Off-grid miles where fuel, faith, and horizons run low

“On the Changthang, distance is measured in breath, not kilometers

and help arrives not on time, but exactly when you need it.”

 

The Plateau That Became a Habit

By 2014, Ladakh wasn’t a destination; it was muscle memory. My twentieth trip felt less like travel and more like returning to a house whose light switches I could find in the dark. Friends in Leh had stopped asking why I kept coming back. The mountains had stopped asking too. They watched me ride in the way elders watch an overeager child fond, firm, and absolutely unwilling to negotiate with folly.

Khardung La and Nubra were old conversations; Pangong had become a familiar argument with wind and light. What tugged at me this time wasn’t a pass or a lake. It was a plateau the Changthang that stark, high-altitude tableland rolling east and southeast of Leh, where the land keeps forgetting to rise into peaks and instead stretches into sky. Where roads are a suggestion, fuel is a rumor, and faith sits quietly in the saddle bag beside spanners and spare cables.

I told myself I was going to “explore.” That’s the word we use when we’re trying not to say “get lost.”

The plan: leave Leh with a full tank and two jerry cans yawning on the rear rack, thread the Indus past Karu and Upshi, climb over the Mahe bridge, turn south maybe Nyoma, maybe Loma, maybe Hanle if the permits stayed friendly then swing through Sumdo toward Tso Moriri, loop Tso Kar, and climb back via Debring and Tanglang La if weather allowed. In reality, Changthang had its own plan for me: fuel anxiety, conversations with goats, a sky punched through with stars, and a reminder that “off-grid” doesn’t just mean no signal. It means no certainty.

 

Leh: Last Chai, First Sum

The ritual never changed. A mechanic’s yard behind the main bazaar; Dorje squatting at the wheel like a surgeon who’d seen worse; the smell of petrol, sun, and last night’s rain arguing over the same patch of dust. Chain slack tightened, clutch cable replaced “just in case,” spark plug cleaned, brake fluid topped, spokes pinged like tuning forks. I packed with the austerity of a monk and the paranoia of a man who knows Ladakh is not impressed by optimism: tubes, tools, levers, bungee cords, a headlamp, biscuits, Diamox, ORS, and a notebook that would end up filled with sand.

I bought permits at the DC office the day before Nyoma, Hanle, Tso Moriri the bureaucratic dance performed with the gentleness that passes for efficiency here. The clerk stamped the papers, asked where I was staying, and told me his cousin had just found work at a homestay in Karzok. “If you reach,” he said, not when. In Ladakh, grammar keeps you honest.

At dawn I drank two cups of chai I didn’t need, strapped down the cans, and wheeled the bike out of the lane. The engine coughed awake like an old friend clearing his throat. Dogs watched me with that Ladakhi kindness that is indistinguishable from indifference. I left the town before shop shutters blinked open, before the air traded night’s bite for day’s glare. The Indus slid beside me, green and silver, as if it knew how to keep secrets.

 

Upshi to Mahe: Indus Arithmetic

The first miles were subtraction: noise, hurry, the compulsion to narrate. At Upshi, I refueled out of habit, not need. The pump boy the same one from years ago or a younger brother who had inherited the posture grinned at my cans and said, “Changthang?” I nodded. He drew a rectangle in the air. “Big. Empty. Good.”

Past Chumatang, steam rose from hot springs like ghosts rehearsing an entrance. BRO wisdom flashed by in yellow: “Be Gentle On My Curves,” “After Whisky Driving Risky,” “Better Mr. Late Than Late Mr.” Old jokes that had long ago stopped being jokes. At Mahe, the bridge looked as it always does: slightly surprised to find itself there. The checkpost performed its ceremony permits stamped; questions asked with care and answered with respect; tea assumed until refused, and then still served.

Beyond the barrier, the Indus seemed to lose interest in being a river and began behaving like a rumor, dissolving into gravel and sky. The landscape grew quieter, which in Ladakh is another word for honest.

