It was a trip where Murphy's law was in full force. Everything that could go wrong did, and some. I drove around in circles trying to find fuel for my motorbike, got lost in the dark on the shores of the Tsomoriri lake, camped out in the wild, got bike's tires punctured and was rescued by the unlikeliest folks possible.. the Changpa nomads living high up in the mountains around the Tsomoriri lake. Needless to say, this was one of my best trips in Ladakh and i thoroughly enjoyed every minute of i

Read on to hear the story of my Tsomoriri trip..

Traveling along the Manali - Leh highway, one is witness to numerous interesting sights. While most of them are of the stunning, take your breath away variety, there are few quirky man made sights that are equally interesting. The strangest of them all for me was sight of truck drivers squatting underneath their trucks every morning and lighting its fuel tank on fire !!

The early part of my flight back from Leh, was spent staring out of the window, mesmerized by the snow clad mountain peaks and the valleys beneath them. The best part of it all was that i could take in the mountain landscape as a whole, everything.. all at once. As my sight wandered down from the lofty peaks, I could the beginning of a glacier and at its end the birth of a stream gentle at first and then turning into a raging torrent which cut a valley down the mountain slopes, which inturn gave life and space for a whole village. I could see valleys meet and the rivers merge.. mountains giving way to hills (Manali, i think...) and the hills finally meeting the plains where then i could see the birth of the mighty Ganges. The mother of all Indian rivers...

My general policy with people is to trust until that trust is broken. But as i was sitting in the van, i started wondering what his game could be. "nobody's that nice", i thought. Especially since he was tout for a hotel and has nothing to gain by giving me this free ride. With my suspicions gradually growing, i suddenly jumped out of the van, grabbed my backpack and went back to the pre-paid taxi counter. 
I got a taxi and as i was entering it i realized that i did not have my camera bag with me!!. Calmly, I thought i must've dropped it at the taxi counter but it wasn't there. Then the realization dawned on me that i must've left it in the hotel van that i abruptly jumped out of. PANIC !!, the prospect of losing my camera and lens collection was a little too much for me to digest. I didn't know the name of the guy i was talking to nor the name of the hotel he worked for. As i wandered around, slowly resigning to the fact that i've lost all my photographic equipment, i spotted him by the edge of the parking lot chatting with his buddies.  Hope trickled in. I told him what had happened, and he immediately offered to help...

Ladakh was the reason why i decided to take my bicycle with me to the Himalayas. The lure of cycling in the mountains with its crisp blue skies and snow capped peaks was too enticing to ignore. I had traveled Ladakh by motorcycle back in 2008, but this time i decided that a bicycle would be a better option. Going by cycle meant going slowly.. a 200km trip from, say, Leh to Pangong lake which can be done in a single day on a motor cycle would take 3 to 4 days on a bicycle. Which means stops in the smaller villages, seeing more sunrises & sunsets, more photo opportunities and more interaction with the local people. I had the one thing which i did not have in my other trips, the luxury of time.
 

Then i thought that if i was going to be cycling in Ladakh then i might as well cycle TO Ladakh. I knew that i was in no shape to tackle the road but i had a get fit plan. It was brilliant, so i thought. First spend a month in Rishikesh learning yoga, then spend the next month slowly making my way to Manali on my bicycle visiting all the interesting places in Himachal Pradesh. Then by september 1'st i'll be in Manali fit and ready to tackle the road to Leh.

Things did not start smoothly for my Manali Leh ride.

After traveling around Himachal by bus it was finally time for me to start cycling. I went to Palampur to collect my bike (I had left it at the home of a railway employee who had generously offered to store my bike at his place when i was away). My plan was to start riding from Palampur to Manali, spend a few days in Manali and then kick onwards towards Leh. But a sudden burst of laziness prompted me to take a bus from Palampur to Mandi with my bike stashed on the roof. I'am not sure if this qualifies as bad karma but i arrived at Mandi to find out that a couple of chain ring nuts had fallen off my bike. I had already damaged one of my chain rings in Uttarakand and now the loss of the nuts meant that the remaining chain rings were now wobbly and delicately held together by the 3 remaining nuts. Lose one more nut and it was game over.

It was a late October day. Cold cloudy and overcast. A dramatic change from the pleasent sunny weather just a day before.  I was cycling back from the Pangong lake to the Tangste village. It is normally a pleasent ride, mostly flat and downhill (from 4400m to 3950m over the course of 25 odd kms). In the mountains, downhill rides such as these are to be savoured but today i was'nt enjoying the ride all that much. When its cold and nippy i'd rather be riding uphill than down.

Anyway, as i was entering Tangtse i see before me the most incredible sight. A motorcycle stacked with all kinds of camping gear imaginable was pulling in. It was as if one of the nomads of the high altitude plains was breaking camp and moving to a new location on his Enflied. We introduced ourselves and his name was Gaurav Jani.

Gaurav is a filmmaker, a solo one at that. He is a one man army making these amazing documentary films of his motor cycle rides. He just arrived at Tangste and was planning to spend the winter in the Changthang plateau, filming a followup to his earlier documentary 'Riding Solo on the Top of the World". Check out the trailer above., it looks great and covers many of the places which normal tourists dont get to go like Hanle and Nyoma. And his new film 'Motorcycle Changpa' promises to be even better. I wish him all the best.

This is a folk tale about how the Tsokar lake in Ladakh lost most of its water. It also explains the origin of the tiny Tso Kiagar lake on the way to TsoMoriri. The story was told to me by a local from the Thukje village.

This is a Ladakhi folk tale about how the Tsomoriri lake got its name.

Legend has it that the lake was not always called as Tsomoriri. It used to be called something different but no one knows what.

One of the things i'am unhappy about myself as a photographer is my reluctance to take more portraits while traveling. There are some good reasons for it. But still, at the end of a trip when i look back at my photos, the ones that bring me the most joy are the ones with people in them.

If i had taken a portrait of someone, then more often than not, it means that i had interacted with that person before taking the portrait and they had shared a small portion of their story with me. It is those stories behind the portraits that make them so memorable for me. Here are a few such stories from my trip to Ladakh in 2010. 

After 5 beautiful sunny days around Pangong Lake, the weather turned for the worse and dropped a ton of snow on the mountains around Chang La. I had to find a way back to Leh. Cycling was impossible now, but i had not planned on cycling back anyway. So i waited at Tangste, hoping to get ride on a jeep or truck going towards Leh.

In between Leh and Pangong Lake lies the mighty Chang La pass. At over 5400m high, Chang La is officially the 3'rd highest mountain pass in Ladakh (after Khardung La and Tanglang La).

After successfully cycling across the Leh - Manali highway i did not think that crossing Chang La on my bicycle would pose much of a problem. But i was wrong.

Towards the end of my Ladakh trip i had become very proficient in hitchhiking around the place. I no longer hesitated to stick out my hand to flag down any passing vehicle. I knew that people would stop if they could spare the space to take you on board. So i no longer worried about finding transportation to anywhere in Ladakh.

That little theory of mine was put to the test when i went to the Nubra valley. And i barely made it through.