Himalayans 8 - Tabo in Spiti to Kaza

Fresh.

That's the way to start the day. And it certainly was. Being on the western slope the sun did not greet us but at least it wasn't really cold, just fresh.

At breakfast we charged phones at the central charging point in the dining room. That all sounds modern, but the dining room was made of drystone walls and the charging point was a dozen outlets linked to two electrical points.

Luckily nothing caught fire while we were there.

Alex arranged donations for the youth centre from us and they were very grateful. This was not the major charity ride we'd done in south India with Adventure Ashram and the donations differed by a couple of decimal places. But that was helping the victims of human trafficking and had been a very organised charity ride. This was helping deserving local people with their daily hopes rather than countering the human effects of international crime.

What for us was a small amount would make a big difference to them.

I tried to decorate Michael's and my bikes. Luckily he had gaffer tape. I had the flags and a couple of sticks scrounged from the garden. Pawanji the support team driver had the wherewithal to match them all up. So we had prayer flags on sticks at the back and flags across the handlebars.

It got a dash complex making sure the flags on the back didn't get caught in the wheels and the ones on the handlebars didn't slap prayers in my face. 
But Pawanji was up to it (and I think it gave him something fun to do!).

As soon as we'd finished, we were greeted by a group from Delhi who were also leapfrogging with us. They'd stayed in the same camp as us in Sarahan and now wanted photos on the bike.

It was either my good looks, or the fact that I had the most flags, but I kept getting asked to pose, seemingly for both families. Michael was also snapping away, while laughing, hence this souvenir shot.

It was a good day's riding. Well apart from the thumping I got from the repaired landslides. 

We were crossing over to the Spiti Valley. As the road wound up the mountains it would be heavily worn whenever it dipped into one of the slashes on the mountainside where the streams ripped away at the mountain and at any road presumptuously carved into the side.

India wants to be very assertive about its territory up here in the Himalayas so the military presence is high. But the army runs on fuel and hundreds of tankers a day must make the journey up to the northern bases. So the roads get repaired to a passable status as quickly as possible.

There is a huge challenge as some roads are at the bottom of scree covered slopes. So rainfall and snowmelt set the entire mountainside in motion and as fast the debris at the bottom is cleared, the rest of the mountain edges down to take its place. Defying gravity takes a lot of energy.

We didn't defy gravity, merely slowed its effects as we wended our way up and then down the rocky, sandy, stony hairpin bends. 

Luckily there was little traffic and the traffic there was turned out to be courteous.

A century ago Rudyard Kipling in Kim said about the Spiti Valley: 
"At last they entered a world - a valley of leagues where the high hills were fashioned of the mere rubble and refuse from off the knees of the mountains... Surely the Gods live here. Beaten down by the silence and the appalling sweep of dispersal of the cloud-shadows after rain. This place is no place for men."

The Spiti valley really is another world.

Michael had spent the morning buddying up, which was really good for my psychology.

It had been hard just stuck at the back rolling in past. But he kindly pottered along with me and we paused every so often and shared thoughts of the views and the ride. 

We all clustered for half an hour or so as our passes were presented to continue up the valley. Swapping stories and trying to keep in the shade. It was hot.

A couple of guys from Bangalore were also waiting. They had put their bikes on a train and had ridden from Delhi. Bike Stallions they were.

Michael continued buddying. It brought so many thoughts to life, putting them into words and being able to share some of the details during the day made it so much more fun.

Nestled in the valley, where a river ran through it, were fields where someone was carefully cultivating large boulders. They sprouted like uncarved Easter Island statues among the struggling grass.  But there were blotches of straggly trees near the river and an incongruously sited horse breeding centre.

About 20 minutes after I was more than ready for chai break. Alex was waiting at the road as we rolled up with Abi and we rode into one of the few spots for tourists in the area. Tabo. The oldest continuously used monastery in the Himalayas. Founded in 996.

We parked and I immediately started for the closest place with food and chai. A modern seeming hotel restaurant. The restaurant was part of a hotel with modern but simple rooms ready for visitors, small bands of travellers in taxis and on bikes.

But here there will also be the higher echelons of Buddhist monks as the Dalai Lama is apparently considering this as a retirement spot.
What a spot.

Some of the hotels we stop at for chai have stickers from dozens of groups.

Each one has a Nomadic Knights sticker modestly placed within the starburst. But here were a few amusing names.

Goans to get Leh,d, Bike Stallions, Raid de Himalaya, Inglorious Riders

So bikers have as bad a sense of humour as anyone else.
We gratefully ate Ladakh Tai.... a spicy noodle soup, which was delicious. Loaded with chai we had fuel for the afternoon.

A quick post prandial wander to look at the temple and the souvenir shops, but with nothing tempting on offer we saddled up and rode.

The afternoon was another slog along sandy, rocky, slidey, danger-filled roads. I ended up going very slowly, which apparently is not the best or indeed safest way to go.

The little scenery I managed to glimpse was spectacular. Massive steep rocky mountains and a violent river. Patches of green, scattered randomly around the landscape. There was no countryside, just the jarring results of a cataclismic event. India smashing into Asia.

Casual gazing at the landscape was severely limited by tunnel vision. My view of the road was of some 10 or maybe 20 metres ahead. Watching for trouble was all encompassing, all embracing, all consuming. This video was taken on the same road, but going the opposite way. So driving on the left we had the big drop to look at!

So we puttered and slogged and swore our way towards Kaza. With Michael buddying the swearing was a lot more under my breath as I didn't want to be accused of whingeing!
But we stopped to look around this spectacular village, seemingly carved into mega termite mounds!

