The Roof of India

Susannah: Travelling to Ladakh, a region in northern India bordered by Kashmir on one side and Tibet on the other, entailed yet another harrowing journey. We embarked on this one in a rickety public bus that took us on endless switchbacks over the second highest drivable pass in the world (the highest is just a couple hundred kilometers away). The landscape is stark high-altitude desert reminiscent at times of the American West, and it’s utterly empty except for the odd tent camp set up to feed weary travelers.

After fifteen hours we arrived in Ladakh’s capitol, Leh. Considering what it took to get there, it was shocking to find that the city is no backwater, but a backpacker’s paradise full of espresso and pizza. It didn’t take long before we’d had enough caffeine and set off to find “real” Ladakh.

We found it just an hour away at Tikset Gompa, one of dozens of monasteries around Ladakh that are home to monks from the “Yellow Hat” sect (of which the Dalai Lama is the leader). Ironically, just as we were climbing up the steep hillside to take a look, the monks began pouring out in full ceremonial regalia. They were headed to Leh for the opening festivities of the Ladakh festival, which we’d completely forgotten about. At their insistence we tossed our packs in the back of their tricked-out truck and headed with them back to the city. Everyone we passed pressed their hands together in prayer. We arrived at the head of the parade in style, just in time to watch dancers, musicians and horsemen from every corner of Ladakh pass by.

The next day we headed back to the monastery to watch the young monks perform some of Tibetan Buddhism’s famous masked dances. The dances were fascinating and the costumes stunning, but the best part was watching the delight on the faces of the other young initiates. On the way home we found it impossible to squeeze onto the buses crammed with other tourists, so we hitched a ride—and who should pick us up but two Catholic nuns from Kerala driving an army truck!

Before we headed south, we had just enough time to enter the festival’s archery competition. My arrow hit the ground several meters before the target (in my defense, it had no feathers!), but Michael was a good shot. He was no match for one of the local guys, though, who put his arrow right through the middle of the CD serving as the target.

Back in Manali, en route to Dharamsala, the Dalai Lama’s home in exile, we ran into our old friend Sonny the shoeshine boy. (Michael adds: “Sonny initially caught my attention with an impassioned impromptu defense of the reality of professional wrestling.”) He invited us to back to his home in the tent camp, where his mother cooked us a fiery meal on a dung-fired clay stove and the whole extended family crowded in to peer at us. Sonny’s sister thought my au naturale style wasn’t cutting it, and made up my face with kohl and lipstick to make me look like a native. An hour later, we were old friends.

Goat Milk and Moonshine

Mike: My friend Freddie Wilkinson is not your average guy. While most of us are waking up in the morning, downing our coffee and heading to an office, Freddie spends his days dreaming up new and exotic acts of vertical insanity for his sponsor, Mountain Hardware, to showcase. To visit him at work, Susannah and I had to spend two days riding buses on roads chiseled into mountainsides by hand, then trek up a remote valley for three days beyond the last human settlement to the foot of a Himalayan glacier. That's a long way to carry a bottle of scotch, but hanging with Freddie has never been boring.

This time around was no different. We caught Freddie and his partners Pat and Dave taking a rare break at base camp, after spending a week climbing above snowline. The five of us split the scotch with the trio's Nepali base camp cook (NOTE: "split,"in this case, refers to dividing the bottle into equal portions after Freddie had consumed roughly 75% of it) and spent a few days swimming in glacial pools, relaxing and bouldering in the moraine, and riding out afternoon storms playing cards. The Nepali cook happily introduced us to his favorite card game, which featured an arcane and endlessly malleable set of rules only he could understand. He seemed to win a lot.

As the climbers prepared to head back to high camp, we shouldered our packs and headed back down the valley in early morning, hoping to cross the worst of the glacial rivers before the sun melted enough snow to spill their banks. On the way, we met our old friend Vijay, the heroic shepherd who had helped us ford a river on our way up the valley (and been soaked in the process). We passed the day hiking together, exchanging language lessons and songs. As we crossed a small stream, Vijay stopped and asked Susannah solemly if she would like to become his honorary sister. She agreed, and they knelt by the water and drank from each others' hands, cementing the new relationship. Despite warnings we'd heard about the valley's wily shepherds, we found them generous and friendly to a fault. If you need wool, give me a call - I've got a brother-in-law in the business.

The next afternoon, as storm clouds closed in, we saw Vijay beckoning to us from the doorway of a squat stone shepherd's hut. We were happy to escape the rain, and crawled into the tiny shelter to find Vijay and his uncle stoking a fire fueled with dried cow dung. They had a pot of tea going, and invited us to share a cup and wait out the rain. After the tea, they brought out a steel fuel canister full of fresh goat milk, and insisted I try some. Glancing out the narrow doorway at the flock of muddy beasts bleating below, and repeating "pasteurization is for pansies" again and again in my head, I took a long pull. It was as fresh as dairy gets.

After the storm passed, we reluctantly left our bed of hay beneath the rocks and continued south, camping near a pair of herders on their way out of the valley, bringing their flock to market. The next day brought us to the village of Tingrit, where we were welcomed with open arms by a local farmer and his family. The farmer, Tashi Dorje, took us on a long afternoon walk through his fields and the hills above the village, stopping frequently to pick us samples of the local produce and wild berries. "Idyllic" simply doesn't do the place justice. Green fields abundant with sugar snap peas, potatoes, carrots, kale, cabbage, soy beans, wheat, lentils and seabuckthorn berries gave way to apple orchards on the terraces above, before the slopes steepened to become towering snow-capped peaks. Majestic white Buddhist stupas stood guard above it all. We spent the evening enjoying the hospitality of Tashi's entire extended family (which required me to take repeated shots from a bottle of unidentified homemade firewater).

