Journeys in Ladakh, Part X: Over the Rainbow in Pangong Tso

We kept driving up the spiraling mountain road until the little village in the valley (seen in the previous day's photos) became smaller and smaller, the snow peaks became closer, and it got harder to breathe. We got out of our cars briefly at the Chang-La mountain pass--5300 meters high, in the snows, and occupied by an army station that hands out sticky sweet tea for free to travelers.

There was nothing much at this base beyond some barracks and an ecumenical Hindu temple with images of everyone from Buddha to Krishna to Jesus. One sign said "May Changla Baba Bless You." Another urged tourists not to stay for more than 20 minutes because of the danger of altitude sickness, and there were oxygen tanks on hand in case of emergency.

An hour later, traveling over almost-impassable roads full of potholes and boulders, we climbed down in altitude a bit but continued driving in the midst of tall, forbidding peaks, with no human habitation in sight. The terrain changed to rocks where Misha saw a red marmot lurking to fine, blinding desert sand. Here and there, where green oases cropped up, we saw animals grazing, and, infrequently, groups of shepherds lazily sitting by the roadside. It was a lost world.

And then, with a glimmer of blue in the distance, we reached our destination: Pangong-Tso, the semi-saline lake that straddles two countries, India and China, and is famous for its beauty, especially in sunlight. The pictures speak for themselves--sometimes we had to pinch ourselves that we were not in the Caribbean (but of course, we couldn't swim because the water was icy cold, despite the daytime heat). And the color of the water truly kept changing at every time of day.

Suddenly, a burst of rain brought forth a full, clear rainbow for about 10 minutes, so stark that you could study every color in it, an optical wonder that evidently only appears high up in the mountains.

For the night, we stayed in the village of Spituk, by the lakeside: it is a village by name alone, being more of a cluster of houses inhabited by perpetually sunburned nomadic Tibetans who come there in the summer to profit from the tourist industry and then retreat high into the mountains to graze their yaks. The accommodation was basic and the food, in this land where nothing grows, not too imaginative (rice and dal, the perpetual Indian lentil stew).

The sunset, however, was the most incredible I had seen, with parts of the sky being lit up one after another as if a giant fire was happening in the heavens.