Kashmir: mystic adventure – Over the top…literally

This entry is part 2 of 16 in the series Adventure Rider Issue #19

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There’s something about India and the Himalayas that beckons to adventure riders. Ian Bowden felt the call and bit the Bullet.

The first time I visited India I told myself I’d never ride a bike there. Sometime later I watched a TV series depicting rides run in the Himalayas. The scenery in the mountains and Kashmir looked fantastic. “Never!” became, “When can I go?”

I checked all the details with Mr Google’s aid and found the Ferris Wheels ride ticked all the boxes, including traversing several of the highest mountain passes on this planet, venturing beyond Leh and through to Srinagar.

I traded a few emails and, luckily for me, a few others were interested in the same date.

I committed and paid the deposit, and I also let three keen adventuresome friends know and they joined the tour as well.

Powerless

I’d been to India and had been working there so knew what to expect. But no words could prepare someone who hadn’t been there for the chaos.

Another culture shock was what we’d be riding – The Royal Enfield Bullet!

The bike was designed by the British in the 1950s and is still built in India with not a lot of changes. Not only was I risking being mowed down by a Tata truck, but I wouldn’t be able to get out of the way since I’d be riding a bike with less horsepower than my wife’s lawnmower.

Yet in a strange way I was looking forward to it.

Desperate times

Our group of four met up with Mike Ferris at New Delhi airport, keen to experience the mighty Himalayas. There was myself, Terry, Craig and Greg, all from New Zealand. Karl from Australia had arrived earlier.

The first problem arose before we even got started when Craig’s bag didn’t arrive.

Fortunately, between all of us enough riding gear was found for Craig to start. His bag turned up a few days into the ride and it was just as well, too. His underwear was starting to ripen and we were on the verge of drawing straws to see which one of us was going to lend him a pair of jocks.

Crew’s control

We didn’t ride out of Delhi, but instead took the train 250km north to Chandigarh where we were introduced to the mighty Royal Enfield Bullet, our close friend for the next three weeks. It had rained all morning during the train trip, but someone from above was looking after us and it cleared as we rode out of Chandigarh to the purring chug of the single-cylinder motor.

The day was a relatively short ride to get used to the bike and the conditions, and we hadn’t even cleared town when Mike’s bike spluttered to a stop. Fortunately we had ace Enfield mechanic Hafiz along and he had the wiring issue sorted fairly quickly.

We called him ‘Fingers’ because there wasn’t an Enfield problem he couldn’t fix. We had a few and he fixed them all.

We had a great team along to make things run smoothly. Amar was our gentle-man guide and ‘Mr Sorts Anything’. Sanju, our van driver, we named ‘Schumacher’ because of how he amazed us by never being far behind even in the worst traffic jams, and riding shotgun with him was Fingers Hafiz.

Parwanoo, the first destination, was soon reached and a neat cable-car ride ferried us to our hilltop hotel where we relaxed over a cold Kingfisher beer while surveying the surrounding hills.

Shimla and Mandi

The next day made a damp start as we climbed the twisting hill roads and headed towards the Himachal State capital of Shimla.

Shimla was the summer national capital in the days of the British Raj. The entire government would relocate there for three months every year to avoid the sweltering heat of Delhi. At 2000m in altitude it was a bit cooler and is popular as a tourist town.

Don’t think of the Swiss Alps though. It’s a bit more ramshackle than that. The traffic was madness and a lot of fun, but you had to be defensive and be very aware of the craziness to survive. Another thing worth mentioning is the food – it was fantastic! The Indians are masters of spicy, tasty food, and even away from the nice hotels the street food is amazing.

Our destination the following day was Mandi. We were greeted with fine, clear weather and wound through some great cornering roads with little traffic and continued into the foothills of the Himalayas. This all changed in the afternoon when the road deteriorated into a potholed muddy ‘B’ road. Safety required a lot of line selection to avoid some of the larger holes as Enfield Bullets don’t have modern adventure-bike suspension. I arrived dry at our hotel but the rest of the team got caught in a cloudburst and were soaked on arrival, and this led to the discovery of the local rum named ‘Old Monk’. Over the following weeks quite a few bottles of this fine rum disappeared under our belts.

Gunga County

Late the next morning on the road to Manali the Enfield clutch started to play up.

It was difficult getting in and out of gear.

While we visited a local factory which made fine Kashmir wool shawls, Fingers Hafiz had the clutch apart and repaired the fault.

It only took him about 30 minutes.

The shawl factory was fascinating, with dozens of Fred Flintstone-type weaving machines operated by enthusiastic locals turning out beautiful, high-quality shawls.