 

The Turn toward Nyoma: When Horizons Go Soft

The slab of blacktop gave up pretending sometime after Mahe. The surface frayed into patches; the road asked for attention the way an elder asks for patience softly but without option. Wind found its day job. Prayer flags snapped. The sun went from companion to authority. Somewhere between Nyoma and Loma, the plateau arrived fully, and with it the odd Changthang illusion: horizons that run low, like a long breath held just before a confession.

Mirage is the Changthang’s favorite joke. Lakes move. Distant trucks double and then disappear. A nomad’s tent rebo wavers on the edge of vision, then turns into a patch of shadow pretending to be shelter. You learn to trust smell and sound before sight: yak dung smoke, the whine of wind, the way your engine’s thump changes pitch when air thins further.

At Loma, a smiling jawan took the permits and asked the conversational question everyone asks in these parts, “Alone?”I said, “Not really,” and tapped the tank. He laughed and pointed at the sky. “Better companion.”

 

A Wrong Turn to Yaye Tso: The Lake That Found Me

When maps go quiet and the land taps your shoulder

Somewhere after Mahe, with the Indus fading into rumor and the wind sharpening its questions, the road forked not dramatically, just enough to make arrogance stumble. No milestone. No BRO wisdom in yellow. Just two tracks: one established and obedient toward Nyoma, and another thinner, paler wandering away as if it had remembered an old story mid-sentence.

The sensible choice was obvious. I took the other one.

You learn the signs on the Changthang: the confidence of truck ruts, the gossip of goat prints, the modesty of a rebo far off, folded into the earth like a punctuation mark. This track had the energy of a rumor. It sloped across a low ridge and then forgot to climb; it drifted through shale that whispered under the tires; it changed its mind more often than a politician. I kept going, not out of bravado, but because going back felt like an argument I hadn’t earned.

The wind fell away the way sound does when a door closes, and the land rounded itself into silence. Then the ridge broke, and the world opened into a bowl an eye, really ink-blue and perfectly still.

Yaye Tso.

I didn’t know the name then. I only knew the gasp my chest made, the way my hands forgot the handlebars, the sudden desire to sit down on the earth and be smaller than I already was. The lake had the hush of places that predates kindness and doesn’t require it. No flags. No temple. No road sign staking a claim. Just water that had learned stillness so well even the sky looked shy being reflected in it.

I rolled closer until the track turned to suggestion and then to grass too honest to pretend it was a road. I killed the engine. The silence picked up the sentence I’d dropped. On the wind’s far edge, a raven drew black calligraphy across the day. My boots sank slightly the peat here likes to keep a secret or two so I moved with the caution one reserves for old libraries and newborns.

The shoreline was sparse: a scatter of black stones, a few tufts of grass, a single cairn arranged with the patience of someone who needed to say “I was here” without shouting. The water was not Pangong’s theatrical sapphire or Moriri’s aristocratic blue. It was a deeper color, like ink kept for signatures solemn, deliberate, final.

A shepherd appeared the way people do on high plateaus: suddenly, as if the land had just remembered to introduce you. He stood with the agenda-less posture of those who live where time still keeps its vows. Two goats negotiated with a slope behind him. His face was chewed into kindness by wind.

He pointed to the water. “Yaye Tso,” he said.

I repeated it, clumsy with the y and the tso, and watched the name become mine to carry. He gestured with a flat hand around, describing a circle in the air. “Crater,” he said, and then smiled to watch the word do its small work in my imagination. I offered biscuits; he accepted one, broke it in half, and returned half to me the formal arithmetic of sharing.

“Road?” he asked, tilting his chin at my bike.

“Wrong,” I said, and we both laughed, because wrong is a word that loses its authority in places like this.

He traced my route back with a finger on the air, then shook his head at a marshy stretch near the edge. “No,” he said. “There soft.” I nodded, grateful for the way advice arrives here clear, unsentimental, and in one-syllable words.

We stood together a while no commentary, no need. The lake held the sky with the tenderness of someone carrying a sleeping child. A breeze ruffled the ink; a shiver ran across the water like the body remembering something it had meant to forget. I picked up a small stone and skimmed it. It skipped twice, then surrendered little ellipses on a sentence the lake preferred to finish without me.

“Some places you don’t discover. They permit you briefly and then teach you how to leave.”

