Peace - the Chadar 2007

For my Mother and Father, with love and memory

We run this most years, check Our treks for the details.

The hauntingly moving sights and sounds of this trek are curiously dream-like, with an incredible intensity that will inhabit my dreams long after I have abandoned this second childhood that has been my Himalayan life over the past two decades.

Now as I write, the sounds are of warmth. The crackle of the porters fire, with the occasional whoosh as the logs collapse, sending up clouds of glowing embers, offering like, to the sky where the stars shine unblinking here in the thin air at 4000 meters.

In the dining tent there is more warmth: a humming stove, candles flickering, books and after dinner clutter. From outside, the rise and fall of the voices of Norbu, Lobsang and Stanzin, the crash of a plate and a peal of laughter - and as the evening ends and the stars wheel overhead, the sonorous voice of one of the porters raised in song.

On such a night the worship of nature is easy.

Days on the ice I take a child-like delight in. My early heroes were all polar explorers, and feeling my breath rasp against the face mask as I slide easily on good ice, wondering at all the intricacies of frozen water as I automatically feel out the way, memories of childhood nighttimes' curled up with a torch and a book flicker in the corners of my mind and I realize how blessed I am to be here.

In front, a line of figures - black dots against the ice - could easily be an image from one of the polar epics that enthralled the young me; but as they come closer my reverie is shattered as they greet me - "k'amzang, ju-le, k'amzang" - all of them friends from Pishu, Zangla, and other villages.

But no childhood dream could imagine this:

Powder snow that crunches gently beneath your feet, a million tiny particles caught at one point in the freezing process, perfect to stop sliding you on the blue ice beneath.

A layer of fragile ice that shatters on contact into jagged one foot shards you can shuuuussh through like autumn leaves, leaving in your wake a trail of vandalism for which no one will scold you.

Ice: pure, thick, clear ice through which you can look down to the river bottom; the rapid flash of a fish sometimes catching the corner of your vision.

Ice, layered with consecutive freezing's; rocks once on the surface now suspended below, hanging like planets in a schoolroom display around which air bubbles curve with the grace of lava lamps.

Blue-green ice, coated with thousands of leaf-like ice crystals formed by some combination of wind, sun, and cold. And in the minus 16C (if you pre-chill a gloveless hand), you can scoop them up and admire their delicate patterns for whole seconds at a time before your warming hands return them to moisture.

And then, at corners of the river, jagged plates of ice - large as dining room floors, ball room floors, hotel room floors - canted at bizarre angles by the pressure of the water beneath. Some, seeming solid and unyielding, lure you into the middle with the promise of moving horizontally; but, as they take your weight, gunshot like cracks echo around canyon walls, and the icy surface starts to bow as it breaks and the Zanskar surges up, sending you skittering back to the safety of the churned up expansion ridges at rivers edge.

Tired at day's end, the camp just minutes away, you cross a flat expanse of ice and feel it shift beneath your feet, and realize the whole surface is moving almost imperceptibly with the surge of the river below. And tired not just from the strain of staying upright on all the varieties of frozen water, but with the sheer immensity of the Chadar, you simply stop and let the moment take you.

And running through everything, Siddhartha like, is the sound of the oh, so blue Zanskar river - sometimes roaring up in white and blue spray as the ice calves; sometimes, a gentler background cadence as hundreds of roundels of slush bobbing on the surface pile into the river bends to create a new surface...and at other times, you are jerked awake by the river in the early hours as huge chunks of ice crash down river, the booming and thundering echoing back and forth - all frozen into stillness by morning.

Teetering gently on a foot wide ledge, the Zanskar surges past an inch or two from your scrabbling ice encrusted foot, focusing your mind marvelously.

Lift your eyes from the river (making sure your feet are firmly anchored first) to frozen waterfalls that drop deep aquamarine claws over impossible rock walls - wind - whipped and water - curved - that you despair of finding purchase on as you clamber away from bad ice to the sparse footing on an ibex trail above.

And the porters, always the porters as counterpoint to the river - the light relief. Smiling, laughing, smoking, cooking, collecting firewood, repairing their crazy soapbox sledges that skitter behind them on the ice, washing their socks through cracks in the ice, dipping their cups in the Zanskar to drink and screaming with delight when one of them wipes out on the slick surface, or another ruefully pulls off his boot to empty a pint of ice water.

And at days end, before the plummeting temperatures take you inside, look up from your darkening gorge and watch the sun pick out the crags that soar above - sheer, red-brown cliff faces lit golden, ramps leading higher to glittering gunmetal summits veined with snow - and drop your gaze to pick out trails you have followed in the past and will follow on balmy summers days to come.

Surely, as Kipling's Kim said, 'The Gods live here'

And, just as you have made a cautious co-existence with this river, you turn a bend and find fresh delight: the snow-capped plateau of the ancient Kingdom of Zangla. Tiny dwellings with frosted prayer flags on every roof; narrow village lanes that bustle with snot-encrusted, brown-eyed children, clad in maroon woolen gonchas and bubbling with life. Dragging makeshift sledges to their local ski run, they plunge downhill, shouting with delight, gasping with pleasure in the sharp thin air, all with the breathless purity of childhood, before spinning to a safe landing in deep powder, sobbing with laughter as they greet us, 'Ju le Ju le Ju le'

Evenings by stove light and hot salt tea in warm Zanskari homes as we cross the frozen plain towards Zangla; every morning the Chu La, the frost mist, surging off the river towards us as we trudge past ice-encrusted briar and frost-rimed poplar that glisten with a first-morning-of-creation light.

And sometimes, sometimes, the tiny pink petals of a faded rose from a summer long gone lying visible in the snow.

Then suddenly, before you, the end of the journey and the beginning of many: The Great Himalayan Barrier rising sheer to six thousand meters and more, stretching blue-white across the horizon. Come spring, the massed snows on the heights will be irrigating the green oasis-towns of this tiny land. This snow-fed river will still be curving through it and the children's laughter and the Zanskari's joy in life will be renewed once more.

Would all endings bring such peace.

"The scale, the purity, the unknowedness, these are characteristics that stimulate contemplation"

Sara Wheeler