Pangong Tso Lake - Big Photo Load 26th June: Breakfast and usual time for us to leave from Santhi Guest house, 0820 AM, towards another highlight, Pangong Tso Lake. Left at Karu junction, 7 kms on we come to the beautifully set Chamre Gompa, 3 kms on another junction at Karu, we take the right turn this time towards Chang La. The road by and large is fine, climbing steeply for the next 34 KMs. You have plenty of photo ops here, deep gorges, green settlements, rivers, ravines, mountain roads, snow and what have you.
Sign in at Zingral TCP and we climb again, 1130 we reach Chang La. Lots of snow, as much as we had at K-Top, colder but devoid of traffic. We meet lots of soldiers from South and get pally with Aby Phillip who gives us tea and introduces us to the rest of the soldiers, this regiment is about to move to Jamnagar soon, another would take its place. We spend 15 mts on the photos and relaxing, if you can call it that at 17892 feets.
We reach Tangse TCP at 1 PM, sign in there and take a Left towards Pangong Tso. The road visibly improves from thereon, but that's a trap. You get lovely surface for a long time and then out of the blue you get radiator breaking dips on the road, some of them really mean. We met a bunch of bikers coming from Chandigarh and play tag with them for some distance, the black tarmac, some green patches, a stream, snow-caps and bikers in front and behind you all make for nice photo spots.35 kms after Tangse TCP we come to the notorious Pagal Nallah, sane now. They have built a big bridge over it and the army guys said this would solve the problem permenantly. 1 kms down the road we come to the first view of the world famous lake Pangong Tso and what a sight it was. It was clear that the area around this place was at one time was filled with the lake water, the sandy basin below bore stark testimony to that.
We reach the Army Camp where boats are moored and look for Prajesh's contact there. Mr.Singh gives us chai and says the day is a very windy one, boat cruises are only on calm days. He sands an orderly with us first for lunch at the canteen near the road and then we walk back to meet him again. The wind has died down, the orderly takes us to the boat, we strap on with the life jackets at all, the wind picks up again, the ride is off.
About the lake, much has been written and photographed, after 3 Idiots, it has become ever so famous. Nothing can describe what it is, only facets of the colours, coutours and clarity of the water can be captured, one has to be really there to experience it.
The road after the army camp to Spangmik, in a real sense, 7-8 kms, does not exhist, only a track. No boards, directions, we were left to try out the high road, which in some places is a patch of mud and stones, off-road actually. We searched for Camp Watermark Resort and finally found it around 5 PM, the wind was up, it was cold and they gave us a tent. This was 26th, full moon day and the whole place was packed, including the waters edge with bikers camping out. We met the boss of the camp and requested him to give us a room there, with some pressure and PR, around 8 PM we could manage to shift to a room. We were lucky, the night temp. was below 5, the wind was howling all around us and hurling sand along with it.
I took rest while Jiggy and Prajesh walkekd off to experiment with the Nikkon, by the time they were back at 8, I had a power-nap and ready for the night. The full moon was up already, the whole place lit up in a silver hue, tried a couple of shots with different exposures on my Cannon, some of them did come out nicely, judge for yourself.
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Last edited by ramkya1 : 10th July 2010 at 19:15.
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