I will start by retracting what i said about Kashmir being a great place to visit, I still think it is worth going to but maybe not right at this moment. Since we left Srinagar it seems like shit has hit the fan and tourists are being actively evacuated from the area. However, Ladakh (formally part of Srinagar & Jammu until last week) is perfectly safe and is a wonderful place to visit and that's where we're going to start this week...
Well not quite in Leh but on the journey.
Imagine sharing a Jeep with strangers for 13 hours, awkward right? Now imagine that this sharing "Jeep" that has been organised for you isn't actually a jeep but a people carrier with horrible suspension. Then imagine that instead of the 7 people this car can hold there is 9 of you, 3 of whom would regularly stop the car to be sick, and while the others stop for impromptu fruit shopping sprees. Yes, now i think you might begin to understand quite how horrible this journey was. That's not to mention the jewellery salesman who was sat next to us, spreading out and listening to his own music loudly (through a tinny phone speaker, held pretty much at Bens' ear level) despite the car radio already being on.
So yes it was horribly cramped and yes occasionally it felt like we would be sent into orbit while bumping over the sometimes not tarmacked mountain roads, but where else in the world do you get such amazing views and stop on top of a mountain to let goats pass... We did get to Leh eventually.
So we arrived in Leh in the evening at a guesthouse just outside of the main town. The guesthouse was nice, the owner was a bit cheeky trying to upgrade our room several times despite us not wanting to spend the extra (it turns out his does this to almost everyone). Leh doesn't feel like you're in India, they call it "little Tibet" and i haven't been to Tibet but i doubt its exactly the same either. It definitely has some Tibetan features, wood carvings on a lot of the buildings and Leh (during tourist season) has a lot of Tibetan refugees come over to sell their wares before heading home for the winter, but to me Leh has almost a European feel to it. This could have something to do with the "German" Bakeries on almost every corner, the coffee shop culture it has or even just the sheer amount of westerners we saw there compared to our travels so far.
In Leh itself there were a few places to explore. Looming over the town is the Ancient Palace of Leh (Gle-Chen-dPal-mKhar) which is built out of the side of the mountain. A walk through some very precarious small streets that are half covered in rubble and a clamber up a dusty hill brings you to the entrance of the Palace. A sign outside the Palace will tell you it was an "engineering feat of the Namgyal dynasty, the second dynasty of Ladakhi rulers" and was built sometime between 1590 and 1635. It was built in Tibetan architectural style and it was the tallest building built at the time of construction being nine stories high.
Abandoned sometime in the 1800's when the royal family moved to a different palace during the Dogra Invasion, it slowly fell to ruin. Now days, the palace has been lovingly restored but it seems to be a bit... empty. For 300 Rs each we expected a bit more. Once inside there are no information plaques, there isn't any furniture and you can't get into more than half of the palace (even to places that are signposted). The palace is definitely an impressive sight and the view from the top gives you a beautiful panorama over the town however, there is a older fort sat higher up the mountain that gives you a better view at a 10th of the cost and that's where we went the next day.
To get to Tesmo fort it's a bit of a trek, first you follow the same route that brings you to the palace then you approach a pretty sheer mountain side that has a few tracks in the dirt criss-crossing its way to the top. So up we climbed, taking many many breaks along the way. It was much harder work than the group in front of us made it seem, they seemed to saunter up while we huffed and puffed. When we reached the top there was, of course, a car park.
There wasn't much information to be found about the fort itself except the name means "victory fort". The fort itself is very small and has nothing to boast about apart from it's Buddhist shrine however, the views from the top are breathtaking, you can see all of Leh and across the barren landscape surrounding it to the mountains in the background. We took the easier route on the way back, following a path down some very uneven steps zigzagging down the mountainside past a series of stupas. When finally reaching the bottom we were promptly chased out of the area by a very loud dog (whose puppies we were looking at) who seemed to delight in frightening tourists.
Apart from wandering the Tibetan markets, sampling the various cakes in the "German" coffee shops, visiting the Prayer wheels and seeing the elaborately decorated mosque there wasn't really a whole lot to do in Leh itself. So when we met a lovely couple (Phil and Antonia) at the guesthouse and they suggested that we join them on a trip to Pangong Lake we decided to say yes. They had already been travelling for a year and had been to many of the places we plan to go, they we full of good advice, ideas and fun stories. Antonia loves animals just as much as i do, going so far to buy biscuits to give to the stray dogs, and carrots to give to the cows and donkeys that roamed near the guest house!
Pangong Tso the "high grassland lake" in Tibetan, is 134 km long and stretches from India through Tibet and into China, it's situated 4,350m high in the Himalayas and due to it's position we had to receive special permission to get there. Getting the permission is extremely easy they just require you to plan to visit in a group and pay 550 Rs each. The whole trip cost us 4,500 Rs and that included a driver to take us the 5 1/2 hours there and back... not much at all considering we stayed there overnight and he had to hang around waiting for us.
The drive there was interesting it self, stopping for 20 minutes to let a military convoy pass on the slim mountain roads, going through the second highest public pass in the world Changla Pass, elevation 5,360 (where we met a friendly dog) and stopping to take pictures in a pretty water meadow with flowers blooming and rivulets flowing through it. That's not to mention the amazing views you get from driving up and down the sides of mountains, seeing down into the valleys in between.
When we arrived at the lake it was around 1pm the sunlight hitting the lake turned the waters a Cerulean blue and we were told this was the best time to take photos, so we did. Lots of photos, then we were approached by a random man who wanted to take our photos so we had a little impromptu photo shoot while feeling very awkward. Surprisingly he didn't even try to sell us the photos, just showed us them and asked permission to put them on his instagram. After grabbing some lunch we travelled further down the lake to a quieter area. Due to a popular India film "the 3 idiots" having a scene where we were previously, the area sees a lot of Indian tourists.
Where we stopped next had a strange sense of abandonment, half the buildings creeping up to the lake had been half destroyed and in some places there was just building foundations and lines of toilets left to show where a hostel or camping site had been. We later found out that due to its' popularity, rubbish and pollution had started to affect the lake and surrounding areas, so it was decided to destroy the buildings to try and keep the amount of visitors down. We spent the afternoon sat along the lakeside, wrapped in blankets against the chill, watching the sunlight turn the waters different shades of blue, happily reading.. well, not so happily in my case. Despite the beauty and peace I finally gave into the headache and feeling of sickness I had been feeling since the Chanla Pass and went to sleep, at 6 pm in the afternoon.
After a long nights sleep i was expecting to feel better, I didn't. At Ben and our drivers insistence and in a very emotional state was taken to the local medical centre where i was told I had Acute mountain sickness (how annoying!) and was put on oxygen for half an hour and given some tablets to help with the headache and nausea. This helped me feel halfway back to normal, so we headed back to our guesthouse at Pangong where the very attentive host made sure we had some breakfast. A couple hours later we made our journey back to Leh... where once again the guesthouse owner tried to put us in a more expensive room than we wanted.
Our time in Leh was great and it was wonderful to meet some new people to go on an adventure with, but with all there being left to do in Leh was go hiking and with altitude not being my friend we decided to move on to the place - Manali. This time deciding to opt for the overnight bus rather than a shared taxi... what a mistake that was but i think i'll save that for next time!
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