The once-forbidden road from Srinagar into the Himalayas began for us along the shores of Dal Lake.
As we threaded past tuk-tuk scooters and Tata trucks – avoiding children, scrawny dogs and sleepy cows – ghostly boatmen in gondola-like shikaras drifted through the dawn mist, mirrored in the still water. Leaving the lake, the pitted road wound up through scruffy villages clinging to the hillsides and crossed the Sind River swollen with snowmelt. Above us, achingly white against an impossibly blue sky, were the foothills of the highest mountains on earth.
Our driver, Bhuti Nibbe, was a great driver but insisted in passing what he could or tailgating in exhaust fumes in the hopes of doing so I’d been warned of the road ahead by the writer Andrew Harvey, who asked a Frenchman who’d travelled the road to tell him what to expect. ‘I have been down the Amazon,’ he told Harvey. ‘I have walked across the Kalahari. I once spent five weeks in the Sahara … and they are nothing like those two days going up from Srinagar to Leh. Find a patron saint and pray to him; don’t look too closely at the side of the road or you’ll faint or be sick. Take opium if you can get some. It helps.’
As we rose higher and higher the air chilled, valleys fell away beneath the scrabbling wheels of our Toyota Qualis and white, insanely high peaks closed in around us. The road became a snaking, hairpin ledge hacked into mountain flanks. Glaciers shimmered in high valleys as we stopped for a picnic lunch beside a river. The water was so cold my hands were instantly numb as I dipped them in to wash.
In a valley far below was a huge gathering of tents. Evidently there’s a cave there with an eternal ice lingam (penis) that Hundus worship, and they were doing it in vast numbers.
As we busied ourselves with food packs, some scruffy but beautiful children approached shyly – sons and daughters of poor shepherds whose rough, plastic-covered huts we’d passed. We handed out some food and one youngster regarded the hard boiled egg in his hand with a wonder long lost to children of the urban lowlands. It was clearly the first egg he’d ever seen.
