After the tight hairpins the valley opens and looks similar to the landscape described by Mr Piercy in our 4th year Geography class at school, ie a U-shaped glacial valley, or is it? Closer inspection does not show other features like horizontal scrapes in the rock. Higher up the sides of the valley you can see what looks like water erosion marks from when the river ran at a higher level. This must be more like the Grand Canyon, ie the river did most of the work.
We stop briefly at Tabo where there is an ancient monastery. Apparently the Dalai Lama plans to retire here one day. It's more of a food refuelling stop than a sight-see, and there's not really an opportunity to have a good look round. There's supposed to be a very important "Gompa" here, one of the most important for Tibetan Buddists. I do have time to pick up a few prayer flags to adorn my bike. These flags are seen everywhere in this predominantly Buddhist region of India.
We visit the Dhankar monastery perched up on a hill overlooking where the Spiti river is joined by another. We stop and climb the last 50m or so (vertical) by foot. I'm still in my biker gear and it is really hard work. When I get to the top my GPS receiver reckons I'm at 3900m. I've definitely never been that high and the thin air explains my difficulty. The spectacular views are definitely worth the climb. There's a small village set on top of the hill here and looking at the location and what's around it (rocks, lots of 'e.m), it's hard to imagine how people live. Life must be really tough, especially in the winter when this place is blanketed in metres of snow and the roads are shut. Somehow people do survive, eking out a living with the limited resources they have. Even shit (cow dung) has value, as they use it to line walls for insulation and for fuel when dried (you see piles of turds dotted around drying like this). One imagines that the spectacle of the views might become mundane to the locals - do they tire of such beauty and does it become like an inner city vista appears to us?
The climb to reach Dhankar is another amazing road, yet more hairpins, but these are extra challenging because of the loose dirt on the corners. On the way up an elephant jumps out and places a large rock just in front of my wheel as I'm exiting a corner. Normally I can avoid or bump over these, but my prayer flags have obviously taken the day off, and I go down and manage to snap the clutch lever in the process. A mechanic further back in the convoy soon reaches me in a short while and changes the lever in about 5minutes flat. Amazing! That's one of the key advantages of the Enduro event over other similar trips I've heard about - the backup support is superb. Incidentally the same elephant that got me jumped out twice on another rider on the way down. I think Colin one of the route marshals, managed to run over it to make sure it couldn't do it again!
Kaza is another small town with a few shops, but it's bigger than Tabo. I manage to call home from a local PCO (no connectable GSM coverage since before Nako) and get my hair cut for 20 Rupees - that's about 30cents! We are spread out at a number of hotels in Kaza and will have an early start tomorrow. 5:30! Ouch again.
Since there's been no network coverage in last few days, these posts will be slightly out of date. Today is Thursday - I think?
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