It’s the middle of summer, and it's freezing, day and night. We content ourselves with crossing the wooden bridge over the Pin River, and watch the black ant forms of a group of trekkers hiking up a glacier in the distance. We strap our luggage to the back of the Enfield, warm up the engine, and leave Mudh.
Around 40km from Mudh, back on the Hindustan-Tibet highway is Kaza, the district capital of Spiti. With a population of around 3000, it’s by far the largest settlement in the region. It’s a centre of trade for local Spitians and Tibetans as well as lowland Indians. At just over 200km from the resort town of Manali, it’s more accessible to tourists than the more southern reaches of Spiti, provided the two mountain passes between Manali and Kaza are open. For at least seven months of the year, they are snowbound, and closed to all traffic.
The very first tourists from Manali will trickle feed into Kaza in the coming weeks. The tiny backpacker cafés around the main bazaar are just beginning to open, and for the first time in what seems like an age, we have access to meat, and food other than vegetable soup, daal and dumplings. We have a huge dinner of stir fried chicken and mutton spring rolls. It’s immensely comforting. Ben buys a Tibetan style scarf from a local vendor in preparation for the trip over the passes. The immensity of the task awaiting us in the next few days is beginning to sink in. The worst road in India. The hardest riding you will ever do.
Kaza sits at a relatively comfortable 3800m. After a night in the town, we decide to check out the cluster of villages that sit above Kaza, spaced out along a rough, winding gravel and dirt road. With the highest of these villages built above the clouds at 4500m, these are the highest settlements anywhere in India.
Key Gompa is the largest monastery of the Spiti Valley. Dating back to the 14th century, the medieval fortress-like gompa is perched on the edge of a deep canyon, with massive slanted mud walls and battlements painted with orche red and white stripes. It’s a multi-storied structure, home to perhaps 100 maroon-robed Buddhist monks. The monks welcome us as we pass through the gates. We wander through the gompa’s central hall, admiring the ancient artworks stored there, and the elaborate candles made from butter (persistently cold temperatures mean the butter is never in danger of melting!). When we ready ourselves to leave, a monk approaches us and gestures for us to sit down. There are half a dozen monks seated on low cushions on the floor, and a senior monk seated opposite them on a chair. We find our places beside them, and they begin to serve chai, biscuits and lumps of sugary dough. We eat our sweets gratefully and watch the monks sip their tea, unsure of what to do next. A bell rings. The head monk begins to chant a Buddhist verse in a low and rapid murmur. Other monks begin to break into verses spontaneously, and as we sit, silent and feeling quite out of place in this magnificent sanctuary of meditation and learning, the room fills with their warm, guttural, ancient chanting. We close our eyes and let it envelop us.
The weather changes swiftly in the mountains. As we depart Key Gompa, howling winds sweep over us and chill us to the bone. Below, we can see a vast wall of fog making its way through the valley towards Kaza. We contemplate going back to the gompa, and seeing if we can stay for the night if the weather turns things unridable. Then, in the space of about 20 minutes, the wind stops, the clouds clear, and the sun is shining.
We cruise easily on the scarcely-used gravel road to the village of Kibber at 4270m. The altitude doesn’t seem to be affecting us so harshly anymore. We decide we can get up even higher. We follow the road past Kibber, expecting to lead us to the last-post village of Langza. It doesn’t. The road gets progressively worse and worse, until it’s completely covered with softball sized rocks and debris, then promptly drops off the edge of a precipice.
Eventually, after riding more than half way back to Kaza, we find the road to Langza. This road sees very little through-traffic, and coming round a corner we manage to disturb a heard of goat-like animals foraging by the roadside. The animals panic and run for higher ground, expertly jumping on to craggy rocks and skirting boulders. When they’re safely standing on a ridge above us, we’re able to get a better look at them. They’re a herd of 20 Himalayan Blue Sheep, the same animals that Peter Matthiessen went to the Himalayas to study in The Snow Leopard. We’re enormously excited to be able to see them in the wild. Around the next corner, a fox bounds across the road and scrambles down a hillside.
We arrive in Langza, at 4400m, a languorously pretty oasis of 20 white mud houses and thriving green crops of pea and barley. Staying overnight here at such a high altitude worries me, and we almost turn back. But we find a homestay, despite the family who live here barely speaking a word of English. We have the best vegetarian dinner we’ve had in the Himalayas, and to our surprise the Isareli couple from Mudh also show up here in the evening, and we sit around the kitchen hearth telling stories. We talk about our Enfield, and they tell us horror stories about the public buses. A few days ago, a young Israeli lost a thumb when the bus door slammed shut on him. He was unable to reach a hospital for 24 hours.
I wake up early in the morning and peer outside. The landscape is silvery white, glittering with fresh snow. We were barely able to stay warm enough in our room overnight, and in the morning we see jthe icy evidence of just how cold the night has really been. The sun warms and the snow quickly melts, and we trudge up to the giant Buddha statue overlooking the village. A local man eagerly unlocks the local gompa for us so we can see the Buddhist relics stored inside. We continue walking, up a hill to a height where the snow hasn’t yet melted. We reach 4600m and throw a few snowballs. On the way back to the bike, Ben finds one of Langza’s famous marine fossils. It turns out to be a fragment of an ammonite shell, a squid-like creature that lived here when the entire region was beneath the ocean, 300 million years ago.
We head back to Kaza, stock up on supplies then hit the road again to Losar village, the last stop before the notorious Kunzum and Rohtang passes. Evening falls, the temperature dips to past freezing, and then snow begins to fall. Lightly at first, then heavier, until to our eyes it appears to be miniature snow storm. We’re not mountain people, we don’t know how to interpret the icy weather. We begin to feel anxious about making it over the passes. If it’s snowing here in Losar at 3900m, then surely Kunzum, at 4550m, will be blanketed in snow by tomorrow? If there’s snow and ice on the roads, then surely we have no way of getting through?
The little stone dhaba where we spend the night is also the hangout spot for the local police. We’d heard numerous warnings about Indian cops. The fact is we're travelling on an illegally hired motorcycle, and had even been given a story and fake papers by the bike shop to feed to the cops should they enquire about how we acquired our bike. But we let our guard down. The Himalayan police seem to be warm, friendly, villagey folk. They invite us to their table, pour us whiskey and we chat away for hours. We express our concerns about crossing the passes, but they seem to think the unseasonal snowfall won't cause any problems. They assure us that the road is really “not that bad”.
We’ll be the first foreigners to cross from Spiti to Manali this season, they say. We head for bed, only slightly less apprehensive, if at all.
See more images from this leg of the trip in our Image Gallery
