The Come Down

Getting down the mountain beside Marsimik La was way
harder than we'd imagined, or left energy for. On the way up
it was relatively easy, if physically draining, to pick out a
route, but descending we had real trouble making out a
course that didn't either lead into a giant rock-block or over
a mini cliff. Stopping was difficult, turning a huge effort and
time and time again we fell as we lost our footing or ended
toppling in one of those scenarios where you're stopped but
canÕt reach the floor. Pick-up after pick-up. Rolling downhill
there wasn't enough muscle-power left in my shoulders to
hold the bars in-line as the front wheel kicked off big rocks
and I just had to go with the bike.

It was with enormous relief that I found my way back onto
the rocky track leading around the mountain and back to the
pass. But just as I was thinking the trial was over, I glanced
over my shoulder to see Pankaj heading down the
mountainside, having missed the track. Then over he went.

As I started on foot towards P, several hundred metres
away, he got back on and started down again into the valley
until he was obviously stuck in some larger rocks. I rode
down the main track to where I could most easily get to him
and walked up the slope, cursing him for making me exert
myself when all I wanted was to get lower and lie down. His
bike was thoroughly stuck between a rock and a steep place.

For about 15 minutes we tried to move the bike, but simply
couldn't muster the strength. We tried taking a 20-minute
break, but no power returned to our arms and we were
gasping hard for breath, throats dry and painful. Realising
we were undergoing the first stages of altitude sickness, we
considered leaving the bike where it was and returning the
next morning with freshly oxygenated bodies.

P had already hit his leg pretty hard on some rocks in a
crash that broke the clutch lever and bent the gear lever into
a piece of modern art. He was hobbling, and in trying to
extricate the bike with big throttle and clutch-dumping, I had
crashed fairly hard on the rocks, winding myself, though by
some miracle - and the protection of my Hein Gericke suit - I
was entirely uninjured. A broken bone of any kind here
would have been very serious, even more so along with the
shock it would probably engender. There was no shelter
from the fierce sun that in the rarefied atmosphere was
burning my scalp through my hair in minutes. We were
already at the outer limits of what we could endure and
certainly didn't have enough in the tank to carry an injured
body down. One foot in front of the other was becoming a
challenge.

Although the army base was only 16 miles away, that
distance would take nearly an hour on a bike and getting an
army truck back up again would be a further hour and a half.
And that's if the rider going for help didn't himself crash.
With all this in mind and our worsening condition, leaving P's
XT seemed the only sensible course - as if we had a choice...

Riding down two-up was difficult. I lacked the shoulder to
correct front end slides and we stayed in first and second
gear, so any crashes were likely to be trivial. It took over an
hour to make it down to Pobrang Valley below.

Of course the army noticed that something was missing
when we got to the checkpoint and P had to do some
sheepish explaining in Hindi. The chief of the garrison was
pretty unfazed by the whole thing and told us to return at
6.30 the next morning when a patrol going out would help
us retrieve our machine.

We tried our best that evening to have something of a
celebration - after all, we had almost certainly achieved our
goal after many weeks of blood, sweat, tears and, worst of
all, the bloody paperwork. It wasn't easy to dance a gig when we were
so beat and beat up and dinner was the same nettle bhajee
and half-cooked lentils (because water boils at a lower
temperature it takes ages for food to half-cook) that we'd
had the night before.

The stars, though, put on quite a performance. Neither of us
had ever seen a sky like it, so packed with light it would be
easier to imagine constellations from the dark patches
between and so busy with stars the only pattern I could
identify was The Plough. And they're so big up there, so
close and so clear with zero light pollution, no airborne
moisture and so little upward atmosphere. Pobrang must be
the best place on Earth from which to star-watch, if not to
dine out.

It's a Flipping Record!

Sorry about the delay in posting a blog, but after the travails
of scaling Marsimik La-plus, a day of rest - in fact of sleep -
was in order.

Today we went up Khardung La, so often claimed as the
world's 'highest motorable road', to check its altitude with
our GPS and to make sure we are justified in claiming a
record. It is, in fact, nothing like as high as its 5600m claim.
And so we are happy as Yaks in snow to claim the record as
the highest unsupported riders ever.



To try and set the 'highest road' record straight, below are
the heights, recorded by us, of the four highest passes in
the world:

4. Tanglang La - 5349m
3. Khardung La - 5382m
2. Chang La - 5383m
1. Marsimik La - 5599m
0. 0ur record - 5713m

And here are some extracts from my diary:



17/7/2006
Pobrang looks like a tatty green flag unfurled on the sandy
beige valley floor below. As we move down the mountainside
the village becomes a pastoral jewel embedded in the desert.
We see a stream, a few willow stands, shiny green barley. A
few horses graze alongside stunted mountain cattle on small
but lush meadows.



Six small 'n' squat Tibetan-style dwellings, filled with small 'n'
squat Tibetan-style people, survive in the shadows of the
snow-flecked mountains rising steeply on every side. We
have a very basic room in one of them, staying with a family
who scrape a living weaving, making bricks from the valley's
mud, raising livestock and hiring rooms to contractors
working on the army base. With 4500m of altitude this is
one of the highest inhabited places on earth, one of the
driest, and with minus-45-degree winters it is said to be the
third coldest.



