As the plane touched down Kushok Bakula Rimpochhe Airport in Leh on a November morning, the flight announcement said that the temperature outside was minus 10 degrees Celsius. I looked out of the window; it was bright and sunny. It looked warm and pleasant, but I was not going to go by that perception. For, perceptions can be illusory in this cold desert.
The distances that the eye gauges are different from what the feet or wheels experience; the temperature too can be quite different from that estimated from within the warm confines of an enclosure. So, I donned my woollen cap and zipped up my jacket to its fullest extent before stepping out of the aircraft. Even after all the precautions, the cold air hit me like a sack of rocks and the bright sunlight was just that – a vast pool of light with no warmth.
This was my second visit to Ladakh in winter, so, I guess, I was somewhat prepared for this. I looked at my two companions for whom this was the first visit to this northern fringe of the country. They seemed to be coping well as we drove to Hotel Tsokar, one of the few that remain open in Leh in winter.
The first day we were to spend inside the hotel – this precaution is mandatory for all visitors coming in by flight as the body needs to acclimatize to the rarefied Leh air before even a simple walk to the market.
And, we needed to be well acclimatised as we planned to cross over the 18,000 feet-high Khardungla (la meaning mountain pass) the next day into the Nubra Valley.
In the event, we spent one extra day in Leh’s Indus Valley following a disturbed night and also because 48 hours is the minimum duration prescribed for visitors before they attempt to gain further in altitude.
This venture of ours to go to the Nubra Valley in winter, on the face of it, was foolish to an extent. Hotels are closed in the valley after October, the end of the tourist season, and the water supply is discontinued for the fear of pipe bursts.
Further, as one has to cross a high pass, getting stranded is a real possibility and then there is always the fear of avalanches on the slopes of Khardungla.
We were lucky to get two rooms opened in a hotel, thanks to a local contact, and the rest we left to the elements. As for this ‘foolish’ venture of ours, going in the winter was actually the main purpose – we wanted to experience the nomenclature ‘cold desert’ in its fullest form. While the Ladakh region, including Leh, is a cold desert, the Nubra Valley comes closest to that definition – it is the only place that had that one thing that defines a desert for a layman, sand dunes.
Further, it is the only place in India where Bactrian camels can be seen. And, it couldn’t get much colder than in winter! So, for us, rather than being foolish, this venture defined the romance of travel.After two days, we started on the most precarious part of our journey – crossing the Khardungla. Just after a few kilometres of ascent, the slopes were covered under snow and the road papered over with ice.
The snow was unlike what one finds in the Great Himalayas; it was powdery. In any case, we were moving into the Karakoram ranges.
Our driver, who was from the Nubra Valley, was careful while driving on this, though happy. “The ice has made the road smooth,” he said, “the potholes are all filled up.”
After South Pullu, where the travel permits for Nubra are first checked, the amount of snow increased appreciably and the road narrowed. Ours was the only vehicle on the road at that time, and an intense quiet prevailed inside. We were gaining in altitude and each one of us was silently testing the extent of their acclimatisation.
A light headache and slight giddiness were felt – as each of us admitted after descending from Khardungla – but there was no serious cause for worry.
The snow was much more on the other side of the pass. And, there was deathly silence, one that is felt ever so strongly on high mountains under the blanket of snow. Even the wind that whistled with some energy on the Leh side of Khardungla, was silent in this part.
We had crossed a geographical line – and a mental one too – when we reached North Pullu to get our permits checked again. The snow cover decreased, to melt away altogether after about 40 minutes, when we crossed Khardung village enroute which lends it name to the pass we had come over, and then we got our first glimpse of the Nubra Valley.
It was magical – a meandering Shyok river, its waters cobalt blue, making its way through a vast pebbled and white sand bed. There was a village on the other side of the water course, the only spot of land that was marked with vegetation which though was yellow and brown in colour because of winter.
We had our breakfast at Khalsar, the first village we encountered after descending to the floor of the valley. From here on, the Shyok would be our constant companion right till Diskit, the main town of the Nubra Valley and the place where we were to spend the next few days.
The Shyok, at this time of the year, didn’t have much water and whatever there was, formed various channels in the sandy bed. Mimicking Brownian motion, like children in the hills returning home from school, it thus skirted and circled around to make its way ahead.
And, as all hill children, it was a pretty sight. We traversed through vast sand beds to reach a pond, half-frozen, just before Diskit.
It was such a lovely spot that we decided to stop. As we were soaking in this picture-postcard scene, we heard some bird calls. It was a sound we had heard for the first time since starting from Leh in the morning.
Looking around, a movement could be deciphered on the other side of the pond, amidst the reeds. Soon, we saw a flock of mallards moving briskly around in water. With their brilliant green heads, they kept close to the reed cover, more so as the flock had a number of chicks.
Then I remembered that mallards breed in these regions before making their way to warmer climes in winter. This particular flock seemed to be running behind time as we did not see any other congregation of their ilk during our stay.
As we reached our rooms in Hotel Siachen – approached through a tunnel-like entrance – we had a cup of tea and were ready to move again to the prime sight of the Nubra Valley – the silver sand dunes.
It was around 2 pm when we made our way to Hunder, a small village, 7 km ahead of Diskit, and the site of the shifting dunes.
Though it was a sunny day, the dunes were in the shadow of the mountain. I thought it was a blessing because the shadow made the sand look more ‘silvery’ than usual.