On the ride back, I felt the arithmetic tilt. Detours have consequences you only meet later: fuel math tightening its belt, daylight thinning quicker than maps admit. But I also felt the day had deepened somehow, like a note that had finally found its harmony. I rejoined the main track near Nyoma, the bike pleased to have a line to follow again, my heart carrying a round blue eye I hadn’t known I was looking for.

Later, when the gauge began its little performance and I siphoned petrol under a parachute tarp from a blue drum that looked suspiciously like a cousin to the lake, I realized Yaye Tso had already altered the story. Not with spectacle, but with intimacy: the kind that doesn’t demand a chapter just a paragraph that keeps shining.

I didn’t photograph it. Not because I am virtuous, but because my hands forgot the modern compulsion. The memory arrived clean and stayed that way. Even now, when puddles in cities catch a square of sky, I flash on that ink-blue bowl on the plateau and the shepherd’s measured voice giving it a name.

Yaye Tso.

A wrong turn that made everything else feel more right.

 

Hanle: A Town That Stares Back at Stars

Roads unzip toward Hanle in a straight line that is not straight at all, because wind is a geometry teacher nobody passes. The village appears like a rumor that turned out to be true: whitewashed homes, a gompa hugging the hill, and the Indian Astronomical Observatory perched like a pilgrim who came to pray to the dark.

I found a homestay by doing what one always does in Hanle: slowing down. Tsering, a woman whose age could have been anywhere between thirty and a quiet infinity, showed me a room with a hard bed and a window that understood light. A solar bulb flickered its resume to life; a clay stove exhaled woodsmoke and yak dung. Tea arrived salted, thick, necessary. Dinner promised thukpa and an early night because tomorrow would be long if today had any say in it.

“Why you come so many times?” she asked, not unkindly.

“Because I forget,” I said.

“Forget what?”

I pointed to the window. “How to be small.”

She nodded like someone who had always known this about me.

Night fell like a decision. Stars arrived in a quantity that felt like an accusation. I walked toward the observatory until the path told me I’d had enough. There’s a kind of silence in Hanle that is not absence. It is presence uncompromised wind, sky, and the particular transistor hum of galaxies doing their math. I lay on my back and tried to remember the names of constellations. A satellite scribbled a neat line across one sentence of the universe. The Milky Way looked less like milk and more like a bruise that had finally learned to shine.

“In Hanle, stargazing is not a hobby. It is an apology.”

Back at the house, Tsering’s son slept under a poster of a cricket team, a country far away playing a game that arrives here as blue on TV when the signal feels generous. A dog chose me and lay down outside my door as if to say, “This is our job now. Keep the sky from falling.”

I slept with my socks on. It’s not poetry; it’s survival.

 

Between Yaks and Sky: Meeting the Changpa

Morning introduced itself with a pale sky and a wind that had washed its face. Tsering’s husband took me to a Changpa camp on the plateau, where rebo tents looked like punctuation marks in a sentence the land had been writing long before we learned to read.

Goats murmured; yaks held council with their shoulders. Children watched me with the unafraid eyes of people who have grown up at 15,000 feet and have seen more weather than strangers. Inside the tent, butter tea happened. Tsampa happened barley flour kneaded with tea and butter into a humble, perfect fist of energy. My hands attempted the motions; laughter gathered like kind birds.

Stanzin, a herder with a beard memorized by wind, spoke in short English and long gesture. “Snow late,” he said, then drew a calendar in the air with one finger. “Water less.” He lifted a tin bowl. “Goat more,” he said, and pointed at the white sea bobbing outside. “Market happy,” he added, tapping an invisible ledger on his palm, “but grass angry.” He whistled; a dog materialized, triumphant with the arrival of six late goats. Nothing on the Changthang is on time. Everything is exactly when it is.

We spoke of wolves with respect and of roads with suspicion. A girl handed me a pashmina fiber to roll; I watched it twist into thread, fragile and stubborn, like plans made at altitude.

When I rose to leave, Stanzin put his hand on my shoulder and pressed three times.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“Go slow,” he said.

In Ladakh, advice has a way of pretending to be blessing.

