Incredible Beauty, Incredible Tragedy: Part 3

Our first indication of trouble came before we went to bed, when our host, using her limited English, was able to convey to us that the bus we had planned to take from Ang back to Leh was not coming. She had heard this over the radio on the Ladakhi news. There was a rumour that the bus driver was already in Ang, so the other two in our party set off to find him and gain more information. However, when Philip and The Other Ross returned in the morning, they had established that the bus driver was nowhere to be found.

The first thing that I did when when I woke up in the morning was walk out to the road to find the bus stop, just in case. About 20m south of the guest house, I ran into the first mud on the road. It was a small slide, but covered the entire road with several inches of mud, requiring a bit of an awkward walk around. I turned north and made it about 15m past the guest house in the other direction before encountering a similar barrier. In my mind, I was starting to process what our options might be. We realized we would have to do some walking, perhaps as far as the highway, before we would be able to find a ride. We knew that a bridge had been damaged close to Leh so poured over the trekking maps looking for potential walk-arounds. Our plan at this point was to hitch a ride back as far as Basgo, then attempt to cross the Indus via a foot bridge and follow the south bank of the river to where it meets the Zanskar. From there, according to the map, we would be able to walk up to the Chilling road, thus bypassing the town of Nemyo, where the bridge had fallen. It would be a full day's walk.

As we set off out of Ang, things became more and more ominous. It was not long before we were walking beside the raging, brown Ang river. The day before it had been a picturesque clear mountain stream. Now, it threatened to breach the road bank and wash the road away. In places, the water had begun to come over the road as the bridges where to small to handle the volume of water. Water poured over the tops of the bridges. My feet started to break through the thin crust of pavement as it was undermined by the water. It felt like walking on thin ice.

There were numerous small landslides of porridge-like mud all along the road, most of them too deep to wade through. This started to give me concern because all around Ang, as well as a long stretch of the highway back to Leh is surrounded by massive, steep, unstable rock and mud slopes. I thought it was just a matter of time before we would encounter an insurmountable slide. Most of the Ladakh region is geologically different than that which surrounds it. Someone had told me that, when an ocean still divided Asia from India, Ladakh was an archipelago of islands in that ocean. As the two continental plates collided to form the Karakorum and Himalayan mountain ranges, Ladakh pressed into the middle. While the mountains of the great ranges are new, massive pillars of hard rock, most of the mountains in Ladakh are giant scree piles of soft stone that is easy to break apart in your hands. All of the towns and roads are built on and around these precarious slopes.

Additionally, Ladakh is a high altitude desert. Neither the natural nor man-made structures are designed to cope with large amounts of rain. Most of the buildings are made of mud bricks which are left out in the sun to dry. Everywhere in Ladakh, you can see mud bricks drying. The mortar between the bricks is a very sandy cement. In fact, I would say that it is also basically mud. There is some cement added to the sand and mud and water, but all that you need to do is pick with your fingers between the bricks and the cement will come away in your hands. Mud, rock, and sand are the only building materials available. There are very few trees and those are used to construct the roofs. That makes the walls and buildings of Ladakh ideal for the dry environment, but doesn't work so well when it rains.

After we had navigated several landslides and floods, we made it to one of the more luxurious hotels in the valley. Being the starting point for several treks in the area, there were several taxis there which had dropped of a new batch of hikers. We were saved. We managed to negotiate with a driver to take us to Basgo, well ahead of our predicted schedule.

We loaded up the taxi and made our way down the steep mountain road, without further incident, other than a scary crossing over a small bridge under which a massive, dark brown flow was crashing. On the way, we passed a couple of young trekkers slowly making their way down to the highway, moving stones from the road as they went. We got to to the highway, turned east, and made it about 2km. The first major bridge, in the town of Nimbo, was already under assault from the swollen river. A small section had fallen away and the army had closed the bridge to cars. Our options; cross the bridge on foot and hope to catch a ride on the other side, or wait on the safe side. We wisely chose to wait on the safe side of the bridge, to see what would happen; the first of many good decisions that we made as a group over the next two days.