The dunes were as one would expect in a desert, with wind patterns clearly marked and their tops knife-edged.
Some dunes had tentacles, a certain sign that they shifted with the direction of the wind. The similarities with the hot desert ended there, for there was a small, picturesque stream – also called Hunder – running through the dunes. It too meandered like its elder cousin, the Shyok, and it too was cobalt blue in colour. There was grass on its banks, covered in frost, and a small wooden bridge across it.
The bridge led to a seabuckthorn forest at a distant. Seabuckthorn here grew on trees, unlike the bushes I had seen in Spiti, another cold desert region in Himachal Pradesh. The bright yellow berries of seabuckthorn, one of the richest sources on earth of Vitamin C, lined the thin branches of the thorny trees. The trees were laden with the berries and we saw them all over Nubra, growing on sandy banks.
The double-humped Bactrian camels – brought to the Nubra Valley by Hor, Turkish Muslims, enroute Yarkand to Leh on the Silk Route before 1962 – love feeding on these berries. In fact, after the tourist season is over by mid-October, these camels are left in the seabuckthorn forest near the sand dunes. This meant that when we reached Hunder, there were no camels to see.
It speaks volumes of the simplicity and hospitability of the people of Hunder that on hearing our disappointment about this fact, two villagers went to the forest to bring back two camels the next day for us to see. There was no cost attached to it, they had made the effort just to make sure that the only three guests in the Nubra Valley at that time of the year did not go back with any complaint!
On our way back to the hotel, with plans to come the next day in the morning to see the dunes in the sun, there was yet another bonus in store. Our driver stopped abruptly just after Hunder to point out a group of Ibex on the slopes of the mountain above us.
They were quite far, but we could see them clearly grazing on something we couldn’t identify from so far. We stood transfixed, watching them balancing themselves nimbly on the steep slope and raising small clouds of dust as they moved around. Though the light was too low, and they were too far for us to take photographs, the sight remains etched in my mind.
The ibex had made my mind wander, but soon I came back to what was perplexing me – how come the Nubra Valley had such sand dunes while I had seen none in other parts of Ladakh, or Lahaul and Spiti and North Sikkim (other cold deserts in India) for that matter.
The Indus River, which ran near Leh, was much bigger in size but it did not bring white sand along with it. Same was the case with the Zanskar, Chandrabhaga or Spiti rivers.
The type of rock and the environmental conditions were not very different, I thought. Why only in Nubra, this was a fact that was nagging me.
It was only after I returned to Delhi and researched a bit that I got a clue. The clue came from a passage in the Himalayan Journal of the Himalayan Club, founded in 1928 and one of the earliest clubs to have been established in the subcontinent.
The passage from an article on ‘Indus Floods and Shyok Glaciers’ by Major Kenneth Mason, published on April 1, 1929 – “… floods caused by the Shyok glaciers appear to have occurred about 1780, in 1835, 1839, 1842, 1903, and 1926. Of these, only those in 1835 and 1926 seem to have been serious down the river as far as Skardu, and the effects of none were felt as low down the river as Attock, 750 miles away.
If we examine the positions of the Shyok glaciers, we see that the valley has been blocked or almost blocked during the greater part of that time. Occasionally, indeed, we have records of one or other of them being clear of the main river. But throughout this period there has been continual danger of a block.”
Major Mason further says, “It is important to distinguish between a glacier dam and a block caused by a rock fall. The latter is composed of heterogenous unconsolidated material, loosely bound together with earth and mud. A lake forming above it is certain to destroy it as soon as its level reaches the top of the dam…a glacier may act as a weir and gradually let the waters disperse gently.” It seems that it was these floods following glacial blocks that brought down such volumes of white sand to the Nubra Valley.
We went back to Hunder the next morning to see the sand dunes again. The blue cast over the sand dunes of the previous evening had given way to grey and the edges of the dunes were more defined.
The scene looked quite different and again forcefully reinforced the point that each place should be seen at different times of the day – and the year, for that matter – to understand what makes it tick. We went inside Hunder village to see the magnificent Bactrian camel, brought back specially for us.
The camel ignored our presence, of course miffed at being taken away from the feast of ripe seabuck thorn for the day just for us. It kept on ruminating aimlessly, keeping its sights steadfastly fixed somewhere in the far horizon.
Taking our time wandering through the village and the dunes we finally reached Diskit Monastery. Following the Yellow Hat sect of Tibetan Buddhism – symbolised by two deers looking at a chakra – the monastery is perched high on a cliff above Diskit.
A huge gold-coloured statue of the Maitreya Buddha, also called Chamba Buddha in these parts, kept a vigil over the valley. The monastery itself was about 650 years old – it is also one of the biggest in Nubra – and it spread like a honeycomb over the ridge of the cliff. A steep flight of steps, passing through chortens and walls painted with Buddha figures, took us to the main temple.
It was dark inside and a monk showed us the plethora of images and statues inside, one of which held a shrivelled head and an arm of a Mongolian warrior, claimed to be dating back a few hundred years.
The roof of the monastery afforded panoramic views of the Nubra Valley. It was from here that it was easy to understand why it was also called the ‘lDumra’ or the ‘Valley of Flowers’. This was by far the greenest valley of Ladakh – this itself was a contradiction with the perception of a desert. In winter, though it was the spread of vegetation that defined it and not so much the greenery.
