Spiti is even more closely tied with Tibetan culture. The local language is Bhoti, a Tibetan dialect. Like the Upper Kinnaur, Spiti lies within the arid Himalayan rain shadow, a cold and silent desert as harsh and desolate as any scorching badland in Central Asia or the Middle East. The average elevation in Spiti is much higher than Kinnaur, and human settlements can be found at almost 4600m, higher than anywhere else in the Subcontinent. It’s also one of India’s least populated regions. If you get stuck out here, you’re stuck for awhile.
About half an hour out of Nako we pass the Israeli group, sitting on the side of the road beside their hired jeep. They’ve just gotten a puncture, and, naturally, the driver has no spare, so they’re waiting for another jeep of the same kind to come by and donate them a tire. We shrug and wish them good luck, and we don’t run into them again.
Just after midday we cross into Spiti district and are stopped at the checkpoint at Sumdo to show our Inner Line Permits. The officials at Sumdo warn us to make sure we take the correct road towards Dhankar, otherwise we’d be riding towards the China border, and that would be bad. As he’s checking our papers, the head official asks as to explain our stance on the Indian student attacks in Melbourne. After a nervous couple of minutes, we manage to deflect his enquiries and change the topic to cricket. The official’s mood changes instantly and he starts chatting animatedly about the recent India v Australia match for a while, then hands us back our papers and wishes us well. Since he’s now become our best friend, we decide to ask him about Kunzum Pass, which we both still believed was well and truly closed. He picks up his phone and makes a call to the police headquarters at Kaza, and then delivers the news: the snow has been cleared, and Kunzum was re-opened at midnight last night.
Overjoyed by the news, we hit the road once more, full of excitement about completing the full Spiti-Manali loop as we’d originally planned.
For the first time, something goes wrong with the bike, but it’s just a minor niggle. The speedo cable has come out. At the next village, Tabo, Ben is able to purchase some duct tape, and in a few minutes, the bike is as good as new again. After a plain but filling Spitian lunch of daal and vegetables, we visit Tabo Gompa, one of the most important monasteries in the entire Himalayan region. It’s a personal favourite of the Dalai Lama – he led its 1000 year anniversary celebrations in 1996. It’s a collection of squat, clay buildings that almost seem to be a part of the bleak, brown landscape but inside it holds an exquisite store of religious treasures and a stunning mural of the life of Buddha.
Fort-like Dhankar Gompa balances precariously on the edge of a rocky crest at 3900m altitude. It’s an immediately striking spectacle, surrounded by lunar rock formations from a surrealist painting. We park the bike and find a homestay, where we are given traditional Spiti food and plenty of warm blankets for bed. It’s bitterly cold at night, and I have been getting headaches on and off because of the altitude. Ben braves the night chill to take some time lapse photos of a spectacularly star-studded night sky.
The next day we walk in warm sunshine up a steep two and half kilometre track to Dhankar Lake at 4200m. It’s remarkably tough and we struggle for breath in the thin air. The lake is clear, cold and clean, a mirror surface reflecting the ice peaks that surround us in every direction. Surprisingly, there are some fish in the lake, and some small water birds. Other than that, we are completely and utterly alone. We wade in the freezing water up to our knees, fill our water bottles with glacier melt from a nearby stream, and take a photo of a dried up, fur-filled turd which we both hope belongs to a snow leopard.
Next we take a detour from the highway to explore the Pin Valley, touted as the “land of snow leopard and ibex”. In fact we see little wildlife here, but the local kids in the village of Mudh are little beasts in their own right. They’re cute, although their wind and cold burned faces belie their tender age, and they seem indifferent to the half-frozen snot that terminally pools around their noses. Like many rural children, they’re keen to have their photo taken, but we’re shocked when, in the struggle to get as close to the camera as possible, a fight breaks out. The kids push, shove and hit, and we slowly back away until they’ve sorted themselves out. They are by far the roughest little kids we’ve come across in India!
Mudh (3700m) feels like the end of the earth. The last 15km of the Mudh road is muddy and horrible, with glaciers right by the side of the road creating fast flowing streams over the gravel. It takes ages to get to Mudh, and we begin getting anxious, since there are no signs in English to tell us we’re actually headed in the right direction. For the first time, the weather turns quite bad. It’s foggy, with huge dark grey clouds overhead and a light but freezing rain. We take a nap shortly after arriving, and when we wake up, it’s dark and terribly cold, and I’m feeling appallingly unwell. I know I’ve got altitude sickness – my chest feels tight, it’s hard to breathe deeply and my brain feels like its swelling up inside my skull. We go to the local eating place and sit by the warm goat dung fuelled fire. Ben also has a headache, but after eating some soup and warming up he feels better and is chatting happily with the Israeli couple also staying in the village. I try to eat but after a few mouthfuls end up running outside and puking violently. Afterwards I feel marginally better, but I go to bed praying that I’m feeling healthier in the morning, as we’ve still got to spend one night in a village 700m higher than Mudh.
