Nine days of walking for around 150 km from Atal Tunnel to Kaza, solo-camping at villages across Lahaul and Spiti, and finally coming down to Manali via hitchhiking.

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Should I reflect? Or should I interpret?

No internet, no Google Maps, no music, no headphones. Roads submerge, with individuals. Love is shared, on open fields of peas. Knowledge is extended, with hands and nods.

Each day’s events have now been transfixed into a wholesome parameter. Now that I have started to write, the eleven days are non-differentiable from the hilltop of what it, as a whole, has done to me. What has it done to me?

I had been dreaming of this so much that I felt responsible to make it my reality. Or realities.

When you are bare, exposed, and vulnerable to the roads, you learn to accept, love, and be grateful for the wonderful life you have a chance to savour, and the goodwill for your existing physical and mental abilities.

A few weeks back, while living in Tirthan Valley, I got terribly sick. Even though I have had COVID on the road, this time sudden nausea and high fever really drained me out of all energy. I couldn’t take two steps forward for days. And in the feebleness of those days, I had never felt more fortunate to have the luxury (and necessity) of robust and healthy physical fitness.

The movement is too slow. The movement of the landscapes. You step onto a picture and linger for the majority of the day in the slightly metamorphosed and tilted varieties of the same frame. The tremors of those sedated movements in landscapes need kilometers of your feet’s one-step-at-a-time retention. The rate is boring, and repetitive. From the interior of a car, you see more, the changes are abrupt, and in fast continuity, you are awed more frequently. And I feel, that’s unreal. The course of life is slow. We have to evolve in slow changes, and relish it before there is another way of partaking in knowledge.

I felt it more and more from the Tempo Traveller I hitchhiked on in my return journey. The villages I solo-camped at nights became pit-stops. And I crave as less pit-stops as I possibly can.

Nine Days of Walking from Atal Tunnel to Kaza

Long-distance hiking is diverse. It brings out the known and the unknown, and the unknown in the known. The nine days of walking from Atal Tunnel to Kaza for around 150 kilometres (including Chandratal Trek) and two days of returning to Manali via hitchhiking surely had the beauty of the roads, but the people of Lahaul and Spiti warmed me at -4 degrees.

There are feelings involved. In innumerable fashions. The ‘joy’ of hiking is not eclipsed by the ‘joy’. Joy itself is a manifold emotion. There is anger, the test of patience, perseverance, and sometimes fumbling upon the key to the primary (and secondary) question the passer-bys posed, ‘Why are you doing this?’ Surely, why? Because I wanted to.

The longest I had hiked before was to Annapurna Base Camp in Nepal for seven days at 4210 meters (for around 100 km). The first tingling thought of long-distance walking beyond a designed trek hit me in Nepal. From the open window of the bus that was to take me from Kathmandu to Pokhara, I wished with all urgency if I could walk that 200 km and know the villages that retain their place only through white letters on green signboards. I made up my mind, but the pre-monsoon and the succeeding monsoon wiped out such a prospect from my landscape. There was a pause.

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I am so fortunate to have dusted off marinated snowflakes sticking to the prayer flags as if they were lying on ice-cream cones! I am so fortunate for the gratitude I received.

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It kept irking me with visionary and adrenaline. That little insect that pesters like a persistence, and sticks to your mind with a heart. I had my doubts, but I wanted to know. I wanted to know Spiti, and the freedom of walking on the most spellbound cold desert mountains of Himachal. It was a privilege to be.

And I drew my own map on a piece of white paper with inaccurate lines and accurate altitudes in an old-fashioned earnest.

Day 1: Solo-Camping at Village Koksar in Lahaul

Bed bugs in a stingy and dingy room in Manali. The preceding night surpassed the onset of the walk. Atal Tunnel, the World’s second longest tunnel above 10,000 ft, would lead the walk with the brawny-brown mountain-walls of Lahaul all around. In those burgeoning instances, there was no vision of Spiti. Kaza was a name I set up as the end-point or the game-point. Mostly because I, for sure, needed to escape the mind-numbing sub-zero winter of Spiti. Snow would begin to drizzle on the cold desert mountains from October onwards, and the roads would get blocked. I had the last two weeks of September in store.

