Snapshots from the Chadar Trek - Shelf 2

The good thing about having a photo-shelf one’s mind is that it is a self-purging space. The worth-while moments automatically stick with you. Here are some more moments which have survived the purge and claimed a more permanent spot…

Ice on my face

Day time temperature stood at -11 centigrade

Since I am an early-riser by nature, my Mom never had to resort to desperate measures like sprinkling water on my face to get me out of bed. But that morning, I was in for a rude shock when I was woken up by a sprinkle of ice on my face. I got up to find a fine dusting of ice crystals on my sleeping bag, and the entire inner wall of the tent covered with a layer of ice. When the wind shook the tent, some of that ice had fallen on my face and forced me to get up.

The extreme cold made sure that many of the tasks I usually did intuitively became something which needed a lot of jugaad. The toothpaste was frozen in its tube, and all I could do was to dunk my toothbrush in a mouthwash and brush my teeth with it. The sunscreen had to be dipped in a pitcher of hot water before it became pliable enough to be applied. At night, I would remove the battery out of the camera and tuck it inside a roll of socks. This roll of socks would then sit at the bottom of my sleeping bag at night, and thus I ensured that the battery would  not run out before the trek was over. Stuffing the snowy sleeping bags and mattress in the bag became a herculean task. If somehow the socks or the gloves would get damp, they would get frozen and stiff in minutes, and would stick to the skin. Everyone had runny noses, and after a couple of days, had given up wiping their drippy noses because the frequent contact with tissue paper bruised the skin. The hands and feet would get painfully numb for so long that sometimes I forgot they even existed.

It had not happened to me before, but I was driven close to tears multiple times during the week. When I had dreamt about being on the Chadar while sitting in my air-conditioned office, I had considered only the exciting and adventurous aspect of it. The physical hardships were taking over the senses, and the romance of the situation slowly froze off.  I really wondered if I would ever sweat again, if the thought of drinking a glass of water would not seem like a punishment to me….

Gangnam Style

20 adults on a trek... respectable and dignified - standing inside a tent at dusk - dancing to ‘Gangnam Style’ with a most earnest look on their faces. I cannot get over the humor of the situation now, but it was impossible that any of us felt funny about it at that time, because we were chilled down to the bone, and would have done anything to get a little warmer. The chilly wind slapped away at the walls of the mess tent, threatening to uproot it any minute. It started off with a little spot jogging and some school style PT inside the tent to stay warm as we waited for dinner to be served; and before we knew it, we went Gangnam Style, singing ‘bop – bop bop’, and imitating Psy’s moves. :)

The Kitchen tent

All through the week, the kitchen tent was the warmest place to be wherever we camped. And it was not just because of the heat from the stoves. The smiling faces and the sense of humor of our cooks used to warm the spirits up. There was always an excuse to linger in the kitchen tent – to ask for hot drinking water, or to dry off a wet sock or a glove, or sit around for a game of cards. I would shamelessly hang around in the kitchen, getting in everybody’s way. But the cooks were too polite to tell me to get the hell out of there. They would not only put up with me, they would also offer me salty butter-tea whenever they had some. Life was good in the Kitchen tent; it was like a little oasis of warmth in this icy desert.    

The Fall

I am not one of those skidding sliding trekkers; I am a person who usually sacrifices speed for the want of a good grip and good balance. This is what had kept me from slipping and falling on the Chadar so far. The thought of a fall was terrifying, especially when the snow had frozen off, and all below our feet there was a layer of thin, razor sharp wafers of ice. 

One afternoon on the way back from Naerak to Tibb, I was walking with my sunglasses on and a muffler around my ears and nose. The glasses were continuously getting fogged up, and blurred my vision. At one point, when I thought I was stepping on slushy ice (which is less slippery), I actually stepped on a patch of smooth slithery ice and I fell down with a thud. The cold hard surface of the Chadar hit me smack on my left cheek, as if the river was reprimanding me for my audacity of walking on it. My trekking pole slipped out of my hand and was slowly advancing sown the slope towards the center of the river. I caught it just in time before it reached the fast flowing water in the middle. The left half of my face was swollen for quite some time after, I could tell by the way my sunglasses sat on my face. The porters had said earlier that you have not really done the Chadar trek till you’ve slipped on it once. Well, I guess I earned this honor too. :)

Snapshots from the Chadar Trek

An un-marinated dream come true

What would you do if your town was disconnected from the rest of the world during winter because the road leading to it was snowed in? I would make sure I had ample food and books to last me a while, and would sit at home curled up in front of a fire during those months. But the people in the Zanskar valley have other ideas. Hibernating in their houses for the winter does not appeal to them. They choose instead to use the frozen Zanskar River as a highway to Leh. So what if it takes multiple days to walk the river and reach Leh, so what if the temperatures are several degrees below freezing, so what if there is wildlife about, so what if food and shelter is scarce?

