Coming Down: Leh to Rajasthan | K2K Part 3

Eight days earlier we had spent everything getting up to Leh. Now we had to give it all back. This was the long way down, 2,054 km from the thin cold air of Ladakh to the furnace heat of Rajasthan, through a dangerous pass, a tense night in Kashmir, a bike that finally gave out, and a single day that felt like riding through an oven.

The mountains do not let you leave easily, and they did not let us. Here is the descent, day by day.

Off the mountain: Leh to Kargil

There was no rush to this one. We had agreed the night before that it would be a short, easy day, so we took breakfast, wrapped up a few things, and did not start riding until noon. The road gave us beautiful country and the kind of ups and downs that make you forget the clock. Pankaj sat behind us most of the way, his bike unable to hold a high speed where mine was happy to, but speed was never the point. You keep the throttle open and let it run.

The weather had other ideas by evening. We rode into heavy rain, then cold, then a little snow, until there was nothing to do but give up for a while. We sheltered under what was really just four pillars and a roof, sat out an hour, and then decided to push on to Kargil. We passed the turn for Magnetic Hill without the time to stop.

At the Kargil checkpost Pankaj was wrung out, properly exhausted. Rather than head into the market we took a room near the military hospital, a warm one with a heater, which was all any of us wanted. The owner kept offering to let us sit in his car, a little too friendly for comfort, so we declined. Dinner came with one dish I could not identify and set aside, and I ate the rest. We slept warm and dry.

Zojila, and losing the group

Nothing went to plan, as usual. The Kargil War Memorial nearly slipped off the list, but running late turned out to be a gift, because we made it there after all. No one should miss that place. Then came Zojila, which looks dangerous and is. It was mud and slush and gravel under rain, a wall of mountain on one side and open valley on the other, and where two vehicles meet, one of them has to edge out toward the drop.

We cleared every bit of it. On the far side a picture I had carried in my head became real, clouds drifting along beside me as we crossed into Kashmir. There were stretches thick with army, and with people who looked like they might be something else.

Past Sonamarg, another beautiful valley, I lost Aditya. They had pulled over on the right while I was looking left, and once we were separated I decided not to stop, guessing they would think the same and that we would meet up ahead. I kept moving toward Srinagar. At the junction where the road splits for Srinagar and Jammu I found a man, got Aditya’s new number from Krishna, and called three times without an answer. I told the man he was from Bangalore and asked him, if anyone called back, to say I was heading to Jammu by the bypass.

He forgot. I still do not know whether he told them I had gone via Srinagar instead. I rode on and decided to stop at Qazigund, borrowed a hotspot from a man at a hotel, and finally reached Aditya. They were only a few kilometres behind.

We regrouped and stayed, though it was a tense, unsettled area and not somewhere I wanted to be, so the day wound down on chips and water. Two things stayed with me from that stretch. A police officer in Srinagar had offered me a bed in his own home, which I turned down to push on to Qazigund, and a man named Arif, from Lucknow, sorted out where we slept that night. Good people, the ones from Kashmir.

Stuck in Qazigund

We had not meant to stay, but Pankaj’s clutch plate had given out, and with no one nearby able to service it we were stuck in a place none of us wanted to linger in. While he went off chasing a repair that did not exist, Aditya and I went into the market. It was thick with military, and everywhere I went someone wanted to know what I was looking for. Past the CRPF checkpost we rode slowly out for a while, thought about a bike wash, fuelled up, and came back.

The spot we picked for lunch felt wrong enough that Aditya packed the food and we left. By evening I wanted something good to eat, and a Punjabi dhaba in the market turned out to be exactly that, a real relief. A man came over asking to use my bike to carry petrol, but in a strange and uneasy place I said no. We ate well in the end, and the night was rainy and, for once, calm.

Down to the plains: Jammu and Amritsar

The clutch plate shaped the next day too. The nearest KTM service was supposed to be in Udhampur, but Pankaj found it had shut months earlier, so Jammu it was. We broke the run at a McDonald’s outside the city while Aditya met a friend, then went on to the KTM workshop, and once the bike was sorted we checked into a hotel and ordered barbecue.

It was a Tuesday, and we had forgotten our own rule about not eating non-veg on one, but the work was done and that was enough. Amritsar the following day was just heat and hard riding, and I arrived soaked through. After a rest, Aditya and I went to the Golden Temple while Pankaj took a call.

We stood in line for an hour, ate halwa three times over with plenty of prashad, and when it was time to leave I found my slippers gone. I borrowed a stranger’s pair, picked a size too small, and walked the rest of the evening in a pinch I could feel with every step before sleeping it off in an air-conditioned room.

Into the heat: Rajasthan

Rajasthan began gently and then turned into a furnace. We left Amritsar late, after ten, took a good breakfast somewhere on the road, and rode under a clean sunny sky. At a lunch stop a family from Lucknow came over with the usual friendly questions about the touring and the riding. Ganganagar, when we finally reached it at the end of a long day, surprised me. I had pictured a small town with the basics and found a big, crowded cantonment city instead, full of services and security. We ate well, took the weekly call, and walked half the place looking for a salon, which somehow felt worth it.

Bikaner the next afternoon was quieter, a four o’clock arrival, lunch, and a bike wash where the man charged a hundred rupees and cleaned almost nothing, so we dried the bikes ourselves with a fresh cloth. I tried a few of the local sweets, cleared some work, and slept, telling myself we would leave by six the next morning while knowing perfectly well we would not.

We did not. I was up at five trying to rouse everyone and got nowhere, bathed, and went back to sleep myself. By the time we actually rolled out it was half past nine, into the full heat of a Rajasthan summer. We reached Jodhpur by four, ate, fuelled, and turned for Udaipur. The highway had camels on it and the older Rajasthan moving along its edges, but the heat was something else, a loo wind blowing like an open furnace, the thermometer past forty-five, and I drank water without ever feeling where it went.

We ground through the traffic and into Udaipur, where Aditya went back to a hostel he had used a few years before and booked two days, one room with air-conditioning and one without. Worn out, I took the cool one. Dinner was a small comedy of every dish being unavailable until we gave up and moved elsewhere, drank a good deal, and Pankaj, gone on a bottoms-up, somehow ended up paying for two more beers. It was a proper weekend. I went back and slept like I had left my body somewhere out on the highway.

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