It was a welcome break and a good chance for everyone to regroup. For some reason even joinging the group in the village I was highly conscious that I may fail to stop in time, even at 5 km per hour and crash into someone, or stop on a slope and not be able to hold the bike. But these fears were not realised, I didn't make a fool of myself, this time.
The buildings were on land that could not be cultivated. Then we clambered up to the building top left, which is a temple, to get this view:

That's the Spiti Valley. Hard farming.

My bike seemed to be particularly violent on the bumpy bits, enough to give me a headache after hours of pounding. I did not want a repeat of the broken forks from the first day, so I asked Abi to check if it was me or the bike. 
Of course it was both, but the shock absorbers were set to hard, presumably Ashram the mechanic thought I was even heavier than I am. Well the next hamlet was the place to wait for the team in the van and get this sorted. Meanwhile a chai was in order. Chai is always in order, especially after an hour on the road.

So I got Abi and I loaded while Michael went ahead to catch up the main group. The team arrived a refreshing few minutes later. Ashraf went to work while we worked the adrenaline off.

I got the team a welcome chai and Lovely told me they had reset the bike to the softest absorbers they could so the rear mudguard might touch the tyre occasionally, so I should tell them if it did. Of course it didn't. Thin as a rake me (well not any more).

Lovely gave me strict instructions about which for in the road to take, 300 metres up the road, take the right hand fork, they were going to finish their chai.
So off I set and five minutes further on, a lot more than 300 metres, all the other riders had stopped to wait for us. In the sun. No chai. Just waiting.

An inner smile was in order. But carefully concealed behind the chin guard of the helmet.

We continued the steady slog to Kaza but I was tired and slow and steadily fell behind the pack. That's fine I'm also here to enjoy it, or at least not to continually suffer! And I was comfortable pottering along.

By the time Abi and I got to Kaza the others were way ahead. He had never stayed here before and the town was strung along the road.
We puttered along for a couple of kilometres and saw the end of town. But before the fields started we stopped to get out the tour plan to check the name of the hotel.

At that moment Alex came up the road ten metres ahead of us, looking for stragglers. So we had arrived.

The hotel advertised wifi, the first since Delhi. Time to check on the outside world.

So we unpacked, failed to find out how the hot water worked, had a fresh water Asian bathe and got ready to chill still further. The hot water was actually an immersion heater and when the electricity was on it worked. It hadn't worked that day.

Wifi was due to come on at 7:30 which seemed unusual. So we eagerly awaited the bewitching hour to get in touch with the world.

Our Indian sim cards had failed to work since the check point three days ago. There was only one carrier that worked in the mountains and it wasn't Vodafone.

The generator fired, the wires hummed and we were off. The owner gave us the password, which was simple, 'himalayan'.
But the wifi did not work with most Apple devices.

One of the first messages I got was about my daughter Steedley. She'd left her passport in Amsterdam and had to fly that night from Frankfurt.
She'd got a singing scholarship to the Ingenium Academy at Winchester, England, he says proudly, and was travelling from Frankfurt to London on a US passport. She's fifteen and very pretty, he says proudly, again. The US passport has no visa because she normally uses her UK passport. The UK passport ran out in April but she turns 16 in August. At 16 you get an adult passport. For the sake of a couple of weeks she was non-EU. So far so simple.

My dear, darling, daughter can consume a lot of resources on her route to happiness as a singer. She had insisted on looking after her passport, then had left it behind on a weekend trip.

My wife Gina had to rebook the flight to the evening, hire a car in Frankfurt, where she works, and drive to Amsterdam to get Steedley's passport. And then back to Frankfurt again. Five hours of driving each way. Better than relaxing on a Sunday.

Steedley would then be late at Heathrow so the Academy were going to charge £150 for a taxi. The message was a couple of hours old and asked if my brother or sister-in-law get her.

I was reluctant to ask my brother whose alarm goes off at 4 something for him to be in the city by half past highly keen.

So I replied asking if the issue had been solved.

I wanted to concentrate on that particular mess and should have retreated to the bedroom but stupidly stayed in the main area.
Being one of the first in the group to get the password, I had to repeat it multiple times to the same people. Especially anyone with an Apple whose device didn't work.

Paul kept laughing as I got the same question for the umpteenth time. Maybe I should have let him inform them.
I ended up being what I thought was direct and what Michael thought was rude when he asked the same question for the third time. I said if anyone needed any more information it would be best to ask the owner.

It is strange how we all react like drowning people when the internet doesn't work, desperately clutching at anyone around to get help and how often we're very upset when they can't or, unforgivably, won't, solve the problem.
Michael is the last person I would want to upset, but I do far to often without meaning to.

Then the wifi went off. It remained intermittent all night affected by both irregular internet and irrational electricity. So I couldn't do much about my darling daughter and her travails.

So we had a couple of shandies and some dinner and went outside for a smoke and a chat. There we learnt that Martin was very knowledgeable about Buddhism. He was really into it and was a worthy teacher to us bunch of agnostics with atheistic tendencies. Somehow the couple of beers, cigars and thin atmosphere of the high altitude made us more receptive.
He was very funny talking about going to see the Dalai Lama 'when he played the O2 stadium'.
Very megastar staff.

We went for a wander in the darkened town but didn't get very far and returned to retire early, exhausted.

Michael read, which I tried to imitate but gave up after about two minutes and was snoring heavily two minutes after that.

The next day was a short ride, an hour or so up to the highest monastery in the world. At some 4600 metres roughly its the sort of height that short haul jets use.
It was supposed to be a rest day but didn't turn out that way.