Along the road to Pangong Tso, I spied an odd marmot. 'Twas rotund of both gut and jowl, and had a beefy butt. It seems Himalaya's boondocks has quite a junk food glut. The rodent snacked on a cracker of the cheesiest kind. I'd have guessed one could search near-n-far and no Cheez-it would one find. Not in this remote borderland where few maintain a home. The point is, for a cheesy-cracker you'll have not far to roam.
Subsequent ridges fade into shapes, darker and less distinct. The farther down the lake one looks, the lower the clouds hang, until they obscure all trace of the apparent infinity of ridges. In front of the one sun-warmed wall of mountain, two rainbows arch skyward, disappearing into the clouds. One is a weak echo of the other. My Irish mind imagines the arc-segments are full semi-circles -- pot-o-gold, and all that. But the weak one seems to quit before it even reaches the cloud, and thus makes me wonder if rainbows are real, and - if they are - is the weak one as real as the bright one. double rainbow arches up from the lake, stoking pondering
the parting clouds divulged a deep blue sky and lapping waves were proof that time passed by but only so gently that I couldn't say if time ran true or told a subtle lie
Taken in August of 2016 on the road to Pangong Tso in Ladakh
painted skies
make mountains puny
by contrast
in thin air
poor sleep paid in
grand skies
Pangong Tso
seen as by the prisoner
from Plato’s cave
5.) Khajuraho in Madhya Pradesh
4.) Varkala in Kerala
3.) Pangong Tso in Ladakh
2.) Pushkar in Rajasthan
1.) Hampi in Karnataka
Taken in the Summer of 2016 on the road to Pangong Tso
Taken in August of 2016 at Pangong Tso in Ladakh
With each change in cloud and sky, Pangong Tso looks like a different lake.
Pangong Tso is a long, narrow lake that crosses the border between India and China. By length, the majority of the lake falls in China, but these photos were all taken on the Indian side of the border.
It’s actually substantially higher than Lake Titicaca in Peru, which claims the title of highest navigable lake in the world. Pangong Tso is 4,350 m (14,280 ft) while Titicaca is 3810 m (12,500 ft.)
Don’t ask me what constitutes “navigable.” My wife and I tried to figure that out when we visited Titicaca several years ago. We didn’t see anything bigger than the boat we were on–nothing that would be called a ship. Of course, we saw not so much as an inner tube on Pangong Tso, and the fact that it’s so narrow in places may mean that a boat would have to have an exceedingly shallow draft to make it down the lake’s length. That is if one could travel the lake’s length without trigger happy Chinese or Indian military forces freaking out and blowing your boat out of the water.
Taken along the road to Pangong Tso in August of 2016
The one on the bottom was rocking out, singing “Don’t Stop Believin'” by Journey into an air mic. Not really, but you can imagine it, can’t you? In fact, I bet you now have that tune stuck in your head. You’re welcome.
the !n(tro)verted yogi 