Padum – Kargil 

Walking, 25km, two days 

Biking, 245.2 km, 2135 vertical metres, four days

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Pedal interlude 

Before embarking on the next stage of biking, we joined Shar and Oak for the first part of their 8 day glacier walking mission. What a novelty, travelling by pedal (the Hindi word for going on foot) instead of pedal (the bike part). 

good parts of tramping

• Reading out loud to each other in the tent
• Seeing some extremely spiky mountains
• Shar, Oak and I went for a scramble up the hill from our first campsite hoping to see a glacier. No luck, just an old terminal moraine, some water-fall sculpted gulches in the rock, and bright tall mountains
• Shimmery blue poppies growing in the boulder fields
• A cool rock biv with a calendar from 2011 on the wall
• Making creamy mushroom pasta

Bad parts of the tramp

• Shreyas has a fever and was super exhausted
• I threw up
• Crossing the freezing cold river with Shar and Oak and getting wet up to my knickers
• Shreyas does not like boulder fields
• There are no panniers and you have to carry stuff on your back so your back gets sweaty?
• Because of points one and two Shreyas and I decided to walk out a day early and had to say goodbye to Shar and Oak in the middle of the mountains not knowing when we’d see them next 🙁

It felt like it took a lot of gumption to de-flop ourselves when we got back to Padum, both feeling quite snotty and sick, and buy food for a bike ride. But we had limited cash and the one ATM in town wasn’t working so maximizing free nights in our tent was the order of the day. 

The next day was sunny and gloriously windless. I nearly threw up my breakfast again but just managed to keep it down and things improved once we were riding. I liked looking up the side valleys and knowing the kind of terrain that was inside them after the short tramp. I tried not to think about how I was riding further away from Shar and was just going to get further and further away but I did find myself with some tears. Telling Shreyas about some of my favourite things about Shar helped. there are some nice things about travelling as two, and Shreyas and I are very much on the same page about how to travel, but I missed the energy and #bikegang feeling of being four.

The Stod river is in a wide valley, with the Great Himalayan range (the tallest line of Himalayan mountains that Mt Everest is in hundreds of kilometres down the line) on one side, and the smaller Zanskar range on the other. The difference was quite stark: the Great Himalayan range was steeper, had greyer rock (to my non geologist eyes) and much more snow. I couldn’t see any glaciers but there were the marks of moraines in the valleys from previous glaciation. We were mostly riding on the other side but luckily there were little snow melt streams trickling down. The road crossed the swells of about a dozen alluvial fans, each holding a small village and their fields. We also passed a pump house next to the river for creating ice stupas. 

Oak had done a research project about water supplies in Zanskar in 2025. Snow, rather than rain, is the main source of water for the people living here; one person explained that they always get more water on warm days, and just before Padum Oak had pointed out a village where most of the people had left because there wasn’t enough water coming from the shrinking glacier to sustain their fields. Because ice melts more slowly than snow an ice stupa is another solution – during winter, spraying water to form a big artificial glacier, which then melts more slowly and can be a water source for perhaps a month after the snow melts. 

By about 2:30 pm, we had biked nearly 50 km and were both feeling super floppy. We set up the tent in a field with lots of yak around (including three cute baby yak), had a nap, and read our books. 

The next day I felt better, and the slow ascent to the base of Penzi La flew by. It was about thirty kilometres, and the river kept getting smaller as we passed more and more side streams. And then both were visible: the long Drang Drung glacier and the long switchbacks of the pass. We had seen some of the glaciers at the far heads of the valley, but all were covered in grey rock, and I could only recognised them because I knew what to look for. Drang Drung was unmistakable, the centre snowy rather than rocky, filling up the whole valley, all the way to the white icefields it started from. We stopped on each switchback corner, including one corner where we received the kind encouragement of a German motorcycle tourist, and another where there was a chai stall halfway up the hill. There was a big terminal lake and lots of little blue pools – the sign of recent glacial retreat? I thought about how hard it is to know what is changing when you only see things once, and how many lives downstream depend unknowingly in this glacier, fragile despite being so long. 

The pass wasn’t nearly as high as Sirsir La and Singe La but the last 200 vertical metres were still exhausting. Luckily, the top was wide and lumpy (also glaciated at one point?) and had these bright blue lakes, which we both dove into to celebrate the downhill beginning. We are some crackers and cheese in the sun then headed into the new valley, with more small glaciers to spot up every side stream. We camped near the river in a meadow, about 5 kilometres from the Rangdum monastery. The water options were all sparkling with glacial silt but we deserved another round of tent naps. 

We were now in the Suru valley, where an initiative had placed some signs to local sights after the valley was voted a must visit location for 2025 by National Geographic. These perky signs didn’t contrast well with feeling extremely fatigued and snotty the next morning. FUN FACT: biking fifty km a day at high altitudes is not a cold cure. The sign lured us to stop at the monastery which was a waste of time – we vaguely looked at some murals of the wheel of reincarnation then a monk said the museum room was closed and we should keep going. The town of Rangdum proper, 5km later, was surrounded by wetlands with pools of clear water, and groups of horses nibbling on juicy grassy areas. We were going downhill and the river had already swelled hugely from the knee depth trickle it had been at Penzi La. I felt like a proud aunty (‘when you were a baby you were THIS big’). 