Before dawn the next morning, Susannah, my headache and I caught the bus out of town, headed for the high Himalayan kingdom of Ladakh.

The Kindness of Strangers

Susannah: The Miyar River originates in Ladakh's forbidding Zanskar region, beginning in a series of treacherous glaciers and carving a steep valley as it flows south to the hill town of Udaipur. Our trek to Freddie's basecamp began after a hair-raising early morning jeep ride from Udaipur to Tingrit, the last village linked by road to civilization. The first day's walk took us through charming villages surrounded by terraced fields before leading us along an unfinished road carved into the cliffside above the river. Top heavy with my pack (I was still carrying a lot of the load Michael would later shoulder), I would have slipped down and landed with a splash in the rapids if a helpful construction worker had not taken me firmly by the hand and led me along the eroding hillside.

Later that day we were saved again when standing next to the raging river debating whether to cross in the rickety cable car or continue on the west side of the valley. Since we had no idea which side of the river Freddie would be camped on, or whether there would be another crossing further north, this posed quite a dilemma. Suddenly, a young man darted down the opposite bank, crossed the river hand over hand in a flash, and ferried us across. He said (in broken English and lots of gesticulation) that the three white guys we sought had come this way the day before with (count 'em) fourteen porters.

We spent the night at a beautiful campsite above the village of Khanjar, in a field of green grass with a bubbling brook running through it. We didn't see another soul for two days--save the lonely shepherds with their sheep and goats, many of which visited our campsite:

The next day and a half of our trek took us through green pastures nestled between the cliffs, over boulder fields, and across countless frigid glacial streams. Finally, searching the horizon for Freddie's orange Mountain Hardware tents, we found a garishly-colored camp clearly not inhabited by shepherds (who prefer squat stone huts). Sadly, Freddie, Pat and Dave were not in evidence--only a pair of Spanish climbers who had seen them go by the day before. "The camp's just an hour further," they said. "Oh, by the way," they added, "you might encounter some difficulty crossing this next river."

The river was just over the next rise. It was a rushing torrent about twenty feet across that had surged over the balance-beam like bridge meant to help you cross the deepest part. It was pretty intimidating, but we took off our boots. Then two little guys, shepherds who had been hanging out at the Spanish camp, rushed up the hill to help us. They picked their way across like agile acrobats, passing our packs between them, until Vijay the intrepid shepherd lost his footing and tumbled into the drink.

Seeing the herder fall in, I was scared, but took his hand and stepped into the icy water. It pulled at my legs, and it was hard to find stable footing. Halfway across, I slipped, taking Vijay with me. We spent a few terrifying moments being swept downstream before finding rocks to cling to and climbing onto the far bank. I looked back and saw that Michael had jumped in after us and was now clinging to a rock himself.

Safely on the other side, we said emotional goodbyes to the herders and walked, bruised and dripping, the last half mile to base camp.

North from Delhi

In an effort to discover just how many broken-down buses, fascinating diseases, grimy guest houses, and amazing people and places there are in the world, we packed up our comfortable life in Seattle and climbed aboard a one-way flight to Delhi on August 1st. The plan, if it can be called that, is to spend the next year traveling overland from Delhi to the Spanish coast via SE Asia, China, Mongolia, Siberia, Turkey, and anywhere else we happen to wind up. Nobody said we were smart!

Our journey began with a sweltering four days in the bazaars of New Delhi, amid the city's teeming homeless bovine population. When the humidity and touts threatened to overwhelm us, we escaped on an overnight bus to Himachal Pradesh, a province in the Indian Himalaya. Our first stop was Manali, and old British "hill station" cum resort town nestled amid lush apple orchards and towering green hills. There, we bumped into our old, good friend Alex Kaufman and his girlfriend Deepa on the street, up from Bangalore on vacation. We took a terrific hike together through the orchards and spent the day catching up.

The next day, Mike's old friend Freddie Wilkinson arrived in town on his way into the Himalaya on a month-long climbing expedition, with his intrepid partners Pat and Dave. The three of them are professional crazy people (they might prefer the term "alpinist") sponsored by Mountain Hardware. As we dined on a trout large enough to consume Moby Dick in a single sitting, the three adventurers laid out their plans to travel up the remote and seldom visited Miyar Valley, establish a basecamp, and climb the surrounding virgin peaks. They invited us to hike the valley and visit them at basecamp.

Not being smart (see above), we set out two days later equipped with the following:

• Two packs, Michael's large, Susannah's quite small
• One bag of rice (note absence of stove)
  
• One bag of lentils (see above)
  
• Assorted dried fruits, nuts, nutella, and yak cheese
• Two umbrellas
  
• One bright yellow plastic tarp (cost: $5)
  
• Ten shish-kebab skewers for use as tarp stakes (cost: $2)
• One large bottle of single malt scotch (cost: $20)

With our equipment (and priorities) clearly in order, we set off down the narrow cliff-walled valley into a wall of mist...