I rode a scooty up to Tandi last year in Lahaul (somewhere between Sissu and Tandi), before I crashed it against a non-moving red Maruti car. But in the ‘eventful’ event of that particular scooty-bashing occasion, I knew my Himachal begins from Lahaul. I picked up the pawns from where they left me. Lahaul.

So, the walking-journey commences at the end-light of the long dark tunnel, with the heft of the newly-summoned weight of my 70-litre backpack, tent, sleeping bag, and the welcoming brunch of the prayer flags giving away colourful shades of the barren landscape of Lahaul.

The goal was to camp at Village Koksar for the night and explore Guru Padmasambhava’s cave over Dimpuk Monastery. And that’s the kind of goals I curated for myself, not the pretty picture of SPITI. The little steps, the little stops, and the stones that shine as if sprinkled in whitewashed waterfalls. On the smoldering roads of fine cuts, I kept the kilometers at bay, only for around 12 km up to Koksar. My body needed to grab the signal, ‘We are going to do this!’ It needed to get accustomed to the ongoing rhythm that lay ahead.

Reaching Koksar early employed the good intention of spending some time at the monastery, and a supposed-waterfall which doesn’t exist, apparently. 

Right by the kitchen of the army base, in the parking lot, I pitched my tent against the black cottage that defused its dark colour in the shootings of the day’s last clouds in sunlight. I asked for the permission of a very sweet lady if I could camp on her land. And from then on, for the next eight nights, I solo-camped all across the villages of Lahaul and Spiti, and I have never felt more at home! In rain, in the whooping minus-coldness of nights, in the high-altitude wind that semi-promises to blow your tent in shivering length, the fragility of a tent kept me sturdy and lent me the warmth of a home in nature.

Wet. When the tent is wet, the only problem is you are bound to waste more time the next morning. You have to wait for the sun to dry it out. Otherwise, the wet tent only increases the weight. And that is something I more or less faced every day.

I had to pack the wet tent the next morning in Koksar. I would run out of time. I had a 23.3 km to catch, long-drawn-out.

Day 2: 23.3 km of Walking to Chhatru And Camping by A Dhaba

How many encounters? How many people stopped their bikes, cars, and paces to comply with my choice? I have lost counts, and I never kept it in the first place.

Sometimes contributions are momentary. In a moment of curiosity, one may stop for a quick conversation, with a packet of Parle-G, or water, and worst, for photographs! The Royal Enfields would jumpstart and fly by, with the encouragement of a lifetime. Things that are small, to the naked eye, have long legs. Things strangers do in a fluke can build convictions. The conviction of convictions. As lovely as the lonely roads are, honestly, it’s all the onlookers who transduced strength to my feet, so much so that the memories of those nine-and-two eleven days bring me the arbitrary faces of Lahaul and Spiti, and the fellow travellers.

I think I celebrated my journey in a unique camaraderie, with other travellers, who may have reached the destination way faster than me, and certainly have returned to their homes way before I even glimpsed Kaza, but they made me more and more aware of the positive space of traveling together.

The second day was, in all mindful ways, the most enigmatic day in the whole journey to Spiti. That is not because I had to climb two mountains up and down for 23.3 km at a stretch. Yes, that is the prologue, the vessel that framed all the emotions of that day, the restlessness towards the end, the hope of the beginning for a village.

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You step onto a picture and linger for the majority of the day in the slightly metamorphosed and tilted varieties of the same frame. The tremors of those sedated movements in landscapes need kilometers of your feet’s one-step-at-a-time retention. The rate is boring, and repetitive.

