Contrary to popular Marathi belief, Leh is pronounced Layh and not Lay-huh, though this frigid desert quickly teaches all the prudence of saving one's breath from that last syllable. Brown mountains of giant rock, endless rivers of icy blue water, grey sand in the plains, snow on the windshield, camouflage jackets and smiling armymen with concealed daggers, camels and yaks with saddles and, on a clear night, more stars than all of Hollywood - the list goes on.
The world's coldest desert is a magnet to adventurers and families alike. It is also hailed as the Meccah to Enfield riders such as myself, who head there in hordes every season (June - August). It is often said that the journey is as important as the destination and Leh is one journey that surpasses it's destination. Winding up from Srinagar to Leh and onward to Chandigarh is possibly the world's most gorgeous highway littered with sights you would not believe in a setting you could not imagine. Naturally then, I had to surpass the journey and head straight to the destination.
My flight departed from Delhi at 6 am, forcing me to get up at an unearthly hour and ruining my carefully established sleep-whenever-the-fuck-I-want pattern. I deftly countered this by not sleeping at all. So that when I boarded the hourlong flight I was securely in that familiar twilight zone only the sleep-deprived find comfort in. Unlike other journeys, however, this one started off on the right foot and, astonishingly, stayed that way right to the end.
I left Delhi in a blind daze because the heat got to me - oh yeah, Delhi was burnin up at 45 degrees. In accordance with dad's instructions, I'd pulled on a jacket because Laddakh was supposed to be chilly. Afternoon temperatures in Leh hover around the 10 degree mark and, as it turned out, my uninsulated non-army issue jacket was to warmth what tissue paper is to contraception. But this problem was quickly resolved by my extraordinary host and guest star of this blog.
Kurt Vonnegut once defined true terror as waking up one morning to discover that your high school class runs the country.
My dad's high school classmate is
With warmth that comes only of a friendship that survived four decades, he welcomed my dad, my brother and I into his humble army quarters and made our comfort the sole priority of his staff of capable jawans. Naively, we took this to be polite hospitality - until the tea started.
Now, in the army, orders are orders are orders. You don't question superiors and you don't justify to subordinates. So when the General ordered tea at 6 am, tea arrived at 6 am and not a minute later; clockwork. For a while we were amused by the efficiency of jawans who, abandoning years of military training and kill-on-sight instincts, took the pains to ensure that inconsequential guests of the Sahab got their morning fix of caffeine at a precise hour.
But wait, bringing the tea wasn't enough. The jawan would literally hold the tray and wait till I finished making my tea. I tried twice to make him leave the tray on the table but for some reason this deeply offended him and he absolutely insisted on holding the damn thing. Just to be clear: I'm not complaining; I've just never been pampered like this and I felt wholly out of place. Though I have been assured by many people that this is the norm in the army and all guests are akin to royalty, it took some getting used to. Then one day I entered the house three minutes shy of 4 o clock and found Rigzen standing outside my dad's room with a tray, glimpsing his watch until, seeing me, he flashed a blinding smile. I grinned back and entered my room and proceeded to laugh for an hour.
Flying into Laddakh entails a 24 hour acclimatisation period, wherein your body must accustom itself to the thinner air, lesser oxygen and drop-dead temperatures. I found my body slip into this new routine quite easily, though my less-than-young father resorted to consuming copious quantities of drugs to keep from altitude sickness, every day, for the entire duration of our weeklong stay. This is imperative because the only known cure for mountain sickness is to get off the fucking mountain.
24 hours after landing, we made the first excursion to the outskirts where was witnessed Mother Nature's giant chumbak - Magnetic Hill. Featured in a yesteryear Bajaj commercial, it is exactly what it sounds like. It exerts a constant albeit weak magnetic pull, drawing in cars, bikes and the odd metalhead.
This short trip was completed by a visit to the local Gurudwara, which is the armyman's favourite shrine, maintaining a steady stream of jawans on darshan. Here, the legend tells of a monster on a hill who flung a 6-ton boulder at a Guru, but the boulder turned to wax upon impact and left an outline of the Guru in it, much in the same way that Wile E. Coyote cuts a silhouette when going through a fence. The Gurudwara presently surrounds the boulder, which is an object of devotion. They also serve lovely tea.
The first real outing, though, was to the lake most have seen at the end of 3 Idiots - Pangong Tso. Usually infested with tourists, we arrived there just after everyone left and sat speechless for two hours nibbling maggi. It is, quite simply, breathtaking. No camera, no painting and certainly no amount of words can do justice to the seven shades of blue I took in at one glance. From inky black to azure to turquoise, I learnt 4 new colours that day.
The jawan accompanying us tried to serve us tea here too but one firm order to the cafe we were seated at made sure that, for once, someone served the jawan.
Late and completely satisfied, we returned to an army base just an hour from the lake (but a long way from Leh) and found hot dinner awaiting us. The long reach of the army's hospitality did not evade us here and we dined as we watched a tennis match on Tata fucking Sky in the mountains in fucking Laddakh with central fucking heating and hot fucking rotis. Then we ventured outside and saw. the. fucking. stars.
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