LAKE PLACID

Leh, I’d thought, would be a study in brown, but there was plenty of emerald in the vale. As the road began to climb the multi-hued mountains, our woollies returned. And the mountains, which had seemed so benevolent, suddenly turned forbidding, with gigantic yellow boulders and torrents of water on the road. It was the chilling wind that first warned us of the snow ahead. It’d begun to drizzle when the road suddenly turned into Zingral, where an Army detachment was perched at 15,500 feet. “Get warmed up here,” welcomed the sign on a hut kept snug by a modern bukhari. Sufficiently energised with a hot cuppa in the hut, we drove up to the white mountains again, watching tufts of green grass sprouting bravely from rust-coloured rocks. Soon, the Gypsy stopped again. “Welcome to Chang-la top, the third-highest motorable pass of the world,” said a signboard.

Here, the warm-your-cockles hut was manned by Rifleman Anil Rawat, a Garhwali who had spent six of his eight-year-long career in Jammu and Kashmir. Outside, a motorcyclist from Delhi told us how he’d never thought much of the Indian Army until he came here. “The soldiers are amazing,” he gushed. A little short of Durbuk, we ran into another wonder—a tented restaurant wedged between formidable mountains and a rivulet.

Tashi Yangcho, the gangly youth who started it two years ago, had already served 30 visitors. Busy from June to September, his restaurant earns him a handsome rupees one lakh in the season. The menu—momos, noodles, rice stew, soup and tea—is the comfort food your body craves for at such dizzying heights.

It was well past six when we reached the Army’s Tangtse Valley guesthouse, “the highest in the world”. It was certainly the prettiest, ringed by mountains with a stream separating the cottages from the Brigade headquarters. Three jawans rounding up sheep and ducks in the garden, “ Lovers Island”, completed the Wordsworthian picture.

Early next morning we set out for Pangong, gazing in wonder at the silent mountains, the silky sand in the valley and the craters that reminded you of the pockmarked moon. Pangong had us bewitched the moment at first sight—a shimmering patch of turquoise in an opening between mountains. As we sped the final few kilometres, there it lay, a lake with every imaginable hue of blue, ringed by snowcapped peaks. From inky blue to sea green and grey, it was all there in the 145-km-wide and 62-km-long water body uniting India and China.

As the icy wind made even the sun shudder, boatman Sepoy Vijay Kumar asked us to hasten our boatride. “The water gets rough once the weather packs up,” he explained as we feasted our eyes. Vijay won our lifelong admiration when he let us in on ways to gauge the lake’s depth. “The deeper it is, the more inky blue its shade;  the lesser the depth, the lighter its colour,” he beamed. In the winters when the temperature plunges, the lake turns into ice capable of carrying light vehicles.

Here too, the olive green uniform is a comforting presence. The armed forces is also the main provider of food and curios. We had yummy cinnamon tea at the Army canteen that also boasted a bar.

Outside, the sandy Garnet Hill beckoned. A friend had told me that many years back one could dig there and come up with shiny crimson stones, but not any longer. Now all you can do is drive midway to the top and come back. Quite smitten by Pangong, we turned back only after a polite reminder from our long-suffering drivers.   And then, as the lake vanished, the mountains had us in thrall, daring us to look elsewhere.