The downhill was a big boost, because I was knackered, fantasizing about lying down in all the meadows we saw. “Why do I still feel so bad?” I whined to Shreyas. “Because you’re still sick,” he said, and passed me cheese and tomato crackers, watched me plunge my face in the stream and waited while I lay in the grass for a short siesta. Despite being so exhausted there were more glaciers to admire, which somewhat perked me up as we entered a gorge section, the river now brown and boisterous. My favourite was a hanging glacier leaning over a rocky edge, but I also loved the huge choppy icefall of the Parkachik glacier descending from the 7100m Nun Kun massif. 

Parkachik marked two distinct changes: the village was almost entirely Shia Muslim, rather than Tibetan Buddhist, a pattern which continued all the way to Kargil. It’s the product of long history – the king of this valley more than 400 years ago invited Muslim scholars from Kashmir to come and teach. He ended up converting, and so did most of his people. The locals speak Balti, a language related to Ladakhi but different. I started saying Salaam Aleykum to people we passed, not Julley, the Ladakhi greeting. 

The other change was…a ferocious headwind. We made it about 5km down the road from Parkachik before I was like ‘That is it I want to lie down somewhere’. In the tiny village of Tangol, enthusiastic Mohammed Hasan had a homestay. 

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‘You’re so good at Hindi’

Outside of Leh, Hindi is a much more common second language (after Ladakhi, a Sino-Tibetan language from a totally different language family) than English. I was so thankful that Shar, Oak and I could talk to people. They had been doing most of the talking but once we split up, I was doing all the speaking, and translating for Shreyas too. 

When I started talking to people, the first question was usually where we were from and where we were cycling to. But the second, implied question was usually phrased as “you speak very good Hindi”. This didn’t exactly feel like a compliment, because truly fluent people don’t really get complimented at all (no one ever tells me I speak great English!), and my Hindi leaves a lot to be desired. My verbs are awkward, my phrases unclear, and when in doubt I revert to calling everything accha (good). (I am hoping to branch out more to zabardast, fantastic).

I don’t mean to complain, because I am so, so glad I can speak Hindi and it made this trip feel very different to travelling in Turkey. Because we were both talking in a second language (and most people were much better at Hindi than I am), the Ladakhis we met were mostly slower at talking and easier for me to understand than the fast talking people where Shar lives in Uttar Pradesh. Even incomplete and clumsy language is a huge gift, and after three weeks of speaking at least a bit of Hindi every day I was feeling in the flow of things, and remembered words like ‘landlord’ and ‘boil’ while conversing which was a lovely feeling. 

I think part of the ‘you’re so good at Hindi’ comes from an unevenness – I’m never surprised when Indians speak English since it has such clear economic value. But people are surprised when I, obviously a foreigner (and feeling OK about that even though there are times I’d like to be seen as a local given I lived her for 11 years!) speak Hindi – even though it’s a very widespread language and there are a lot of clear advantages to learning it (not economic value but other kinds of value). 

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Mohammed Hassan told me that his village is getting less and less snow each year but he doesn’t know why. It was so surprising that people living in the mountains, so dependent on a stable climate, hadn’t heard of climate change. We showed him some photos of New Zealand and ate khambir, sourdough fermented (I think?) thick local flatbread with dal. Outside, new planted barley glowed green. Two fields belonged to our host, as well as 16 goats and sheep and four cows, away grazing in the high alpine meadows. The village was fed by a frothy stream tumbling from above into the ravine of the Suru river. He sent us on out way the next morning with some boiled eggs for lunch and instructions to visit the big Buddha statue 30km away in Sankoo. 

This turned out to be a bit of a stitch up. Sankoo is a market town for all the surrounding villages, and the Buddha commissioned by a king many centuries ago is five km out of the way up a side valley. But the Google Maps photos looked cool… we ate our boiled eggs in a scungy willow plantation and puffed upwards in the midday heat. Being lower down and warmer, the barley had had more time to grow and the seeds were nearly fully developed, compared to the tender sprigs in Photoskar or Tangol. 

The Buddha itself was very underwhelming, mostly because it was covered in scaffolding and not that big. Why are big things more impressive? I felt like I should admire this centuries old cliff carving that was about three times my height but I just felt disappointed. Carving Buddhas was obviously a trend along this area though, because there was another Buddha down the road which was just scratched on a rock, not 3D at all. Having never attempted rock sculpture I’m not in a position to criticise… but still.

It felt like we were going out of the mountains, and into continually build up small villages, with the towering stratified cliffs above us and every scrap of flat valley land taken by meadows or fields or houses. Camping options were slim, so we kept going to Kargil. 

I was proud of us for finishing with a nearly 90km day, but sad that our international biking is over for now. We didn’t have much time in Kargil, just enough to find an expensive and weird smelling hotel, cook dinner on our stove in the hotel bathroom, and discover that tickets on the Leh bus were sold out and we would have to opt for a taxi. It was all a bit anticlimactic – I was so caught up in hotel negotiations I even forgot to take an end of trip photo. 

So let’s end the biking here, in a private Kargil museum put together from items in a local merchants caravanserai, operational until about 80 years ago. A ball of preserved yak butter, a cube of tea leaves, grotty ibex horns, snuggly trousers for the snow. Coming and going from Kargil with loaded paniers and faraway homes is a long tradition. Above, the mountains remain, no matter who draws the borders or defends them. And through the valley the river rushes, brown and wavy, slowly carrying the mountains away.