Ladakh on a Bike and a Budget: Leg 01-Leh to Nubra Valley (Sumur)
Have you ever traveled with a group of friends and left from a place exactly at the time you decided the night earlier? Or perhaps an hour within the targeted time, give or take? We never did, at least on our trip this time to Ladakh in the third week of August 2021. But then, I guess it isn’t a fair expectation anyway when it’s a group of 8 people staying in four rooms with a provision of 3 hot water buckets for the entire day (It wasn’t meant to be this way, long story). That, coupled with the not so delightful task of arranging logistics for 5 days of camping around Nubra valley meant things had to go wrong somewhere.
Ideally, we wanted to rent five Royal Enfield Himalayan bikes for the next 5 days, three to be rode pillion and the rest to carry our tents, sleeping bags etc. I never realized that an ideal world does not exist as quickly as I did this time. The previous night, our bike rental lead who we spoke with before reaching Leh gave up and was unable to provide any bikes at all, let alone RE Himalayan.
It was the same case with any
bike rental place we spoke with later. With COVID cases reducing and revenge tourism
on the rise, Ladakh had an unprecedented number of tourists the week earlier, and
demand far outweighed supply. Luckily, the bike rental guy turned out to be a
distant cousin of our lovely host because of which he somehow managed to source
two bikes we wanted and three other Royal Enfield Classics while literally
turning away hordes of people right before us, grateful.
All this and an hour spent securing our tents and sleeping bags to the bikes made sure that we left a good
four hours later than the originally planned time of 10AM. We were to Camp close
to a homestay in Sumur that night and the prospects of reaching anytime before
sunset seemed bleak.
First things first, we fuelled
up, geared up, masked up, and headed north on the road to Khardung La pass at
about 1430 while the weather was still pleasant. A steady climb begins right
after Leh town towards South Pullu, the southern post before Khardung La top
where permits must be displayed. Although Inner Line Permit is no longer
required from 06th August, tourists still need to pay a fee
(Environment, Red cross, and wildlife fee combined) of 490 rupees per person. In
August, the wind chill till this point was manageable but began to get a lot colder
owing to the steep climb and relatively quicker altitude gain after South
Pullu.
The mighty Khardung La Pass, standing tall at 17982 ft (5480 Mts) presented itself in full glory in under an hour from South Pullu, severe wind chill and dearth of oxygen in the thin air at this altitude were evident as we struggled to walk around to take the customary pictures. We spent a little over 10 minutes at Khardung La and began to ride towards North Pullu, it was close to 1700 by then. Road condition is okay till North pullu where entries of vehicle details must be made again. By this point, we had already descended to 16000ft which is a tad bit comfortable over Khardung La in terms of cold. Maggi never tasted any better than what I had at this point, the golden light reflecting across the mountains from the setting sun made it even better.
Road conditions got worse a couple
of kilometers past North Pullu and became practically non-existent after that
due to reconstruction and widening. Although this meant that we could expect
good roads soon, it was an extremely bumpy and dusty ride till a few kilometers
before Khardung village. The Roads and views after Khardung village are absolute bliss all the way till Khalsar, I will let pictures do the talking.
The beauty of Himalayas kept revealing further after every corner
We largely tried to make sure all bikes were close to each other since there was no network anywhere and we didn’t really trust the condition of the rental bikes, at least on the first day. The only problem was with a lone RE Classic 350 which we took for two reasons, it supposedly had sufficient power to comfortably carry one person and some luggage tied to it, two we didn’t have a choice really. For some reason though, this vehicle ended up having enough power to only plow through straight roads comfortably. That, along with a dirty-looking white sack stuffed with sleeping bags tied on the pillion made sure it was literally a white elephant of the formation. I was riding ahead on a RE Himalayan and had to stop numerous times only to find a silhouette of the bike with a white sack that looked like a fertilizer bag plowing up or down the curvy roads a few hills behind.
With the white elephant slowing
us down a bit, it was twilight by the time we managed to reach the right
deviation which leads to Aagam, Shyok village, and further to Pangong Tso. This
direct route saves a day for anyone intending to head directly to Pangong from
Nubra instead of the longer route via Leh. Few stops, a couple of near misses, and
tons of beautiful views later we managed to reach Khalsar just a short while
before 1900Hrs.
It was well past twilight by the
time we crossed the fork at Khalsar, road to the left from here leads to
Diskit, Hunder, Thoise, and further to Turtuk, Tyakshi, and Thang at the Zero-point
(LoC) border with Pakistan. The road straight from Khalsar leads to Sumur,
Panamik, Sasuma, Warshi, and further to Siachen Base Camp and Kumar Top. We were
heading on the second one to camp close to a homestay in Sumur.
It was completely dark by the
time we crossed this junction after Khalsar and couldn’t see much after the
bridge over Shyok River. There were quite a lot of small water crossings across
the road all the way till we reached Sumur village by 2000Hrs. It took close to
6 hours for a 120kms ride from Leh to Sumur with decent speed, well over the
03:20 mins suggested by Google Maps (Unreliable in the mountains, lesson
learned).
We quickly unpacked the bags and pitched our tents outside the homestay. The lovely host, Mr.Chawang, and his family arranged a home-cooked dinner for us served in typical Ladakhi style costing all of 100INR per person. On this visit to Ladakh, this was perhaps the best food we had. In case anyone is looking for a budget yet comfortable homestay in Nubra Valley, this certainly is recommended (the name of the place is AO Homestay, in Sumur). This brought an end to a really long day, we had to ride towards Siachen Base Camp the next morning…
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