Sleep didn’t seem to come. Even after last day’s ride which was tiring, I kept waking up every 2 hours or so. Around 3am, I felt I was struck with viral fever, my body was aching, sleep wasn’t coming by and I wasn’t just feeling good enough. Somehow time just passed, wriggling in the nice warm thick soft cotton blankets. I kept hearing Siddarth wakeup, sneezing he was choking ’cause of his heavy cold. Kept muttering something loudly, only guy who seemed to be dozing was Sourabh who had got the injection for Altitude Sickness at Bagso.

Leh, 2 Sep, 2015

After a tiring and restless night, I finally decided I couldn’t fake sleep anymore, Siddarth was already awake. It was around 7am. I woke up with heavy legs and arms, I checked myself if I had temperature, but I was lucky not to have it, perhaps it was just altitude sickness.

Have complete rest on the first day

Last day’s thought started ringing again, I declared..

मुझे नही लगता है हमे आज Khardungla जाना चाहिए !

Siddarth with his bad cold was happy to accept the decision, Sourabh who was yet to fully get up from the comforts of his रजाई heard it, smiled and dug further in the bed.

We decided today we shan’t do any physical activity, even the long  walk up the road! The driver we had booked last day called, we told a friend wasn’t feeling well, and we won’t be going to Khardungla today.

We called for the nodding Padma and asked her for tea and toast. Post that we stood atop the guest house’s top overlooking the beautiful surroundings, Poplar trees which lined up almost every street of J&K looked ever so wonderful ! The trees with their almost white looking trunk grew tall and straight, the branches coming off radially and growing upwards. The leaves of the tree somewhat similar to a Peepal leaf fluttered beautifully in the Ladakh air. An aesthetically very appealing tree, I thought it as the Ashoka tree of the Himalayas.

The crisp cold air was touched with the soft warmth of early morning sun. It felt just so good to feel it, the low oxygen didn’t seem to matter so much right now.

In the afternoon, we continued with the butter, jam, mayo and bread lunch from last night. All the while we simply stuck ourselves in the thick blankets, pulling it up right to the neck and resting back at the wall and simply talking and looking at golden hue the sun brought inside the guest house. The guest house was a typical house, the ceiling made up cement/concrete but laid over long, almost circular cross-section trunks of Poplar trees, each with a similar diameter of a foot. The parallel trunks supporting another smaller rod like trunks of smaller diameter of around 1-2 inches. Each of the trunks nicely varnished giving it a golden brown warm feel to it. The windows too were having a similar feel to them, the sunlight that came through it was adding to the yellow.

After lunch we heard kids talking downstairs, before we could figure out who it was, 3 kids came upstairs. Each of them about 4 inches taller than the other. The eldest was a girl so was the youngest with a embroidered and laced white top, the middle fellow seemed like a mischievous lad. We talked, or atleast tried to talk with them. The mischievous one was infact a girl and the youngest a boy! We couldn’t really figure out their names, younests of them was Tenzing,  a common Tibetian name for a boy.

By evening, we felt a lot stronger, the slightly heavy head was completely normal. We decided to go out for a dinner on that long road and confirmed with our driver for the next day’s visit to the ever inviting PangongTso.

Even though we hadn’t done anything apart from just sitting on the bed, the sleep was wonderfully simple and deep.