Flora of the Zanskar

When you hear "Himalayas", you could be forgiven for picturing mountains, snow, and not too much else. You don't generally imagine valley floors carpeted with wild flowers, with butterflies overhead, or scree slopes held together with thistles, geraniums, and other flora we get back in the UK. 

One of the science projects on the Ladakh expedition looked at the Amchi system of Tibetan 'medicine'. It is one of the most ancient living medical systems in the world, and until the early 60s was the only medicine available to Ladakhis. Locals believe Amchis to be representatives of the Medicine Buddha, so they are highly respected in both a social and spiritual sense. Many plants in Ladakh are becoming and have become endangered and rare because of their use in Amchi medicine. 

I was somewhat cynical and wasn't particularly interested in supporting the Amchi research. However, I found the plants fascinating, and enjoyed getting back to sketching and taking photos of the plants and flowers. 

According to the few books we had on the subject, which detailed the locations and elevations of most plants in Ladakh, some of the flowers we saw were at unusually high altitudes. Seeing the impact of global warming in such a unique way was incredible. As well as this, seeing the same plant at base camp going to seed but at a higher altitude only just flowering was also pretty cool to see.

Here are a few examples of the plants we saw and some of my drawings.

A sketch of Meconopsis aculeata, the rare Himalayan Blue Poppy

Meconopsis aculeata, the rare Himalayan Blue Poppy - endangered due to over picking by Amchis

Chrysanthemum pyrethroidas

A sea of Bistort - the flowers changed from pale pink through to deep magenta as they went to seed

A sketch of Bistort

I'm yet to identify most of these - please tell me if you know!

This was seen outside of the Zanskar valley, by the side of a river just before ascending to the Kanji La

Thymus serpyllum - Wild Thyme - we used this a few times whilst cooking at basecamp 

This was everywhere around base camp and the surrounding valleys

Ascending Mount Shyok

One of the reasons I went to India was to stand on top of a mountain and see the view you think of when you hear the word 'Himalayas' - snow capped, triangular peaks, as far as the eye can see, some of them disappearing into the clouds, all of them majestic and breathtaking. Well now I've done it, and I want to do it again, and again, and again, because it was everything I expected it to be and more.

Team Shyok at the summit - Photo by Cameron Montgomery

The expedition was divided up into phases one to four, with each fire doing something different for each one, and phase three being for 'special tours', where everyone could choose between peak ascents, ice field tours, climbing camps, etc. For tour three, most of the TLs decided that they'd like to do something together; we settled on an ascent of a 5,797m peak down the valley from base camp, that we named Mount Shyok.

Our ascent was to be over three days, with a day to reach our high bivvy spot, a day to summit the peak and return to the same bivvy spot, and a day to return to base camp, feeling elated having summited the awesome mountain. The team was to consist of me, Becky, Steph, Rob, Karl, Calum, Monty, Mark, Imi, Cameron and Matt, with Jenny in charge.

We left base camp on the morning of the 10th of August, walking down the Pensi La past a stupa we'd become quite familiar with after trekking past so much, before turning off to the left and starting our ascent. It really was uphill, and felt almost vertical at times, zigzagging past groups of yaks and avoiding slippery parts of scree, struggling to breathe most of the time. The terrain morphed from rolling grassy slopes to broken scree, then into giant unstable slabs and boulders, changing every time we'd got used to walking, climbing and clambering over it. By 6pm we'd made it to our bivvy spot - a flattish area about 4,900m high, sheltered by a large crag, which when climbed over gave way to the most incredible view over base camp and up along the Drang Drung glacier. As it grew dark we cooked our dinner on our temperamental stoves and bedded down in preparation for our ascent the next morning.

Hugging rocks just above our bivvy spot
Photo by Calum Matthews

Throughout the night I woke to a new view of the stars and moon overhead as they moved across the sky, always feeling warm and cosy snuggled up to the others in my crazily warm sleeping bag. I couldn't stop thinking about what awaited us in the morning, and was both stupidly excited and nervous about what it would be like. I hadn't been above 4,700m before that, and knew that I'd feel the altitude as we climbed higher, but I was ready to push myself hard to get there.

We awoke at 5:30am to find our sleeping bags frozen to our bivvy bags and the sun rising over the mountains ahead of us to the east. After a quick flapjack breakfast we packed our bags as light as possible, leaving our bivvy bags weighted with rocks to dry in the sun, and set off towards the ridge we were to follow to the summit.

On the ascent, hating the scree
Photo by Calum Matthews

I could feel the air getting thinner, making it harder to breathe and causing my muscles to burn like fire as we pushed ourselves on. Even taking two breaths per step became difficult at points, and I found myself staring at the ground ahead and forgetting to take in the beauty of our surroundings. We could see the summit we were aiming for most of the time, and it seemed to taunt us by looking so close but making us slog for nine hours before we could stand atop its snow. 