The barely habitable environment of the ‘Chadar’, as the locals very matter-of-factly call it, has all the makings of a highly glamorous trek - one which will enable a trekker to test her attitude, tolerance, determination and survival instincts while providing for some of the best visuals imaginable. The idea of trekking on the frozen Zanskar River struck so incredulous to me that I had not allowed myself to even dream sincerely about it. In a haze I booked the trek, and in a haze I started preparing for it; knowing fully well that I could never be completely prepared, hardly believing that I would go through with it. This trek was unlike anything else I had ever attempted. There were no peaks to be conquered; there were no altitude maximums to be ticked off. This trek, more than anything else, was all about the journey rather than the destination.

In retrospect, the seven days spent on the Chadar are not a continuous wave of events in my head. They are merely moments imprinted on my memory, snapshots on the walls of my mind. 

Leh

A Game of Ice-hockey in Leh

I stood watching an under-14 game of ice-hockey between Haryana and J&K. We had a day to spend in Leh before the trek began. I couldn’t believe that for the first time I was in a state of the country which I had only seen in news, more for the wrong reasons than the right. The plane had landed here after crossing miles and miles of mountain ranges. The people were different, they had different lives, different issues. I usually saw kids playing cricket or football; here they were skating on blades, striking a puck! But they were my countrymen. Did they have the same Indian-ness as me? Could the Indian spirit penetrate all these miles of mountains?

The sight of the great Sindhu

The mighty Indus

The trek was to start from Tilad Do, which is about 70 km from Leh, and we started off in a bus. We were driven along the Sindhu River, and the sight of the great Indus - the river which nurtured one of the oldest civilizations in the world, the river which cultivated the most intelligent minds to have created one of the best civic systems of all times, the river which names our country – gave me goose bumps. We stopped at the confluence point of the Sindhu and the Zanskar rivers. Standing next to the fluttering prayer flags, I felt sure that I could spend the rest of my life looking at these mighty rivers without getting even the slightest bit bored.

The Skid

The Indus looked slender and more livid as compared to the wide icy Zanskar. I was sitting on the left side, where I could directly see the side of the road fall to the Chadar of ice covering the Zanskar. It seemed as if there was space just enough for our bus on the road, and not a millimeter more. Yet miraculously, whenever a vehicle used to come from the other side, the road seemed to expand a little, and both the vehicles would cross each other. My eyes were glued to the road, watching if the driver responded to each curve of the road by sufficiently steering the wheel. Though he was going tentatively over the blotches of snow on the road, he had the vehicle more-or-less under control.

Suddenly, on one of the sharper curves, the tires skidded on a patch of ice. The bus drifted over the ice for a few feet without the will of the driver, and stopped just in time. All the twenty hearts in the bus skipped a beat; it was scary to have the driver lose control of the bus like that, even if it was for a few seconds. After that I decided the best thing to do was to take my eyes off the road and take a small nap.

My first snowfall

On the frozen Zanskar, amidst snowfall

Having lived in a tropical country all my life, my only chance to see snow, albeit stale, was to go to a hill station during summer vacation. So on the second day of the trek, when little snow-flakes started trooping down from the sky, it was a great moment for me. I wanted to pack snowballs and build snowmen. My European trek-mates, to whom snowfall is as common as a rainy day in Mumbai during monsoons, were thoroughly amused by my enthusiasm. It snowed the whole of that day, and the whole of night. The Chadar got a powder coating of snow, and all the mountains and rocks with jagged edges were wrapped in cuddly softness. At night, we were told to shake the snow off the tents every couple of hours, else they would collapse under the weight of the snow. While having lunch en-route, our noodle-bowls used to get a garnish of snow within minutes.

The snow helped us in a lot of ways – walking on the Chadar with a dusting of snow became much easier, and the temperature raised a little. And as for the view – the mountains looked like Nigella’s multi layered chocolate cake with a dusting of icing sugar on top….

The Science lesson recalled

The torn metal bottle

When liquids cool down, they contract. So does water, but only till it reaches 4 degrees. Below that, water expands; and when it freezes, it expands by about 9%. Why was I reminded of this particular science class from school? Because I was staring horrified at my cracked metal water bottle lying outside the tent. I had filled the water with hot water the night before, and wanted to tuck it in my sleeping bag next to my feet to keep them warm. But I changed my mind at the last minute, and slid the bottle out of the tent from under the tent. That night the mercury dropped to -23, and made sure that I had no water bottle with me for the rest of the trek... :(