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From Koksar to Chhatru, through Gramphu. Chhatru is anything but a full-grown village, befitting definitions. Officially 120 people live there, but apart from a farmhouse, only a few tents are used as both Dhabas and homes. I camped for the night right outside Prem Dhaba, scooped in between the trucks that stop for singular nights. Throughout the course of the evening, I dried my sopping shoes and socks by the cooking fire, reliving the symmetries and asymmetries of the day. My feet were hurting.

Gramphu, 6 km uphill from Koksar, is the point of diversion, granted that the famous dusty off-road bifurcates from this point. The ‘bad’ road goes towards Spiti, and the ‘good’ road towards Rohtang Pass. From Gramphu, it’s a 17.3-km-walk to Chhatru, and on the bed of spiked gravels and waterfalls at blind curves, I had no sense of kilometers.

After walking from 8:30 am to 1:30 pm, a tiny stupa with prayer flags was the only sign of a ‘something’ in the long stretches of the desolate landslide-prone ‘infrastructure’ of India’s best-kept natural enigma, Lahaul-Spiti. The universe knows, I have never seen anything like it! But that revelation was yet to be revealed! In a process of losing obscurity and getting close through the treacherous roads to Chhatru, which for the last eight kilometers, even though downhill and across, lulled me to restlessness.

I couldn’t see the village anywhere! Normally, you can glimpse, maybe a speck of a village from faraway. At around 3:30 or 4 pm, in my mind I couldn’t assess the remaining kilometers, with the receding light shrinking deeper. And my surroundings felt like a graveyard of boulders. It reminded me so much of the Machhapuchare Base Camp trail on Annapurna Base Camp Trek, only worse. Now that I had climbed down the whole mountain in gravel and pebbles, I found myself completely alone in a valley of boulders. The open pasture divided up into a narrow path with larger-than-life boulders, smaller rocks, and spikier rough edges. It’s like a civilization that existed once. Even though I knew the village should be within a 2-3 km radius, I still could not spot a single house, and with the dimming sunlight, that got on my nerves.

There were only trucks running. I stopped a truck and asked the driver how far Chhatru was, hoping it to be 1 km or so. He said, ‘10 more km!’ ‘What?!’ How is that even possible! I had a basic sense of kilometers, of course. It’s just not possible!

I confidently told the driver that was not possible, who clearly was trying to misguide me. I asked him to leave. But when you hear that in such a stressful moment, your mind boggles. And therein sprung up the tickling sensation of a need for certainty. I needed to be certain I was close. But I could see nothing!

Five minutes later, a Royal Enfield came from the opposite direction. I finally put myself together, and stopped the bike. ‘How far is the next village?’ ‘You are almost there. One more kilometer!’ I was right.

Prem Dhaba. Didi and Bhaiyaa. A plate of hot Rajma-Chawal. Cooking fire. Milky way.

There were just tents. No constructed homes. That’s why I couldn’t spot the village from up there.

Also read – The Hidden Villages in Parvati Valley – Rasol and Stona

Day 3: Chhatru to Batal – Hiking, Hitchhiking and Camping

This particular day was different. Different in the extension of the depressing landscape, different in the pattern of the day. I had to hitchhike midway.

The distance between Chhatru and Chota Dara is 17 km, and from there, Batal is another 14 km. On my map, I marked Chota Dara as my night-halt for Day 3. But I soon got to know that it’s not a village. There’s an abandoned guesthouse in the middle of nowhere! It used to be a PWD Rest House, but nobody lives there anymore. And it really was not a safe option for solo-camping. My understanding is truck drivers must halt there at night.

Now my only way out is to reach Batal, a stretch of 14 km further. My daily kilometers of hiking were determined by the distance between two villages. After the last day’s 23.3 km hike, it did not seem to be a balanced choice to hike for 31 km in that dispiriting and unfavorable terrain. I decided to walk the first stretch (17 km), and hitchhike the rest. You have to accommodate yourself as per the roads.

My early-morning roads were angsty. With scarce vehicles in passing, I dreaded the trucks. In all the villages, the locals had cautioned me, repeatedly, not to walk this particular road. It really is the most depressing stretch, and that was my sole thought throughout. Honestly, I did not enjoy walking that day. But that’s part of the journey. Not all the roads would speak to you.

