At 17,582 feet above sea level, the Taglang La is the world’s second highest motorable pass. It’s the highest point on the 300-mile “highway” that connects the northern cities of Leh and Manali. On a bicycle, getting to the top of the pass from the southern side requires a 3-hour, 12-mile climb that takes you up 2,000 feet. Without the zig-zagging switchbacks typical of other Himalayan passes, the road is visible all the way up the pass—an ash ribbon snaking up and around the canyon wall.
Given Minnesota’s flatland topography, training for the ride up the Taglang La required some creative adaptation. In the months before the trip, I sweated up and down the High Bridge and Ohio Street in St. Paul hundreds of times. That helped with general fitness, but nothing in my neighborhood could prepare me for the long, gradual, and oxygen-deprived slog up northern India’s mountain passes. Mostly the Taglang La was an artless and obstinate ascent characterized more by a sore rear-end than any of the profound spiritual truths that mountains supposedly provide.
When we reached the top of the pass, the sky turned darker and big snowflakes began to fall. It wasn’t snowing hard, and the bragging value of riding through snow (“and then it snowed on us!”) far outweighed the discomfort. The pass marker was emblazoned with the curious but grammatically correct English of India’s military sign painters: “You are passing over second highest pass of the world. Unbelievable, is not it?”
Unbelievable it was. The worn and beaten Buddhist prayer flags that decorate all mountain passes in this part of the world were flapping in the breeze. To the south, glaciers were melting under broad patches of direct sunlight. I was euphoric, and the trip was all downhill from there.
But there were more adventures below. Descending down the road on the northern side, the road led us into the valley of the Indus River. We soon encountered a road crew kicking up dust clouds as they cleared a landslide, and beyond that, the fiery and smoky world of the Bihari road builders. Citizens of one of India’s poorest states, these road builders work for $2 a day in what look like post-apocalyptic conditions. Entire families are bivouacked by the side of the road. The cold and rocky landscape is punctuated with burning barrels of pitch, the smoke from which blackens the Biharis’ faces and their clothing. Dazed by sand and soot and spattered by paving oil, seven riders stopped to catch our breath at a rural dhaba—a tea shack playing solar-powered disco music.
Back on the bikes, we descended gradually through the magic land of Ladakh, a semi-autonomous region inhabited by people of Tibetan ancestry, who cultivate and irrigate terraced fields the way they have for centuries. In the late afternoon, the shadows were getting long, but the scenery was still stunning: a high desert of striated hills and strange rock formations with splashes of red, gray, and green reminiscent of the American Southwest. To the children of the roadside villages, we were hilarious spandex-clad astronauts, and we laughed with them as they chased after us, yelling for chocolates.
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