As Pobrang is the last outpost of human existence, the
garrison is the last bastion of the India/Tibet Border Police
and around 40 hardy souls patrol the huge mountains,
ready to see off the Chinese hordes should they show the
nerve to make an incursion. It is here we have to present
our paperwork if we wish to pass on up to Marsimik La, the
world's highest road, and attempt to make a record.

The police chief suggests we have added the name of
Marsimik to the permission documents. It is unheard of for a
foreigner to be granted a pass to come so far as Pobrang. It
may well be the case that I'm the first non-Indian (or
Nepalese soldier/contractor) to come here in nearly a century
Ð nobody can remember seeing a white man here before.

There is a record from the mid-eighteen-hundreds of a fellow
called Ward leading an even earlier expedition to try and re-
find an old route through to China from Leh. In a previous
valley I was shown an incomplete photocopy of a page from
a book which suggested a date prior to 1832 for his
expedition. His comments: 'Marsimik 18,400 feet. Fuel mainly
dung.'

By the time we have convinced the police chief our
paperwork is genuine, drunk some army-issue tomato soup
and partially explained what the hell we're up to, it's obvious
we'll have to leave any record-making to the following
morning. We've already had an exceptional day, riding 100
miles out of Leh into the arse end of nowhere, crossing
Chang La at 5383m, watching the colours of the
mountainous desert through which we've been riding shift
hues by the minute.

Neither of us gets a wink's sleep that night. Our sinuses are
crammed with dust, cracking with dehydration. Lack of
oxygen at altitude is famous for preventing sleep, but we've
kipped at over 4000m before without problems. Maybe it's
the fact we're so close to our ridiculously meaningless goal
after so much arse-ache, so many setbacks and the near-
catastrophes...

18/7/2006
The morning dawns bright - as they do here about 360 days
of the year - and by 9am the temperature is already heading
into the thirties. As we ride up to the pass along a steep and
dusty track the intensity of the sun bores through our
clothing. Graceful, tastefully-striped wild ass canter beside
us and fat giant Himalayan marmots double-take before
waddle-sprinting to their dens.

In places the track's surface has the consistency of cornflour
and tyres slew around, but its only 16 miles to the top of
the pass and our bikes are untaxed as we take it easy on
our knobbly tyres. It would be a different game on an Enfield
- big respect to the small hardcore of Indian Bullet riders
who have made it up here.

Marsimik La shows 5599m on our GPS and this ties in with
the altitude shown on a military map we've seen, so we
believe it to be higher than the other contender for highest
road, Khardung La. Running to the left of the pass' top is a
path consisting of sharp-edged, bread-loaf-sized lumps of
granite rubble, leading to the base of a scree slope that
heads up the rocky mountain above (the second on the left
from the pass itself).



Any increase in height should see us safely able to claim an
unassisted altitude record, but we want to set a decent
benchmark. And we haven't measured Khardung yet, so
want to be sure that we're getting higher than the many
who've ridden there. So, off we go, straight up the side of
the mountain, everything braced and clenched.

We attack the mountain with handfuls of throttle and the
mountain fights back. The rules of this ridiculous game are
that neither of us is to give the other help, in order to keep
our unassisted mantra alive. It's more than hard going. Our
XT660 Yamahas weigh in at near 200kg apiece and it takes
everything we have in us to repeatedly dust ourselves off
and lift them single-handedly at over 5500m. Everything.

The strength to stand up on the pegs is soon lost and we're
relegated to - quite appropriately - the techniques of leg-
flailing dirt novices. We take turns in charging wildly up the
slope, passing each other by a couple of hundred on-the-
ground metres before toppling or digging in to the softer
scree.

I have never known exhaustion like it (though I'm later to
taste it on an altogether more serious level). I am reduced to
supine panting beside the bike before the strength
rematerialises to pick it up. When the back tyre buries in the
sandy dirt the bike must be wrenched onto its side, dragged
clear and lifted.



With some 30 vertical metres to the mountain's top my back
tyre digs into the surface again and I'm able to leave it
standing alone. Pankaj is fighting an epic battle of his own a
little way below. Our physical resources are fast diminishing,
so we decide the height of my bike is to be the benchmark.
We are not tired, not knackered, we are becoming truly
exhausted. In the thin air there is no recovery, just physical
degradation. In fact the air is so thin it's tough to keep a
cigarette lit!

But P fights on, the plan to get his bike dead level.

Whether the last 30 feet took 30 minutes or an hour I don't
know, but it was painful to watch without helping as he fell
over, picked it up, fell over again, had the tyre dig in, got
stuck against some big rocks, fell panting to his knees.



Eventually, by working his way parallel to the slope, P found
some traction and carried on up until I cried 'Stop!'. Each bike
when measured had its front tyre patch at 5713m according
to the Garmin GPS. We were happy, we were sure we had a
record, we were thoroughly exhausted, we were in for a
nightmare ride back down.

Two bikes made it up there, but only one came down that
day. More tomorrow (excuse the tenses, no time to sort as
electricity is down and battery fading).
Damon