Two km prior to Chota Dara, in red-hot heat that burns, I finally asked a South Indian couple for a lift. In the hired cab, Sardarji, the cab driver, was a lively and talkative companion.

Chacha-Chachi Dhaba. Bodh Darjee and Hishe Chhomo, popular among the locals as Chacha and Chachi, have been running the Dhaba for the last 45 years. And they are quite famous now in Spiti for rescuing a group of school kids during extreme snowfall, saving travellers from storms, and sheltering them in borderline situations. They had also been accorded with Godfrey Philip Bravery Award.

Chacha has a keen sense of humour.

– ‘Chacha, aapke bare mein bohot suna hai!’ (’Chacha, I have heard so much about you!)

– ‘Ha, abhi dekh liya.’ (’Now you have seen me’)

That night I camped just under an iron-bridge, a few meters down the Dhaba. ‘The wind would be less fierce there’, Chacha showed me the ground. A brick-wall posed as a windbreaker, and the half-bright half-dim mammoth mountains were waiting for the yellow sunset. That night the temperature dropped to -3 degrees, but I had no clue! It was warm inside my sleeping bag.

Just around the corner, I unzipped my tent to pee out in the open, and up there was the dreamy map of stars. Numerous connecting dots. The shooting star was falling away!

Also read – Ways of Chamba – Culture, Wildlife & the People

Day 4: 15 Km Trek to Chandratal Lake in Lahaul-Spiti

‘We have a society ‘Save Chandratal’. In every ten days, two staff members from each campsite clean Chandratal. All the garbage goes to Manali. Tourists bring Maggie packets, chips packets, and they throw everything in and around the lake. So, all the campsites together keep our lake clean. If you want to pitch your own tent, you can do so at a campsite, and use their washroom’.

Chandratal, a high-altitude lake in Lahaul-Spiti at 4250 meters, has borrowed the name ‘Moonlake’ for its crescent shape. As per the locals, the lake has a depth beyond measurement. Sleepy on the surface and troubled in the kernel, swimming in Chandratal Lake is strictly prohibited. Every year there is news of desperate attempts and desperate deaths. Divers have rescued dead bodies from the depths of the lake.

Until a few years, one could camp all around the periphery of Chandratal, a lake so vast that it takes a minimum of an hour to walk the circle. Now the forest department has instilled some supervisory rules. It is not allowed to play loud music after 10 PM. It is not allowed to camp within 3 km of the lake. The number of campsites has been restricted. Each campsite can pitch no more than 15 tents.

Chandratal is a 15-km-trek from Batal (one way). With the marking of a green gate, one road cuts to Chandra Taal and another towards Spiti. I would have to hike back to Batal the next day but now for the next 15 km, there would be non-colors in the colossal shady structures except in the confronting direction which expands in light purple from both diagonals. Down my eyes’ lines, the tangled glosses of the lean Chandra River linger in the frame of the quaint visuals. Somewhere out of my league, three isolated tents were perched down the line. Out of reach. I was still afar. Far, far, far…

The first campsite, ‘Moonlake Camps’. And my exhausted feet were attracted to a home for the night. I was to reach and dump my backpack at the campsite and then hike the remaining 3 km to Chandra Tal. The owner of the campsite, Sunny Ji, not only helped me in pitching the tent in the bizarre wind, (the wind was so intense that it took four staff members, Sunny ji, and me to pitch a two-person tent I alone generally pitch in less than five minutes), the stories and insights he shared about the locals of Lahaul credited an engaging conversation. Even though I was so tired to the bones that I desired no human company, an hour-long honest conversation with a local from Lahaul made me understand the life of Spiti-Lahaul in much depth.

For the night-buffet, soup, and the morning-breakfast, Sunny Ji refused any money. I will always remember his smiling face with prominent Nepali features. What an amazing person! These little tokens can never be acquired through monetary exchanges.