The morning stretched on and the afternoon began before we attached our crampons, grasped our ice axes and began to follow the edge of the snowline to the summit, avoiding precipitous drops and menacing hidden cornice. We stuck together as a team and slowly plodded up the snow towards the summit, over crests and hummocks before the final lump.

Team Shyok crazily happy at the summit
Photo by Calum Matthews

As we moved up the final uphill stretch and onto the flat summit, it felt incredible. We were jumping for joy, congratulating each other on our massive achievement and taking photo after photo and holding pose after pose. The whole team was elated - we'd managed to reach the summit, and for all we knew we could have been the first people ever to get up there. We hadn't seen a single cairn or path on the way up, and we certainly hadn't seen footprints at the top, so maybe we were!

Our descent flew by, and was much faster than our ascent. The snow fields could be pretty much slid down (apart from the deep patches where we fell in up to our knees and couldn't get out from laughing so much), and our route back avoided scrambling over a lot of scree, instead sticking to the snow. We reached our bivvy spot - having been able to see our brightly coloured bags for most of the day - just as the sun was setting, and enjoyed the dramatically changing colours of the sky dancing behind the mountains as we walked into the camp. We ate dinner in the dark before bedding down again, feeling completely knackered but very pleased with ourselves.

Team Shyok on the descent down the ridgeline
Photo by Calum Matthews

The morning after the ascent we woke to find everything frozen again, and had a relaxed morning enjoying the sunrise and the gorgeous view. We even fitted in a spot of yoga in the four hours we were up there, doing sun salutations and poses, before Calum's glute workout, which in hindsight really wasn't necessary but was fun all the same.

One of the main aims of the BES expedition was to conduct science in a remote environment, collecting data for various scientific projects. One project was looking at the effects of pre-conditioning on altitude acclimatisation. A few of us on the expedition had volunteered for the study, which involved being 'cuffed' (a blood pressure cuff was put around our arm and inflated to a certain pressure for a certain amount of time, to build up toxins in our arm and trick our bodies into acclimatising quicker) before each ascent in altitude, and then tested to see how our bodies had reacted. This resulted in us having to do press-ups as fast as possible for 30 seconds, as well as doing multiple spirometry tests, all at high altitude and whilst knackered. Hopefully some interesting results will come out of this study, which should help with our understanding of altitude medicine.

We descended from our bivvy spot to base camp feeling completely parched, as our water source had been the snow but we hadn't managed to melt very much. Reaching the stream by the Pensi La was a happy moment for all of us, and the 30 minute wait for our puritabs to work felt like hours. We got back to base camp in time for lunch, so we made chapattis on the Shyok stove (which we'd named Tanzin), and then deep fried nuggets of dough, when the mix didn't go so well..

Ascending Mount Shyok was definitely one of the highlights of the expedition for me - what an awesome feeling of camaraderie and achievement. Everest next?

Journey to Base Camp

When you start to refer to a base camp as 'home', you know that you're in an awesome place, and that mountains are where you belong.

Our base camp home lay just off the Pensi La, up the valley from the Drang Drung glacier, in amongst the glacial lakes and surrounded by peaks reaching 6000m. It took the whole expedition team about three trips each from the buses and trucks to base camp, heavily laden with bags, boxes and barrels, whilst suffering from AMS, to get all of our equipment and supplies to our camp spot and ready to be sorted out. That made us pretty knackered as the walk was over hills, streams and rocks, but it was totally worth it.

A colourfully decorated Indian truck on the Pensi La

We split the camp into different areas for each fire, with a spot for base camp HQ in the middle, surrounded by Dras, Zanskar, Chenubra, Markha, Indus and Shyok fires. Each fire had a big blue mess tent, to cook, eat and socialise in, plus their own big stove, kettle and pressure cooker. Dras (the fire I was a TL in) ended up with crazy paving in their tent to stop the dust and sand from getting everywhere, and everyone had a rock to sit on - so homely!

Basecamp sunset - beats watching TV

The journey to base camp took us three days, bouncing and bumping along National Highway 1 (I'd love to see National Highway 2 or any of the others..) through tiny villages in stunning glaciated valleys and across rickety bridges over raging rivers. It was truly awesome, with breathtaking views around every corner and the excitement of reaching the Zanskar valley building every second. Our route took us northwest out of Leh along NH1, before turning south at Kargil onto road 301, which (after a long drive) turns into the Pensi La. Lunch on our first day was at the small hillside town of Lamayuru, where a medieval monastery towers over a tumbletown of mud brick houses built around and within the strangely eroded caves in the cliff face. We tried our first taste of what would be our lunch for the next 35 days - Amul tinned cheese; crackers (only slightly broken at this point, but after a day in a rucksack they quickly became fine cracker dust); apricots so dry they could break teeth; boondi and bhujia and other ridiculously spicy bombay mix type nibbles; 425kcal giant heavy flapjacks; we weren't impressed..  