 

Fuel: When Math Meets Mercy

When math runs out and mercy shows up in a blue drum

I left Hanle with cans full, heart fuller, and a plan with margins as wide as the sky. The gauge was its usual liar; at altitude, needles become poets and say things the facts don’t agree with. The odometer became my accountant. I calculated in quiet curses and conservative throttle: kilometers to Puga, to Sumdo, to Karzok, to a place where rumor became petrol in a drum under a tarp.

Somewhere between Niddar and Thit Zarbo La a small pass that wears its altitude lightly the wind turned bureaucrat again, demanding papers from every inch of forward motion. The road discovered potholes it had been saving for me. I opened the jerry can for the first pour funneling as carefully as a man transferring a soul. Petrol ran down the tank’s lip like a blessing I didn’t quite earn.

Two hours later, a second pour. The math didn’t line up. The horizon moved its goalposts. A third pour and no more cans. The line on the reserve needle began to look like a measure of character, not fuel. I learned to ride like a rumor quiet, within myself, clutch a whisper, throttle a promise.

I passed a truck parked at an angle that spelled trouble. Three men sat in its shade, playing cards with the seriousness of surgeons. One looked up, read my fuel face, and lifted a can as if performing a magic trick. “Diesel,” he said with apology, but the fourth man the one who had been winning stood, dusted his palms, and pointed east. “Tea tent, two bends,” he said. “Petrol how much? Maybe.” The sentence had all the precision of a mountain forecast and all the hope of a prayer.

Two bends later, a shack presented itself with the weary glamour of a miracle. A parachute cafe run by a woman whose smile made my lungs feel less ambitious. Noodles boiled in a pan that had seen wars and weddings. Chai deepened into brown enough to qualify as history. Under a sagging blue tarp, away from wind, sat a blue drum staring back with the same solemn color I’d met that morning at Yaye Tso ink-blue, deliberate, final. For a second, the drum and the lake overlapped: two circles of mercy holding the day in place.

“How much?” I asked, patting the tank with a tenderness I reserve for animals and engines.

She tilted her head. “You need. We have.” She named a price that recognized need and refused to exploit it. I wanted to hug the drum; I hugged the air instead.

We siphoned petrol with a hose that had known other mouths. The first mouthful carried the memory of dinosaurs. I spat and laughed and coughed and, out of habit, traced the hose’s curve like a shoreline without meaning to, I followed Yaye Tso’s contour in the air. The lake had already taught my hands a shape for rescue.

“On the Changthang, fuel is not a commodity. It’s a handshake sometimes blue as a cratered lake.”

I paid, ate, thanked, and left with a tank that was no longer a question.

 

Tso Moriri: When Water Teaches You Stillness

The lake didn’t appear so much as it collected itself from sky. Tso Moriri sat like a patient animal, all spine and breath. Karzok leaned against it with the weary confidence of a village that has negotiated with wind for centuries. Prayer flags performed their endless task; a gompa opened its doors to my dust and doubt.

I found a room by doing the same as Hanle slowing until I stopped. A woman named Padma showed me a bed, a bulb, a window, a kettle, and a smile that made apology unnecessary. The view the kind of thing we pretend we don’t come for was an unpunctuated sentence of blue, white, brown, and the particular green that only high-altitude grass can risk.

Standing at the water’s edge is an education in breathing. The lake inhales light and exhales silence. I watched a cloud try on its reflection and decide to keep it. A child tossed stones whose sound took longer than physics to arrive. A dog with a monk’s face followed me and then forgave me for not knowing where I was going.

Dinner was dal, rice, saag that had negotiated with frost, and a bowl of soup that tasted like memory. Power came and went, a friendly stranger. The generator coughed once and remembered its job. Outside, stars rehearsed the same play with a different cast.

I slept early and badly, the way you sleep when beauty is a kind of noise.

 

Storm Lesson on the Empty Road

I left Karzok toward Sumdo under a white sky that had not yet decided what it wanted. The road if we agree to call it that sat on the earth like an afterthought. Kiang, the wild asses, watched me with the moral confidence of animals who have never needed humans. A group of cranes arrowed toward the lake and then changed their mind at the last second, as if reluctant to share the secret.