For those readers who don’t know what gunga is, think ‘weed’. There was plenty about, even growing on the side of the road. The town of Manali, especially Old Manali, is the dope capital of northern India and a quite few lost souls reside there in a haze of bliss. It’s a very picturesque area and the Kulu Valley is spectacularly beautiful with lush green hills, steep gorges and great winding roads. We had a rest day there.

Big cat

“If you go down in the woods today or you’re in for a big surprise!”

Remember those words from The Teddy Bears’ Picnic? Well, when walking through the woods near Manali we came across a lot of fresh blood not far from our hillside hotel. It turned out a leopard had escaped from a nearby wildlife park the day before and was stalking and killing local dogs.

We’d come across the remains of one poor Fido. It probably wasn’t really a good place to be wandering. Typically of India though, there were no warning signs, barriers or police about.

At the start of this adventure there had been alarming news reports of flooding in the areas we were to travel through, but it didn’t cause us any problems apart from having to put on the wet-weather gear a couple of times. Still, it was evident a lot of rain had fallen and most of the larger rivers were running at close to flood level. In fact, the road closed behind us for three days after leaving Manali due to severe flooding.

Into the clouds

We were told the real Himalayan riding would start shortly after leaving Manali.

We started to climb the incredibly scenic Rohtang Pass. This road featured in the TV series about the world’s most dangerous roads and it was easy to see why. It was rough and narrow with huge drop offs and plenty of evidence of previous casualties in the form of unrecovered wrecks down the steep sides. This was the first of many high passes we were to travel and to celebrate we stopped at the almost-snowing 4000m summit for a nip of antifreeze – Black Dog whiskey.

After descending the other side and having a tasty roadside meal we made our way through the remote Lahaul Valley, and the landscape and views were amazing.

The roads were rough and dusty, just the way we liked them!

We arrived at the small village of Keylong, deep in the mountains, the day before India’s Independence Day and spent the rest of the afternoon wandering about and watching the colourful celebrations.

Sarchu and the Old Monk

After watching the morning celebrations we left Keylong. Every turn into a new valley produced a breathtaking change of colour,texture and formation. Enormously deep river canyons combined with wind, rain and ice to carve impossible sculptures out of the rock and gravel. The Enfield only just made it to Darcha as the battery had cracked and all the power-holding juice had leaked out.

Again this was no problem for Fingers.

He replaced it while we had lunch.

After lunch it was up and over the scenic Baralacha Pass at 4850m. We crossed several cold, clear streams of glacier melt before arriving at our destination for the day: a group of a dozen tents in a semi-permanent ‘town’ just before a police check-point at Sarchu, the entry into the State of J&K (Jammu and Kashmir). It was a cold night in the tents at 4400m and difficult to sleep in the thin air. This created the need for more antifreeze and Old Monk came to our aid again. It’s good stuff at only $6.00 a bottle.

Into Kashmir

It was out of the sack early the next morning as we had a big day planned.

The air was very crisp at 7.00am as we purred down the valley.

Not far along the road we started climbing the 21 switchbacks of the Gata Loops. It’s a steep-sided, rocky mountain with amazing views over the surrounding landscape. Karl thought he was on his dirt bike on this road and took one of the many steep, dirt shortcuts between the loops. This came to a sticky end as the old girl didn’t have the horsepower and stopped for a rest. It needed a little manpower to conquer the last couple of metres.

Climbing over two more high passes, the Nakeela and Lachalang, both around 5000m, we continued on fantastic dirt roads before a great run down a massive valley to Pang, where we stopped for a morning lemon tea. After the refreshment we rode across a huge lunar-landscape plateau where nomadic people tended their goats and yaks.

The animals appeared to survive on a diet of gravel and sand.

Then it was up, up, and more up as we climbed to the Taglang pass at 5328m, the second-highest road in the world.

At that altitude the Enfield, as well as ourselves, had difficulty breathing the rarefied air. There’s not a lot of oxygen up there. In fact it was snowing, bloody cold and I struggled just getting my wet-weather gear on. Then it was down, down, and more down, out of the snow and rain to the town of Upshi. We’d just gone from zero degrees to 30 degrees after riding down another huge valley and had to get all the gear off before we dissolved.

So, scattered amid a pile of bike gear, we basked in the hot sun, shirtless, sipping iced drinks in the town centre.

A final 50km blast into Leh to ice-cold beers and showers never felt so good and completed a long, fantastic day.

Here ends the first part of the Himalayan adventure. Next issue the ride conquers the highest motorable road in the world and heads towards the disputed border region with Pakistan and deep into Kashmir.

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