Calum, Tim and Becky loving life at the glamping place

The first night's stay was nicknamed 'the glamping place' by us, as it was so idyllic. Small marquee type tents surrounded a vegetable patch / flowerbed, with bright red poppies growing right next to runner beans, and butterflies fluttering around. We knew the next few weeks wouldn't be as easy as this, but it was certainly a nice way to ease ourselves into it, sleeping on the carpeted floors and being made chai and given hot food. The next night was spent on a flattish patch of grass by the roadside, so it was everyone's first night in the expedition tents, eating a memorable (both for the location and for what they do to your digestive system..) ration pack dinner of chicken tikka masala.

Witness the cuteness! Awesome photo by Abel McLinden

Yaks and cows were one of our biggest problems at base camp, which says something about how care free life was and how little anything else mattered without communication with the world back home. The giant, fluffy, earringed, cute but ugly beasts would wander into our camp every morning at about 8am, then leave again before it got dark, directed by the local herders. They were unstoppable in their quest to drink every bowl of soapy water, apparently because as calves they'd been raised drinking washing up water, making the most of the leftover scraps of food. They would find their way into the stores tents and rummage around in the boxes before weeing on the floor, they'd walk straight through guy ropes and make tents fall down, and they'd pick our washing off the line and chew it up, before spitting it out again a short walk away. They did however sit nicely whilst we sketched and photographed them, and the young ones would even let us give their heads a scratch, so eventually they became an accepted part of base camp - part of the team.

Karl enjoying a freezing dip in one of the lakes

I have a new found love for wild swimming - we'd wash in the surrounding glacial lakes, spending ages standing knee deep in silty sediment, trying to psych ourselves up to throw ourselves in deeper, before reaching the drop off and plunging into the deep icy waters, instantly feeling clean and refreshed. Every time I went in my fingers and toes would go numb, leading to hours spend sitting next to a stove in my big down jacket, trying to warm back up again. Every afternoon the winds would pick up, blowing away the calm of the morning and placing sand in every nook and cranny of our kit. It left us no opportunity to lounge around in the sun to let ourselves dry and try to fix our t-shirt and sandal tan lines, so I just embraced them.

Great photo from Calum Matthews
Me, Cameron, Rachel, Monty and Becca, on a short walk out of base camp
Base camp lay amongst the glacial lakes in the background

Leaving base camp at the end of the expedition was tough - we'd worked really hard to make it a home, but we had to take it completely apart and leave without a trace. I was part of the Phase 5 trek team, who left a few days early to trek over the Kanji La and through villages for five days to meet the buses as they drove past, so I cheekily got out of the slog of carrying equipment back to the buses, but I still helped to dismantle Dras' camp. We threw the crazy paving back onto the scree, filled in the toilet and slops pit, took down our stove protection wall and outdoor dry stone kitchen, took down the mess tent.. so much emotion.

One day I'll go back, I'm sure of it.

Advance Party reaches Leh

Reaching Delhi, stepping outdoors from the air conditioned airport, the heat and humidity hit us like a brick wall. The advance party of the expedition had now arrived in country, but whilst dogs and people ran around us, the city's dense smog hung overhead like a thick barrier to the calm of nature and the beauty of India. Staying a few short hours in the city before our flight to Leh was more than enough for us - we craved clean mountain air and beautiful views.

Leh, the old capital of the Himalayan kingdom of Ladakh, is nestled high in the Himalayas, a green oasis in the harsh rocky mountains. We were to be staying a week at the Ladakh Ecological Development Group hostel in Leh; LEDeG for short. Food and equipment needed to be bought, stores loaded up onto trucks, and things generally organised before the rest of the expedition arrived and the drive to base camp began. We didn't have much time to feel sorry for ourselves and nurse our Acute Mountain Sickness headaches after arriving at high altitude - a quick morning nap and a cup of masala chai later we wandered down into Leh to get our bearings and prepare ourselves for the days of shopping ahead.

A beautifully shaped and painted wall in a back street in Leh

Small teams of TLs set out into Leh in the following few days to source random items such as eggs, watermelons, sponges, jerrycans and planks of wood. Our team of four was in charge of hardware, which involved searching the town for some very specific items, armed with a questionable Ladakhi phrasebook and lots of rupees. What an amazing way to interact with locals and get to know a town. Next time I'm travelling maybe I should search for 16 metal jerrycans again - I could repeat the surreal experience of ending up in a tiny, dark, windowless store room with a Ladakhi man showing me his 'new' (i.e. really old but apparently didn't leak) jerry cans and arguing over the price. Or I could search for four planks of wood, and end up being driven to the outskirts of town and wandering around a wood yard, chatting to workmen and clambering over hundreds of planks of wood to find the perfect one.