Somewhere in the big nowhere, weather arrived without introduction. Wind sharpened into a weapon; snow decided to try May and liked it. Hail found my visor and asked for attention in Morse. The road, which had been pretending to be benevolent, argued itself into pieces.

I did the only three things I know how to do on a motorcycle when the world rearranges itself: loosen arms, lower speed, widen eyes. Focus became not a skill but a vow. Ten meters at a time; nothing else existed. The Changthang has a way of shrinking the universe to a sentence you can actually read.

I saw a BRO crew up ahead men in parkas hunched over a task no one would thank them for. I pulled over; one waved me into their circle as if I had earned it. “Sit,” he said, and “Wait,” and “Drink.” The tea was sweet. The wind was a fact. We looked at the sky like men who had once been boys and would be again.

“Where to?” someone asked.

“Back to the road,” I said.

They laughed and returned to making it.

When the storm had done what it came to do remind us who’s in charge it left with the same suddenness. Sun burned holes in cloud. The world changed expression and then pretended it hadn’t.

I rode on, heart quieter, hands calmer. Sometimes, survival is just somebody else’s work done well.

 

Tso Kar: White Rim, Wild Wind

If Tso Moriri is opera, Tso Kar is a whisper. The lake lies shallow and shy, its rim salted white, its moods closer to the earth. The wind does most of the talking here; dust devils throw tantrums and then apologize by becoming nothing again.

I watched a herd of kiang cross the flats with a discipline most armies would envy. Marmots popped up like bad ideas and then improved the day by being themselves. A truck appeared on the far side of the lake and took a full ten minutes to become a truck.

At Puga hot springs, the earth exhaled its secrets in a smell that made science seem like gossip. A man waved and pointed to the ground. “Careful,” he said. I took one step back and understood a little more about why superstition does well at altitude: anything can happen, and often does.

I wanted to stay. I wanted to go. The day made both possible and neither wise. A shepherd boy in a woolen cap frowned at my camera and then smiled when I lowered it. “Where from?” he asked. I said, “Often,” and he nodded as if that were a place.

 

Puncture: A Minor Tragedy with a Proper Ending

The Changthang has a sense of humor. It waited until the sky was a perfect blue and the wind had agreed to coffee before placing a nail where only my rear tire wanted to step. The wobble, the whine, the heavy sigh of rubber remembering humility. I rolled to a stop on a road that insisted it wasn’t one.

You learn the choreography after the first dozen times in India: center stand, stones for chocks, gloves off, tube out, fingers black, language darker, breath even. The patch kit did its magic; the spare tube looked at me with suspicion. From the middle distance, two women materialized with a curiosity that felt like kindness. One offered water I didn’t need; the other offered advice I did. “More soap,” she said, and mimed a slickness I’d forgotten. The bead seated with the satisfying little pop that feels like a good decision.

I paid them with thanks and a packet of biscuits, which they refused and then accepted because I was stubborn.

“Out here, help is a verb. Payment is a smile you remember for weeks.”

Back on the road, the bike found its voice again. I found mine where I’d left it around the next bend.

 

The Long Line to Debring: When Patience Becomes Fuel

The line that leads from Tso Kar to Debring is a geography lesson drawn with wind. The famous More Plains sprawled like a stadium built for sky. Somewhere to the left, a convoy rehearsed the art of carrying a country on their backs. Somewhere to the right, a dust devil practiced being a god.

I stopped counting kilometers. I counted cranes, kiang, and the number of times I considered stopping and did not. I counted breaths, the five-two-six that had become my rosary. I counted yellow signs that made their way from joke to scripture and back.

At Debring, the familiar T-junction offered its exam: Manali by way of the many-headed Lachulung and Baralacha; or Leh by the stern kindness of Tanglang La. The sky chose for me. I took the road home. The pass rose like a thought I’d had before. Snow kept its counsel. The engine, now as tired as I would later be, did not complain.

The descent into Rumtse came with the long sigh that is the body’s thank you. The valley colored itself back into greens and browns my eyes remembered how to trust. At Gya, a child waved from a rooftop and then pretended not to care; at Upshi a shepherd dog allowed me to be on his road; at Karu a cafe gave me tea sweet enough to qualify as therapy.

