Pangong Lake is a closed basin lake.  Without rivers leading out of the lake, its water is brackish.  It is 134 km (83 miles) long and extends from India to Tibet.  Sixty percent of the length of the lake is located in Tibet, now controlled by China.  Further down the road from the tourist area is the Line of Actual Control, controlled by China but claimed by India, making it a heavily militarized area.

Many tourists visit to the lake for multiple days of camping but we only had a few hours free in our schedule.  Due to the salinity of the water, the lake takes on different colors as the sunlight hits it.  The water was extremely cold and it freezes solid in the winter.  After a couple of hours of taking pictures, skipping stones, and doing hand stands, we packed up and headed home.

On Cory’s and Kunal’s final full day in Ladakh, we got an early start so Jack could drive us the 150 km to Pangong Lake and back.  Getting there and back takes about five hours each way and we would have to cross Chang La, advertised as the third highest pass in the world.

Along the way we saw a variety of wildlife including wild ass, marmots, sheep, horses, and yaks.  A few miles from the lake Kunal left the car to test himself with a run  at and altitude of 14,000+ feet; later he admitted it might not have been the best idea!

After a few hours at the Hemis Festival, Jack took us to see a few more gompas and palaces around Leh:

• First, Thikse Monastery, the largest monastery in central Ladakh.  It was supposedly built to look like Potala Palace in Lhasa.
• Next, the Shey Monastery and Shey Palace complex.  Shey was the old capital of the upper Ladakh region, but when the Dogras of Jammu invaded Ladakh in 1842, the Namgyals abandoned the palace and fled to Stok.  Most of Shey Palace is in ruins, but the monastery has a nice 39 foot tall Shakyamuni Buddha statue.
• Finally, we traveled across the Indus River to Stok Palace.  It was here that the Namgyals, rulers of Ladakh, fled to, and it is still used today as a residence by the Ladakhi royalty.

The Hemis Festival is held every year in the Hemis Monastery, the largest Buddhist monastery of Ladakh.   The two-day celebration kicked off on July 10, the tenth day of the lunar month on the Tibetan calendar. The festival celebrates the birth anniversary of Guru Padmasambhava, founder of Tibetan Buddhism. During the festival, the Lamas gather around the central flagpole in the courtyard of the monastery and perform mask dances and sacred plays depicting Guru Padmasambhava’s fight for good over evil. Their performances are accompanied by the music from drums, cymbals, and long horns.

The Hemis Festival is a major attractions in Ladakh and we saw more tourists here than anywhere else in the last six weeks on the Mango Hwy.   The actual entertainment value of the dances and plays is short-lived and we found ourselves chatting with other tourists more than watching the stage.  Kunal did get some photography tips from a German photographer that he put into practice.  Below are a few of his best shots selected from
about a hundred.

Heading back to Leh from the Hundar in the Nubra Valley, we stopped at the Diskit Gompa (gompa means monastery in Tibetan).  Founded by Changzem Tserab Zangpo in the 14th century, the gompa belongs to the Gelugpa (Yellow Hat) sect of Tibetan Buddhism and is a sub-gompa of the Thikse gompa.  At the foothill of the gompa is a 32 meter statue of Maitreya Buddha, known as future Buddha.

In the wintertime, when the pipes freeze, monks have to carry water up a steep staircase built into the rock.  Along the staircase and the road there are hundreds of prayer stones with Sanskrit characters carved into them, possibly with prayers that each monk will make it back up to the top!

We made it to Hundar, a small town in Nubra Valley, in the late afternoon and went straight to the sand dunes.   The geography of the Nubra Valley is overwhelming: the Shyok River meets the Nubra or Siachan River to form a large valley separating the Ladakh and Karakoram ranges of the Himalaya.  Like the rest of Ladakh, Nubra is a high altitude desert with rare precipitation and scant vegetation except along the river beds, where irrigated.  Between Hundar and Diskit lie several miles of sand dunes, and two-humped bactrian camels graze in the neighbouring “forests” of seabuckthorn.