We tried out our Ladakhi on most people, but not much of it has stuck in my head. Shouts of "jullay!" could be heard constantly, everywhere we went - it means "hello", "yes" and "goodbye", and is said all the time, to and by people of all backgrounds, ages and religions. 'Balang' means cow, which you also see everywhere, wandering the streets and looking like they belong there, even on the main bazaar, eating the vegetables the women had travelled for miles from Leh's surrounding small villages to sell. "Kamzang le?" means "how are you?", and is replied to with "kamzang", meaning "yes, good". Our phrasebook also contained "where can one find a horse?" which was sadly too complex to remember, but could have come in handy at some point!

The main bazaar in Leh - prayer flags flying everywhere,
vegetable sellers all around, mountains in the background

Most of us probably pushed ourselves too hard in that week, and also in the weeks to follow if I'm honest. Splitting headaches and nausea were daily occurrences, but we forced litres of water down our throats to try to combat it. The alcohol ban on expedition led to a drinking game: drinking from Nalgenes whilst whizzing down a bumpy road - I love being a child. Our ascent profile for the trip was quite steep; Leh, at 3524m, was a high place to start from, so we had to be careful on our way up to base camp. When the YEs arrived we'd have to watch out for and monitor cases of AMS, and our ascent up to the Pensi La was deliberately broken down into three days to minimise risk from our 1km height gain.

We could feel the altitude as soon as we reached the airport - our lungs felt as though they weren't working quite as well, carrying rucksacks felt harder than before, and walking uphill felt like sprinting uphill. We walked up to a cafe just below the palace in Leh on our first afternoon, and really felt like we deserved the masala chai by the time we got there. We had beautiful views over Leh from the tiny windows, and enjoyed sitting on cushions on the floor, chatting about our expectations for the trip. Our hostel was just below Shanti Stupa, a white domed stupa on a hilltop, built to promote world peace and prosperity and holding the relics of the Buddha. It's a steep walk uphill, and felt like climbing a mountain the first few times we went up before we'd acclimatised - I'm sure I'm not the only one who was slightly worried about the real mountains to come after getting completely puffed out on the way up.

A surprisingly stunning view over Leh
from the toilet at the palace cafe

The food in Ladkh is incredible, and not what I'd expected from India. Because of Tibetan influences, the food is beautifully fragrant and fresh. Vegetarian stews such as thukpa, served with khambir, a soft flatbread, were exactly what we needed after a long day. In town we bought momos, beautifully comforting steamed dumplings served with spicy dipping sauce, and drank mango lassis from a rooftop restaurant overlooking a busy street and a monastery. Monks are everywhere in Ladakh - both obviously important wizened old men, ushered through crowds into monasteries, and young boys wearing trainers, jumpers and beanie hats, carrying iPhones. They welcomed us into their monasteries many times throughout the expedition, greeting us and helping us, spreading their kindness and generosity.

Dogs also run rife in Leh, as they do in Delhi (except these were much fluffier, hardier mountain dogs than those in the city). They're a real nuisance, and their population is getting out of control, but no solution has been reached by the governing authority. They bark and fight until 3am, making sleeping very difficult - and that's on top of the scary periodic breathing due to the altitude from whoever you're sharing a room with - and occasionally get vicious and attack people. Whilst shopping in town we began to be followed by Fluffy, who obviously didn't have any doggy friends; he'd be barked at and chased as we walked around the town, but he just wouldn't leave us alone. He was welcomed into our team at first, but when the other dogs wouldn't let us go up a path to a monastery because of him we decided we should probably try to lose him. About twenty corners and a few quick jogs later we were four again (and also slightly lost..).

Shanti Stupa in Leh - LEDeG hostel was just below this

Leh is a paradise for westerners attempting to 'find themselves' - the number of people wearing floppy hippy trousers with dreadlocks told us that - so there are a lot of yoga retreats held there. We attempted quite a few yoga sessions throughout the expedition, which at times felt pretty special. In Leh, we held some early morning sessions, involving lots of sun salutations and pose holding, but out at base camp and even on some of our long treks we managed to fit some in. Stretching out our backs after a long day of carrying our rucksacks, watching the sun go down and listening to the flow of the river beside us towards the end of the expedition will always stay with me, especially the comedic value of not being able to breathe and trying to hold poses in a down jacket and mountain boots.

Sitting outside in my garden with a cup of coffee and the dog at my feet, it's hard to comprehend how far from Ladakh I am right now. Fighting the post-expedition blues is harder than I'd expected. Time to pack for California!