From Himalayan Roads: Chapter Seventeen - Manali to Chattru - Chattru to Leh

Manali to Chattru

There was never any clear information on our side of the pass.

“I heard you won’t be able to get to Leh until July.”

“Huh. I heard that the passes will open next week.”

“Oh no. The passes are open now, but tourists aren’t allowed to cross.”

“Well, foreigners can’t cross without inner line permits anyway. And they’ll be checking your bike registration at Rhotang pass. Probably at the Kashmir border too.”

The confusion was enough to tempt me to end my trip there, stay in Himachal Pradesh and keep climbing for the month. It was too much of a headache to try and sort out when and if I could make it to Leh, the planned end of this whole little adventure. I was comfortable in Himachal. It was easy. Why go through the bother of traveling into another unknown?

Because Leh is the goal.

The adventurer’s mind is stubborn. There was a picture of my route on my computer that I referred to along the way and there was no denying that I had not hit the final destination. There was also no denying that it was close now. I couldn’t quit. Going against good sense and hearsay was, after all, the theme of the trip.

Once again I went through the routine of lashing my pack to the back of Solivagant, strapping my side-satchel just below, and starting off into a new challenge. Hopefully, the final challenge.

Rhotang pass, just outside of Manali, was the first obstacle. The pass itself was nothing too formidable. I had ridden over passes just as high in Bhutan. But in the height of tourist season, there would be a line of traffic backed up for miles. It was also unsure if I could pass through the checkpoint. My dubious documentation for the bike still had never been checked and, if the rumors were true, this was where it might finally be found out that I was traveling by somewhat illegal means.

I encountered the back of the traffic jam maybe three miles from the checkpoint. In such cases, I praise the lax Indian traffic rules. Though the taxis and busses and private cars have to wait in an orderly line, motorcycles do not. With very little traffic coming from the opposite direction, I could use the open lane to pass everyone: Delhiites honking incessantly (and ineffectively) in their expensive cars, European tourists standing helplessly outside of busses, locals eating a packed-lunch near their hired taxis. Every time I have come across traffic like this and am able to pass, I feel a tinge of guilt ... but mostly an overwhelming relief. A wait that should have taken hours, was over in about five minutes.

At the checkpoint, I pulled out a permit that I applied for online and prayed that they wouldn’t ask for my license or registration. I approached with an air of affability, hoping that any conflict that might arise could be subverted with good humor and a smile.

“Country?” the officer asked.

“USA,” I said.

“Ah. Trump.”

“Yeah. Bad president.”

He laughed, barely looked at my permit, and gave it to his assistant to stamp.

“Have a good trip.”

And with the same ease that I passed the traffic, I had gotten through the checkpoint.

At the top of Rhotang pass my confidence in the success of the journey was boosted even more. I met a group of bikers on Royal Enfields that were carrying heavy packs and extra fuel.

“Are you guys headed to Leh?” I asked.

“Yes!” they cheered.

“So the passes are all open?”

“Yes!”

They took a few selfies with me in the background and then revved their engines and charged on. I would have accompanied them, but I was not headed straight to Leh. There was one more climbing area that I wanted to check out that would take me a little out of the way.

Obstacle two: the road to Chattru.

Situated at the end of the rugged and craggy Spiti Valley, Chattru is an alpine climbing area that is reached by taking seventeen kilometers of bad dirt road to a collection of roadside dhabas in the middle of a veritable paradise.

Any kind of paradise takes effort to get to. Now I was again on a quintessential Himalayan road. Aside from the abundance of loose stones and erratic breaks and bumps, there were frequent creek crossings that submerged me up to the boots. Half-a-dozen times I picked a line through the raging waters, wished for the best, and gunned through, bouncing atop rounded river rocks and hoping that I wouldn’t be sent down the steep side.

Traffic was also terrible. There were no other vehicles around, no taxis or private cars like on Rhotang. But there were enough goats and sheep covering large swaths of road that I had to come to a stop and move through the bleating hoards at a snail’s pace. The shepherds accompanying the flocks, weathered and timeless men in flat, round hats, noticed me briefly. As I would inch by, they’d look up and we’d make eye-contact that felt like it connected us across centuries as much as cultures; they on a daily routine that has existed as long as people had in Spiti Valley, me, aberrantly revving an engine on a clunky motorcycle. Each of us wondered, perhaps, what a lifetime would be like in the other person’s shoes.

Once the “traffic” cleared and the road abated its relentless gauntlet of obstacles, there was that moment that I have found so rarely on the trip: a moment of peace. On these mountain roads, I’m often so worried that I will get a flat or damage the bike or get lost, that I have few instances where I am relaxed and can appreciate where I am. In Chattru, the road flattened out and now, so long into this journey, I knew that Solivagant was fine and wouldn’t have problems. There was one road, so I would not get lost. All there was to do was to move effortlessly along the soft dirt and watch as Solivagant propelled me into an alpine valley so beautiful that I couldn’t help but laugh aloud.