We didn’t see any wild camels but there were plenty available to ride!  It was about Rs. 300 (US $6.50) for a half an hour. 

After camel racing we ran up and down the sand dunes.  Jack had just finished washing his car and wasn’t excited to see us covered in sand. 

That night we stayed at the Organic Retreat Camp in a nice, bedded tent.  There were a number of other Indian tourists staying at the camp so we shared stories and drinks around the campfire.  The camp also has its own organic garden, and we enjoyed the taste of locally grown veg in our meals.

About an hour after crossing Khardung La, Jack stopped to replace a flat tire with a spare.  This was the third and thankfully final time we had had car troubles in India and surprisingly this time was the quickest fix.  One hour further down the road, just inside Nubra Valley, was a small auto shop that repaired our tire in about 45 minutes.  Jack seemed to know the guys from his years of driving this route.

While we waited we enjoyed some chai and maggi and marveled at an area that used to be part of the Silk Road.

On the third day in Ladakh we set out early for Nubra Valley.  Located northwest of Leh, we had to cross Khardung La (La means ‘pass’ in Tibetan) at 5,602 m or 18,380 feet.  At that height it is the highest motorable road in the world, however, further research online reveals that the altitude reported by the signs may be slightly exaggerated; a recent GPS study put it at 17,582 feet, making it the third highest road.

Like most roads in Ladakh, Khardung La is maintained by the Border Roads Organization (BRO) and is always under some state of repair.  In addition to carrying travelers to more amazing sites in Ladakh, it is also strategically important to India because it is used to carry supplies to the Siachen Glacier.  About 100 miles further north of Khardung La, Siachen Glacier is the highest battleground on earth, a place where India and Pakistan have fought intermittently since 1984 over a border dispute.

Khardung La is also home to the highest cafeteria in the world. Travelers and soldiers mingle and eat maggi and momos (dumplings).  There are tens of thousands of prayer flags located at Khardung La and we enjoyed hiking to higher spots to get a better view.

On the second day in Leh we took National Highway 1 on a four hour trip to Alchi Monastery, located on the south bank of the Indus River.  The site was built around 1000 years ago and marks the beginnings of Buddhism in the region.  There are three major shrines: the Dukhang (Assembly Hall), the Sumtseg, and the Temple of Manjushri, all built around the 12th and 13th centuries.

The thing that stands out the most about the monastery complex is that so much of it is made from wood.  The original door frames and carvings stay well preserved over hundreds of years due to the dry climate.  The complex has huge statues of the Buddha, elaborate wood carvings, and some of the oldest surviving paintings in Ladakh.

The major highlight of Alchi was finding monks creating a large sand mandala in the Dukhang (Assembly Hall).   It is quite a sight to see monks sitting for hours dropping colored sand, particle by particle, over a 25 square foot area; unfortunately no photography was allowed.

Those who ride motorcycles say a Royal Enfield is the best way to get around in Leh.  Since none of us knew how to ride, our travel agent, Stanzin, arranged transport to the many sites outside of town with Jack.

Over the next five days we were in Jack’s Toyota Innova between five and ten hours a day.  There is little traffic, but the roads are rarely straight and each journey involves thousands of feet of elevation change.

Jack is an amazing driver, with a great sense of respect for the mountains.  After all the crazy driving we experienced in the congested cities of India, it was nice to have a conservative driver with years of local experience take us up and down the switchbacks of the Himalaya.

We did fall for some of Jack’s many humorous pranks including his story about Magnetic Hill.  On the way to Alchi along National Highway 1 we stopped, Jack put the car in neutral and we appeared to be rolling uphill!   Only upon looking up the site on Wikipedia did I discover that this is just an optical illusion due to an obstructed horizon and not due to a mystical magnet in the ground.