By the way, before the last 3 km to Chandra Taal, I met a group of bikers who offered me tea and since it was getting rather dark, proposed to take me to the lake in their bikes. I accepted. The lake would have been closed by 6:30 pm!

Also read – Offbeat Places Near Manali You Didn’t Know

Day 5: Hiking in the Intense Wind of the Himalayas, And…

This is the day to return from Chandratal to the green gate. Kunzum Pass is a high mountain pass connecting Lahaul Valley to Spiti Valley at 4551 meters. With 15 hairpin turns, the road whirls around Kunzum Stupa, a sharp upscale from 4000 meters to 4551 meters.

When I left Moonlake Camps, the sun tweaked a bit of heat, and that was my cue to leave. But soon, within 2-3 km, the weather shifted into a windy pre-storm. A local was telling the cars to turn back from Chandratal.

I can still hear the whistling rattle of the ferocious wind of the Himalayas. The sharp pointy sounds piercing from all directions. It was a physical sensation, to be trapped in sounds. Then it started raining. Drizzling, rather. But it makes no difference in the Himalayas.

I was disheartened. I had to hitch a ride from near the green gate. In the last seven-eight kilometers of hiking in this eerie force of wind, I realized I might get sick if I continued hiking in the crazed weather. I was already shaking. Nature gives, nature takes. Nature took away the 23 kilometers. It gave me the freshly-snowed Kunzum Pass under my feet on the way back. The same stretch in an ethereal eternity. But that’s for later.

In that void stretch in a four-wheeler with a Punjabi man, his Russian wife, and their five-year-old daughter, the vision of Kunzum Stupa flashed away.

Flash forward. The eleventh day. The Kunzum Pass I so desired to walk on, wore a knightly white gown, making the bald mountaintops an ineffable saddle. If not now, on my way back, I walked on the promise I kept. By then every inch had shifted. I am so fortunate to have dusted off marinated snowflakes sticking to the prayer flags as if they were lying on ice-cream cones! I am so fortunate for the gratitude I received.

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It kept irking me with visionary and adrenaline. That little insect that pesters like a persistence, and sticks to your mind with a heart. I had my doubts, but I wanted to know. I wanted to know Spiti.

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Snow would pile up. Up, up, up… And down, down, down would fade the temperature, hitting -30 degrees in December. Life doesn’t break off in nature’s hoarse roughness, in topographical turmoil. It commences.

That night I camped on a farm of peas in the first village of Spiti Valley, Losar. And the next night as well.

Also read – Dalhousie with its Hailstorms & Dainkund Peak

Day 6 & 7: Two Nights of Solo-Camping in the First Village of Spiti Valley

Didi took me to her field. I was on one of those steps where peas grow, except that it was a dying season. Peas are one of the very very few vegetables the locals grow in the hard and hardened base of the high-altitude desert mountains. Everything else gets delivered to all over Spiti Valley in a truck from Manali; condiments, spices, and every little to littlest necessity.

The villages close to the headquarters can roll to Kaza during the semi-whole winters, but the villages of Spiti mostly store enough of every bit for the next seven months of the year. The temperature around December is susceptible to a drop as low as -30 degrees. During those harsh-cold months, up till May, the road from Manali to Spiti stays completely shut and non-admissable. The snow-melting process is one of a brandish beginning, generally in the month of March. The ice-shielded locals of Spiti begin to defrost from the cubes.

‘We melt chunks of ice to drink water. That’s how it is for seven months. Through layers and layers of clothes, only eyes flash to the freezing world. When we go out to feed the yaks, snowflakes dense up around the eyeline. Everything becomes a sheet of white. There is no other colour’, Didi told me on one of our walks to the check post. She showed me the distant house of her mother, and the unknown cave where her grandfather spent his life, meditating. But that’s when the first snowfall of fresh grinds blocked the road just before Losar. On my way back.

My tent held onto the farm of peas for two nights. My feet needed nourishment. And a bottleful of Dettol and cotton wraps. 