 

Back in Leh: Small Luxuries, Large Quiet

I rolled into Leh with all the drama of a tired man bringing bread home. The guesthouse courtyard was a geography of familiar faces: the owner who never asked for my name anymore; the boy who’d once wanted a ride and now wanted my gloves; the dog who had decided to retire near my room and watch sunsets from there.

I washed the day off my face and left it in a towel, ate thukpa until it turned into gratitude, and slept the sleep of people who have practiced being small and succeeded for a few hours.

Morning came with the soft insistence of routines. Mechanic yard, chain lube, the friendly lie “All good?” and the honest answer, “Enough.” I returned the jerry cans to their usual sulk-ready places, folded the permits into the notebook, and made a list of names I’d met: Tsering, Stanzin, Padma, the BRO man with a laugh like a hammer, the woman with the blue drum, the boy who called “often” a place.

 

What the Changthang Taught Me (Again)

I used to think the Changthang taught you about distance. It does, but that’s the least of it. It teaches you ratio the mathematics of enough: enough fuel, enough daylight, enough water, enough humility. It teaches you trust not as a sentimental idea but as a set of transactions: a siphon passed from stranger to stranger; a drum of petrol priced with fairness; a dog that decides you are worth guarding for a night. It teaches you attention the ten meters you can see and steer into; the kiang you yield to not because law says so but because pride would be ridiculous otherwise. It teaches you speech that the right number of words is fewer than you think. It teaches you faith, if by faith you mean believing in what is not guaranteed: weather, help, your own hands.

It also teaches you the art of being unimpressive. I don’t mean unimpressed I was impressed every five minutes. I mean unimpressive: riding without show, arriving without announcement, leaving no mark except the ones wind erases at once.

“Home is not where you’re from. It’s where you learn to be small and are loved for it.”

Ladakh became home not because I knew the roads, but because the roads knew me. They knew my failures and forgave them. They knew my habits and tolerated them. They knew I would return and did not clap for it.

 

A Map for Next Time (Because There’s Always a Next Time)

People ask for GPX files, fuel points, timing charts. I could give you those, and maybe I will, knowing full well the Changthang will change them by the time you go. Instead, here’s the only map that never lies:

• Pack lightly. Carry the tools you know how to use. Learn how to use one you do not.
• Fuel early, not late. A half tank on the Changthang is a confession, not a comfort.
• Ask the road. If it says stop, stop. If it says wait, wait. If it says look look.
• Buy tea. For the drum owner, the BRO crew, the jawan, the woman with the parachute tarp. You may never need them again. You already did.
• Say thanks. In English, in a nod, in rupees, in the way you ride the next ten meters.

 

Epilogue: Between Yaks and Sky

Back in the city months later, I’d wake to a noise my body misheard as wind and find it was a fan. A puddle on a road after rain would flash the color of Tso Kar and then remember it was just a puddle. The smell of petrol on my fingers would arrive days after I’d washed my hands. Someone would ask, “How was the ride?” and I’d say “good” because we have made that word do too much work.

If pressed, I would say this: the Changthang is where you ride until your wants grow small enough to carry. It is where you meet people who cannot afford your hurry and will not buy it. It is where a drum of fuel is a sacrament; where a dog is a door; where a boy names a place “often” and you know exactly what he means. And sometimes, when you take a wrong turn, a lake names you back Yaye Tso opening like an ink-blue eye to watch over the rest of your day.

In my notebook, the last line from that trip reads: “Between yaks and sky, I remembered how to ask for less and receive more.” Months later, city puddles briefly caught a square of sky and for a heartbeat remembered Yaye Tso’s gaze. I do not know how many more times I will return. Enough, I hope, to keep forgetting and relearning the same lesson: that off-grid miles are not an escape from the world, but a way back into it thinner air, truer breath, horizons running low so your eyes remember to lift.

And when the wind in some future year asks again, the answer will be the same. Strap the cans. Count the breaths. Ride into the sentence the land is writing. Between yaks and sky. Where fuel, faith, and horizons run low and everything that matters runs deep.