Yak Pack Theatre Project update 29th July.
With some trepidation, we left Manali at 5.45am on Sunday morning to leave plenty of time for what is always an unpredictable journey. It’s been raining heavily for a week now and that’s not great for traveling in an area prone to landslides. Although some of the mountain side is steep rocky cliff, most of it is much looser gravelly material strewn with huge boulders. When saturated with rain it doesn’t take much for the whole lot to come down, blocking and destroying roads.
As we loaded up, Juliette blessed our van with Holy Water. We all wore our blessed ribbons from our ceremony with the monk at Manali monastery. And crossed our fingers tightly as we headed out of the Kullu Valley and up towards the Roatang Pass.
Our driver Angdrup soon proved himself to be extremely capable and we all started to relax. He was confident and made the most of the tarmac road, overtaking trucks and buses with great skill. We were without doubt the fastest thing on the road today – we overtook EVERYTHING. Unfortunately he was a fan of Bryan Adams and only had one CD. As we listened to ‘Everything I do’ for the second time round, we dismally tried to work out how many times a CD fits into a 12 hour journey…..
‘Roatang’ means ‘pile of bones’, so good to go over the top without incident! Coming down the other side, the road turned into a huge mud slick, churned into great ridges by the trucks. Angdrup was absolutely brilliant, gently tweaking with steering and accelerator with not a single wheel spin or uncontrolled skid. We passed a truck and a minibus full of travellers, stuck fast and looking mournfully out of the windows at us.
At the bottom of the Roatang pass, the road splits. The tarmac continues ahead, the road to Leh and Ladakh. Turn right, and the road turns immediately into a rough muddy track – this is the road to Spiti, about 8 hours of jarring, jolting, suspension killing road lay ahead of us. Any speed over 15 miles an hour was to be celebrated. Spiti is truly remote and kept even more so by the lack of investment in its infrastructure.
We stopped in Chattru for breakfast, just a couple of cafes and tents by a bridge. It’s about 3,200m above sea level here so we are all feeling the altitude a bit, getting out of breath much more easily. Pete especially is noticing, as he leaps out of the bus at every opportunity, to film us driving across boulder fields or round hairpin bends, then catching us up.
Full of eggs and curry, we continued along the boulder strewn valley floor, following a road that was little more than a slightly flatter bit among the rocks. Angdrup has headphones on, and is utterly lost in a world of navigating the van, taking every scrap of is concentration. We are still overtaking everything, he is fantastic.
The landscape is utterly desolate. No houses or people, few birds or animals, hardly any plants. Just a barren rocky moonscape with towering mountains around us in every direction, their black silhouettes and white glaciers contrasting with a deep blue sky. It truly feels like we are driving to the very end of the world. Alf and Ben somehow managed to sleep through the bumping and jolting.
After 3 hours or so, we started to wind up a switch-backing road at the top of the valley towards the Kunzum pass. The flat bottomed valley below us spread out like a geography lesson in glaciation, complete with moraine (that’s the boulders we’d been driving over) and cols nestled in the mountains above with glaciers spilling down from their lips. The road seems to have been widened a little in the past couple of years, or maybe it was Angdrups skilful driving, but we made it up without any hair-rising incidents.
Kunzum Pass is the highest point on our journey, marked by a big shrine surrounded by prayer flags. We drove around it clockwise, then stopped to get out. It’s a spectacular place, breath taking in every way (one of those ways being around 5000m up!).
There is noticeably less snow on the high mountains than is usual, particularly looking into the Spiti Valley ahead. In this alpine desert, the snow melt coming down off the mountains in summer is the only water available for irrigation – no snow equals drought and crop failure. Climate change made real and visible.
Coming down the other side, the van started to backfire and belch out big clouds of smoke. I can’t remember if black or white smoke is worst, but we were seeing both! The van seemed to be driving Ok though (and the brakes still worked!) so we continued down into the Spiti Valley, and the police checkpoint at Lossar, the first village in Spiti. We picked up an American man Paul whose motorbike had died at the side of the road and took him with us to the village to find a mechanic. Unfortunately for him, was wedged between Pete and Ben, so within literally one minute of being in the van, Paul had a camera about 8 inches from his nose and Ben was asking him for thoughts on his journey by bike across India.
From Lossar the 2 hour drive to Kaza is glorious. This part of Spiti is starkly beautiful with sandstone rock carved by the wind reminiscent of Death Valley or the Grand Canyon. Occasionally the road goes through a tiny village surrounded by neat fields and people busy harvesting peas.
We picked up a friend of Angdrups for the last few miles. Pete somehow refrained from filming him close up too. Angdrup seems to know everyone and stops to wind down his window and say hi to all the drivers we pass.
Finally we reached Kaza and wiggled down the last little lane to the Old Monk Hotel. A few doors up there was some building work, with lots of bamboo scaffolding and piles of gravel narrowing the road. After 10 hours of flawless driving, Angdrup got stuck just 50m from our destination!
Rana and Shalu gave us a warm welcome to the Old Monk and we felt instantly at home. Freddie and Izzy made friends with the kids playing in the street outside, the teenagers started to come to terms with no wifi and no 4g and not much electricity either, and the adults retired for a wee snooze.
We feel rather battered by the rough roads, but all the various Gods were clearly listening, as our journey here was incredibly smooth and without incident, when it could very easily have been a different story. We feel blessed to be here safely.