Alright, Solivagant. Now we’re doing it. This is what it’s supposed to be like.

Waterfalls dove out of the cliffs surrounding us, the sky was cerulean, the grassy meadows emerald. It was a scene pulled straight from my dreams about what it would be like to take a motorcycle along Himalayan roads.

Chattru to Leh

I spent four days in Chattru. I climbed more boulders with friends, ate cheap and delicious meals at one of the few dhabas there, and slept out under the stars and the bright, waxing moon. Though it was paradisiacal, again I had to move on. Such was the state of things for the last six months: move on, move on, move on. When the climbing is good and I’ve made good friends, I move on. When beautiful young women from the villages wave and smile, still I move on. When I find a piece of heaven on Earth, again I move on.

I was tired of moving, but what lie ahead was that goal that I had promised myself. Leh may not have friends as kind as those I left in Bhutan; the landscape may not stun like the views from the Khumbu region’s Kala Patthar; the rock climbing will definitely not be as good as Sethan; and there will be no hope of meeting a woman from the village and settling down in some idyllic Himalayan villa with her. But I knew I had to head there nonetheless—because I had intended to from the outset. It was a promise I had to keep.

Though all the above results were true, it was still worth it to move on. The ride from Chattru to Leh was truly spectacular.

There are scenes from that ride that still resonate to my core: The winding fresh asphalt—so smooth—that took me through the green alpine country around Keylong. There, massive rocky peaks were capped with glaciers and waterfalls came careening down, the noise echoing a wet static throughout the valley. Then came the rise into the arid lands, the limits of the western side of the Tibetan plateau, into Kashmir and the former kingdom of Ladakh. The terrain was moonlike. Hoodoos rose out of scree fields and the evening light painted them as watchful sentinels of the remote and quiet river below.

On my third day on the route, I started in the morning sun on a high and grassy plateau amid rounded and snowcapped peaks. From the cleavage between two foothills, a pair of wild asses came charging out at full speed, kicking up dust in their wake that the sun glistened off of. They ran with such power that I thought I felt the earth tremble below me. That same day I passed a group of Tibetan nomads out with their sheep. Their beaten old tent was behind them, as weathered as they were. There was no mistaking that they were a part of that inhospitable land as much as the sheep that trotted through seeking any scrap of saxifrage they could feed on. The frigid Himalayan winds pushed against the sheepherders’ tattered garments and they leaned into the wind, their ruddy cheeks chapped and ashen. People still live like this, I reminded myself as I stopped to watch and feel (as best as I could) their lives. Thank God that people still live like this.

At night I camped out at 15,000 feet. The wind howled and for the first time I used my emergency tarp to build a wall against it. I wrapped the tarp around the bike and set the loose ends onto the ground with heavy stones. The plastic fluttered loudly and unremittingly but it was enough to create a pocket of refuge on that open plain. I was rewarded with vistas of the great river below and the forgotten peaks in the distance and the vast lands stretching east. They were lands that were mostly empty and open. Pockets of various groups of Buddhists lived through the entirety of the range, from Bhutan to where I found myself then, and I had gotten to know many of them on this trip, from Drukpa to Gurung to Sherpa to Ladakhi.

That night the stars came out in an infinity that was staggering. I sat back in my sleeping bag, in the open air, and watched their silent and resplendent symphony until I fell asleep.

As I approached Leh on the final day of my drive, I thought about the Buddhist pilgrims that had come along the same paths for centuries. They were easy to imagine as the landscape had not changed much since their time. There are stupas everywhere, mostly old and crumbling, and the villages are still made up of buildings in the old style: mudbrick and stucco walls, with rooftop crenellations of dried branches clustered together. The homes hide in green oasis valleys that have grown rebelliously out of the arid and rocky lands. And there are still monasteries perched high atop jutting hills, beckoning devotees to come prostrate and spin mani wheels and incant Om mani padme hum over the Indus river valley.

Ladakh succumbed to the powers of India a century ago, but it is still very much its own country. What it must have been like when it was ruled by Buddhist kings—not an ostentatious monarchy, I imagine. It must have been a bare and hardened kingdom. The palaces, also placed high on hillsides, are made of the same mudbricks as the poorest village home and I imagine that even the royal robes couldn’t escape the omnipresent dust and the bleaching from that ferocious sun.

The arrival to Leh brought deliverance. To have completed the six-month odyssey on Himalayan roads (with a brief sojourn onto flat lands) brought no ecstasy or feelings of euphoria. I only felt safe to finally rest, to kick my shoes off and stretch out my legs. There was no need to go anywhere else now, no need to move on.

But, as it turns out, moving on was not simply a result of an itinerary set out before me. It was a prerogative innate within me. Before long I’d be up again and on the move.