The lake on the roof of the world

Posted by Hazel Dickens on 14 June 2011

Sometimes in life experiences get blurred together over time and it’s difficult to remember exactly what happened when. Did you go out for dinner last week Wednesday? Or was it Thursday? And if it was Thursday, what happened on Wednesday? Generally, after a pause and a frown, you slowly put the pieces back together (unless Wednesday/Thursday was a very heavy night of course – and then it remains a blur) and things become clearer. Of course, there are those days that stand out, days that you won’t forget easily – driving around the coast, discovering secret beaches and picnicking in the sand days – but for the most part, your past is just a mix of images, of laughter, of people, of hardships and of times spent dreaming of faraway places.

The same is unfortunately true for travelling. Was that tiny hotel room you remember in Paris, or was it Prague? Looking back years later at a backpacking trip through Europe, it’s difficult to remember all the details. I know I walked along the pebbled beach in Nice – but was it cold? Did the pebbles hurt my feet? Did the waves rush up around my ankles? Did I run away, squealing, before they could soak my jeans? Or was I left shivering in wet clothes as the sun disappeared below the horizon? Sunset on the Cote de Azure is a spectacular thing, but today, as I sit looking over the wintery Stellenbosch vineyards, it’s nothing but a vague memory, and if I close my eyes it’s difficult to get back there.

Luckily – as with those special days where you can still remember the sunlight glinting off the water, the feel of the waves lapping at your ankles and the salty smell of the ocean – the best travel experiences are remembered not with the mind, but with the senses. As much as we try to get away from the tourist trail and explore unheard of places, often we just end up on a ferry with 300 other travellers all looking for the same undiscovered places, and all discovering that very few of them exist anymore. And while those that you find are special in the moment, all too soon they begin to fade into the background. Travel white noise. Even to the most seasoned travellers these special travel experiences are few and far between. I’ve been to a lot of places – and there are still only a handful of experiences that truly stand out so perfectly in my memory, after all the years that have followed.

One of them is a lake on the roof of the world.

Somewhere between cerulean and cyan (those are shades of blue to those with a y-chromosome in our midst) it was hard to tell where the earth ended and the sky began. Even the clouds came down to earth to chase each other across its mirrored surface, and if it weren’t for the wind ruffling the surface of the water, I’d have thought I’d stumbled into a world where everything was upside down.  But no, I hadn’t journeyed through the looking glass, nor had I taken the red pill to see how far the rabbit hole goes”¦I had just found myself on top of the world – literally.

Pangong Tso lies in the Himalayas at 4350m above sea level and stretches 134km through India and into Tibet. The line of control passes directly through the lake, and walking the entire length of it is impossible, unless you have a penchant for landmines. To reach the lake we had set off from Leh, on a five hour (although it seemed like ten) journey over the third highest motorable pass in the world (5200m – although their use of the word ‘motorable’ is questionable). Our driver, a Tibetan BCom graduate who favoured The Doors and Metallica, showed no mercy to our nerves as he hurtled our land cruiser along the windey mountain pass. During the periods that my eyes were open, I was awed by the scenery: Up on remote peaks, prayer flags blew the prayers of the monks into the heavens while wild Yaks wandered the mountainside. Pashmina goats frolicked on the rocky outcroppings beside the road, and on the plains below herds of wild horses grazed in the sun. Somewhere along the way, we whizzed past a field packed to capacity with people in a way that made it look like the Glastonbury Festival and I heard the ends of an empassioned speech broadcast over a loud-speaker. “Concert?” I asked the driver. “His Holiness,” he replied. And that’s the story of how I missed playing strip poker the 14th Dalai Lama – hey, it could happen – always do your research before you travel.

We rattled on, the stark mountain wilderness juxtaposed with the occassional outcropping of military tanks, surface-to-air missiles, anti-tank guns, and battalions of troops doing manoeuvres in the mountains (they looked surprisingly (and amusingly) like the Romans in the Asterix comics.) Street signs along the road in the various villages we drove through convinced me that “Here, Courage and Fortitude are the Norm“. And I started to wonder if perhaps I should join the army, see the world, meet interesting people and kill them. Shaking myself out of it, I focussed on the other road signs and was assured that “After Whiskey, Driving’s Risky” and “I have curves, go slow“”¦I kid you not. But even though I could not forget that I was indeed deep within the disputed region of Jammu&Kashmir, nothing could prepare me for the sight that met my eyes as we crested the last hill”¦mountain”¦well”¦as we arrived at Pangong: The bluest, clearest lake I have ever seen. Even in the most cliched post-cards.

After securing my accommodations (the less said about this the better, although I will say they were tents and they were 100 times better than the flea-infested room I was initially offered) I set off to discover the lake. It looked so refreshing and I happily waded in….it was freezing! The coldest water I have ever felt. But being the brave South African that I am, this did not deter me (although I now wish it had) and I decided to go for a dip”¦”¦..AAAARGH!!!! Within seconds of stepping into the water, my breathing became laboured and my skin turned a horrified pink in protest. But not wanting to admit defeat with everyone watching, I fortified my mind, clenched my teeth, held my breath and disappeared beneath the surface. Time stopped. And then restarted with a jolt, and the sudden cold hit me like a defribulator. I was out of the water and standing shivering in the sun before I realised what had happened. My skin was on fire and my breath came in short, harsh gasps. It was definitely one of those things where the memory is better than the actual experience. Somehow, in my rush to get as far away from the offending coldness as possible, I had managed to lose on of my shoes. I could see it there, taunting me from beneath the icy surface of the lake, but did I really need two slipslops?

The sun set and the temperature dropped just as fast. I huddled in my sleeping bag, wrapped in my Yakket (it’s a jacket, made from Yak wool – trademark pending…) and watched the sky turn from pink to black. The Milky Way stretched out so clearly above me, not hampered by any city lights, and on the inky surface of the lake, the stars danced like fireflies. I drifted to sleep in perfect silence.

The next day, I woke before sunrise and set off to walk along the lake – or as far as I could before I reached the landmines. I walked briskly to ward off the cold, and buried my nose in my collar. I skipped stones over the surface of the lake – or tried to – and examined the small piles of stones that others had built. The larger stupa’s normally accumulate over time as each visitor to a grave leaves a stone behind as a memorial to the dead – but I didn’t know that then, so I built one too – it seemed like the thing to do. Random side note: In Tibet, and I was almost in Tibet, the ground is too hard to bury anyone, so the dead are left on high mountain ridges for the eagles to eat. You gotta admit it’s better than being eaten by worms. Then I sat on the edge of the lake, watching the first rays of light fan out over the mountains, and wondered about the life and death of it all. For about a minute. All too soon, the perfect Himalayan silence was broken by the sounds of the camp waking up, and it was time to head back through the looking glass and into the real world.

But looking back, four years later, I can still feel the cold lake water burn my skin; the way the stars danced across the surface in the night; the smell of bad coffee that wafted down to me from the kitchen tent in the morning as I sat by the lake watching the sunrise; the smokey taste of the parathas, cooked for me by a Tibetan woman with a crinkly smile and a missing tooth; and the inexplicable feeling of peace that came over me as I watched the prayer flags blowing in the wind. There’s something special about that place. Something magic.

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