After one of the most difficult travel days I've had since coming over to India, I am now in Kargil. This is halfway between Leh and Srinagar, and a just a grenade toss away from the infamous line that divides India and Pakistan's two pieces of Kashmir. But it is not dangerous, I assure you. Here they don't blow up ordinary tourists, they just lob missiles at each other (the soldiers, that is) when they get pissy.
I don't really like it here and I am leaving as soon as I can, to go south into the Suru Valley and Zanskar. Kargil and the Suru Valley are Shiite Muslim, and once you go far enough south into the valley you go back into Buddhist territory, supposedly because that area was so remote that the 16th century Muslim invaders just couldn't deal with it.
Ladakh and the whole of Jammu and Kashmir are suffering from serious rains right now. To look around is to see what happens when it rains and storms for a week straight in a place that is neither culturally, ecologically, or architecturally prepared for more than a couple of sprinkles per annum. It's a disaster.
I spent last night in the town below the famous monastery of Likir, just to be near the road early in the morning. The main road here, by the way -- the road from Leh to Srinagar, I mean -- is about the width of a typical driveway and mostly unpaved. Anyway, I got up at sunrise and walked the couple of kilometers to the main road in the hopes of finding some bus, truck, jeep, or whatever on its way to Kargil. I got picked up immediately by a jeep with a couple of guys with the unmistakable Kashmiri accent and agreed on a cheap fare to Kargil.
After about an hour of hairpin turns through a spectacular gorge, we came to the back of a line of stopped trucks. Very familiar experience in India. Something wrong up ahead. The river is swelled to within a foot or two of the road because of these rains. Up ahead it had completely taken over the road with a violent current chest deep. A large truck was in the middle of the water, up to the door of the cab, unable to move. My jeep offered to take me back to Leh, but I couldn't do it. They said I could either wade through somehow, or climb the mountain that separated our side of the flood from the other side.
I have a heavy backpack with me. I climbed up to the first little ridge to see what I would have to deal with. It's all rocks here, with the odd little plant clinging to its existence on the cliffs. The top ridge that I could see was really scraggly, with little chutes falling down from each notch in the ridge. The idea was to choose the chute least likely to come tumbling down when you touched it. It looked impossible. Too high and too steep. Maybe if I didn't have a huge backpack and instead had a coil of rope and hooks or whatever. I thought about it, probed a little, and then decided to turn around and try my luck with the water. But as I descended, three locals came up and persuaded me to join them. The men had never gone up there but were very confident and the one woman thought they were nuts. She and I followed about 20 feet behind them.
It took all my muscle and lungs, and it was pretty terrifying at moments, but we made it. After a long walk of about a kilometer up and down over several ridges, chutes of rocks and sandy plateaus, we lowered ourselves down a chute that descended upon the mirror-image crowd of truck drivers conferring and shaking their heads at the disastrous river swallowing up the unfortunate truck that had dared to test it.
It's just nuts here. The rain and its effects are anomalous, but the nuttiness of it all is not. There is always something like this interfering with "normal" travel. After an hour of just lounging around by the side of the road eating apricots and drinking water, I finally found a ride on a bus heading up to Kargil. We had to cross several more places where the river had taken over the road, but it was never more than knee deep -- safe for a bus, not for motorcycles. Then the road shot up into the clouds. We passed the incredible monastery of Lamayaru, spread like a tarantula over the sharp rocks, then the standing Maitreya Buddha carved into the vertical rock face at Mulbekh. Then the monasteries gave way to mosques and other signs of Islam. And the military, of course. At one point we were delayed almost as much as by the floods by a line of no fewer than 20 covered trucks led by one topped by masked men holding machine guns pointed skywards. Like I said, the road is super narrow, so encounters like this forced us to drive in reverse and do all kinds cliff-edge fancy Indian bus moves that would put an Olympic ice skater to shame.
So, Kargil. I am tired. Time for some dal, rice, and sweet sleep.