Day 8: The Warmth of the Locals of Spiti in Village Hasna

Ever since I had reached Losar, I had been particularly giddy, with the fine roads as flat as pancakes. In the last lockdown, the roads of Spiti Valley were mended, in superfine frugality. Walking in Spiti escalated my pace, a relief, an aberration from the unfine cuts of Lahaul. I was so happy to walk across the picturesque villages of Spiti, adorned with tiny mountains and friendly yaks.

The mudhouses are built in the same pattern all over the valley. The roofs are put together with a special kind of tree that grows in these desert regions. The windows are open in width and breadth, more in squares. The Buddhist frames frame the windows. Yak-houses and grass-storages. There is always a ladder somewhere, lazily reclining against the walls. The houses are, for the most part, white.

On my second day of walking in Spiti, passing by the villages at 4500 meters, my lunch-halt was to be in Hasna. But as I reached Hasna, I soon learned there was no Dhaba! Hungry and tired in the raging heat, I sat on a bench opposite the stupas. A young woman invited me to her home, and prepared pancakes. Covered in a green scarf and black sweater, she led me to the first floor of the mudhouse. Her mother-in-law fed me stories of how she got lost in Nepal once, and she, the beautiful and generous, packed four pancakes for my dinner.

That night another field in Kyato became my windy shelter. Kyato, only 3 km away from Hansa, was empty midday. An elderly man approached me from a farm, and I got the perfect opening for a conversation. I camped on the land of his daughter’s newly-married home.

Also read – A Tiny Space in the Ever-Growing Tourism in McLeodganj

Day 9: Something Outside My Tent!

Potato Momo for the hungry backpacker. Men and women from Village Pangmo jostle at intervals, an interval from working at the pea fields. They pack their lunch in the morning and around noon, huddle in a row, and share all the meals. One of them had Roti-Sabji, another had bread-bhurji…. and another had Potato Momo. In a handmade chula, they make tea in open fields. Curiosity lured them to call out the woman passing by with a 70-liter backpack. To everyone’s notice, her stooping gait was betraying her steps. Reluctant steps, unsure of the way forward. To her, it’s the sound her bowels were making, craving some food.

They shared their meals with her, and she shared laughter, and gratefulness.

And because they fed her that day, she could walk further with hesitance and exhaustion, the spellbound curve that silences the mind. I could feel the pages of geography books folding and unfolding. Everything around me was years of evolution of nature.

Village Hull. The last camping-night. There was an influx of sounds in the dark. The song of the barking dogs, assimilated in a raucous chorus, from every corner of the village. And subdued in that chaos, a subdued sound that was more like intense snoring, which surfaced more, in movements. Something was outside my tent. That ‘something’ could not be one of the dogs. I could navigate the sounds.

That ‘something’ could be a jungle cat that actually bites, and is rather aggressive. That ‘something’ could be a snow leopard (the owner of the nearest homestay told me later that leopards are common visitors!). I can not be sure, but there was an animal outside.

I had imagined my death. There was no fire going out there, only the solar light inside my tent. On parallel thoughts, I needed to do everything I could, a synonymous state in which the certainty and uncertainty of death coexist, and that means, the means to live.

I can not light up the fire. I can not play loud music, for I had no music on my phone! The only way to let the ‘something’ know of my presence was to make loud noises. I started thumping against the walls of the tent. Then came an idea! I can play all the videos I had recorded of me speaking to the camera. It was as if I was talking out loud! I had never been more grateful to have fallen asleep with the sound of my own voice, I don’t know when. I woke up to the clearance of 5 am. Ready to move on.

Kaza, At Last!

I thought Kaza would be assuring. At last, I have landed on a name! At last, I am sleeping in a bed! At last, it’s over.

But I felt neutral.

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The journey to Spiti, distinct and non-modular to my sight, opened up my first funnel to long-distance hiking. I can only walk far from here.

Have you ever hiked alone long-distance?

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