After setting the highest SUP record in Suraj Tal, a small lake in north India, April Zilg and friends hit the road to Leh.
Cut off from most of civilization in the winter, Leh is home to Buddhist monks, yak herders, and weaving women. Flights are not a bad way to arrive in summer months, but winter makes arrival difficult by air and impossible by land.
We were travelling by road, held up by the mudslides of snowmelt. To get there we traversed the highest motorable passes in the world. Even then, as the oxygen got thin, the engine of our vehicle coughed and hiccupped while trying to get up to 17,000 feet. You can travel through higher passes, but you’d need to take a yak.
Despite the trouble our vehicle was having, when we reached one pass I leapt from the car and started doing jumping jacks. The driver, mortified, was quick to grab a can of emergency oxygen from under the driver’s seat. He kept saying, “No. Madam. No… Oxygen,” while I continued to count my reps.
Once in Leh, we made day trips through other, higher passes to some of the well-known high-altitude lakes of India. Tsomoriri and Pangong were large, blue, beautiful lakes completely cut off from civilization during winter months. In the summer, however, they were destinations for numerous Indian tourists on motorbike excursions. We often camped in temporary tent towns or upstairs in a local personal home and ate Maggie noodles (ramen noodles). Local children were excited to see the Hobie Tour Inflatables, and my blonde hair…
After a week of out and back excursions using Leh as our center it was time to travel back to Manali to grab one of the Indian busses to Dehli; population 16 million. Hardly ready for our expedition to end, we found a comfortable hotel on the ride back to stay for a night next to a river that we just couldn’t get out of our heads. We had seen it on the way up to Leh, but we were starting to get crunched for time and couldn’t stop. It was a wide, flat, gentle river full of round rocks and sand, a stark contrast to the raging rapids we had encountered up to this point.
We drove to the north end of the town and inflated the boards and hopped in the water. Like a lazy river, we careened through the sleepy town of Jispa. Population 332. For some reason, in this town the mountains seemed taller, the sky bluer, and the trees greener. Maybe it was the impending return to a very hectic and populated civilization. Maybe it was still the high altitude making everything seem more beautiful than it was. It’s also possible that Jispa is indeed that beautiful. Either way, there couldn’t have been a better way to end an expedition.
