{"id":436,"date":"2017-09-18T18:28:27","date_gmt":"2017-09-18T18:28:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thetravellore.com\/?p=436"},"modified":"2017-10-23T18:17:11","modified_gmt":"2017-10-23T18:17:11","slug":"ladakh-roof-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetravellore.com\/blog\/ladakh-roof-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Ladakh \u2013 The Roof of the World"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Khardung
Located at an elevation of 18,379 ft, Khardung La is the world\u2019s highest motorable road and serves as the gateway to Shyok and Nubra valleys in the Ladakh region.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The road to Pangong lake in Ladakh is like nothing you\u2019ve ever seen before. It\u2019s a five or six-hour drive from the city of Leh, an absolutely spellbinding journey. We drove through all sorts of rough and dramatic terrain\u2026 streams and lush meadows with flowers, sandy dunes, ice-covered peaks, black rocks, and dusty brown mountains.
\nThe shutter button on my camera clicked almost incessantly, capturing the transitions in the scenery. A huge monastery, the houses creeping up an entire mountain range. Streams of green mosaic cascading between valleys of unforgiving black stone. Arid, barren plateaus that looked like the surface of the moon. The whole landscape looked untouched. Unreal.<\/p>\n

\"The
Ladakh-a mountainous region called as cold desert or land of high passes.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The motorways are narrow in Ladakh<\/a>, and sometimes it felt like the car was just clinging onto the edge of a steep drop. The roads were built by the Indian Army\u2019s Border Roads Organisation (BRO). Every few kilometres, I was highly amused by creative road signs that read \u2018BRO: go slow\u2019, \u2018Be gentle on my curves\u2019, \u2018It is not a rally, enjoy the valley\u2019 and some humorous ones like \u2018Darling I like you, but not so fast\u2019.<\/p>\n

Finally, after endless snaking over and around mountainsides, we turned a corner and caught a glimpse, a flash of brilliant blue. It was just for a moment, a teaser, as the narrow road turned and left us looking again at dull brown mountains. A few twists and turns later, we broke out into an open space, where the entire lake stretched out before us. I rolled down the car window and literally had the breath knocked out of me. I don\u2019t know whether it was the force of the wind or the infinite beautiful blue-ness that did it. \u201cIt\u2019s so blue!\u201d was all I could manage to gasp. And it is indeed a crazy, gleaming, incredible blue. It\u2019s almost impossibly blue. That magical blue, with the grey-brown mountains encircling it, and stunning blue skies with fluffy clouds above, is just something from another world.<\/p>\n

\"The
Ladakh boasts its rich cultural inheritance. Some of the world\u2019s oldest Buddhist monasteries and other religious place are making it a must visit place for any travellers across the world.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Even though I had seen countless pictures of the lake before, nothing prepared me for how breathtakingly beautiful it is when you actually see it yourself. I felt light-headed, just looking at it. Maybe it was the altitude\u2026 after all, we were up at 14,000 feet. But it was definitely one of those views, those moments that you would remember your whole life. And it\u2019s quiet. So quiet. Down by the shore of the lake, I could just hear the waves lapping against the pebbles and the gulls screeching overhead.<\/p>\n

\"The-Travellore_Pangong
Pangong Lake is an endorheic lake in the Himalayas situated at a height of about 4,350 above the sea level.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Pangong Tso is Tibetan <\/a>for \u201clong, narrow, enchanted lake\u201d in Ladakh. A third of the lake is situated in India and two-thirds in China. The funny thing it, the lake changes colour as the day progresses\u2026 once the sun goes down, it transforms to a dull grey. It\u2019s only at its blue-est best when the sun is strong. I wondered if the lake was just reflecting the blue skies overhead. I realized that the place is absurdly beautiful but also harsh\u2026 if you\u2019re not prepared for the weather, you will get badly sunburned during the day, and freeze when the temperatures drop at night.<\/p>\n

\"The_Travellore_Leh_Ladakh\"
Pangong Tso can be reached in a five-hour drive from Leh, most of it on a rough and dramatic mountain road\u00a0of the Ladakh.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But even when there\u2019s no sun, at night all you have to do is turn your eyes to the heavens. The skies are so clear, and we were so high up, that the stars just overwhelmed the darkness. I don\u2019t think I\u2019ve ever seen so many stars at once before. I don\u2019t think I\u2019ve ever seen the milky way before. It\u2019s dizzying, to realize that there are so many millions of stars, so many celestial bodies floating around in the galaxy and that you are just a speck on one such planet. I felt engulfed by the enormity of it all. But I also felt connected, like a part of something. A cosmic energy, a force. The universe and me.<\/p>\n

( This Blog post first appeared on\u00a0gypseatrip<\/a>\u00a0)<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The road to Pangong lake in Ladakh is like nothing you\u2019ve ever seen before. It\u2019s a five or six-hour drive<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":437,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[15,88,80,81,82,78,79,86,87,85,12],"class_list":["post-436","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-thetravellore-travel-blog","tag-adventure-tours","tag-camel-safari","tag-jammu-and-kashmir","tag-jktourism","tag-khardung-la","tag-ladakh","tag-leh","tag-nubra-valley","tag-sand-dunes","tag-thetravellore","tag-tourism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetravellore.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/436","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetravellore.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetravellore.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetravellore.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetravellore.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=436"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetravellore.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/436\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":499,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetravellore.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/436\/revisions\/499"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetravellore.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/437"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetravellore.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetravellore.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetravellore.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}