The leaving begins before you know it.
At Puga, sulfur rises from the earth in threads of steam. The ground breathing what it has held for millennia. My wife and I hop between pools of scalding water, laughing like children who have discovered the planet itself can be playful.
We are alone here except for the geothermal vents sighing.
For a moment, the journey ahead doesn’t matter.
Tsokar
The lake appears without announcement. White-rimmed. Salt crusting its edges. Unlike the one we passed on our way to Tso Moriri—the one we drove by without stopping—this one makes us pause.
The water holds the sky. I cannot tell where one ends and the other begins.
We don’t stay long. There’s a pull now. Forward and back at once.
What I’m Leaving
I won’t see Pangong Tso shift from turquoise to indigo as the sun moves. Won’t see Tso Moriri in its evening stillness, or its morning gold, or whatever color it becomes at the hour I’ll be somewhere else.
The lakes continue their conversations with light. I’m leaving before the sentences finish.
Climbing
The road climbs toward Tanglang La. Switchback after switchback. The air thins. At 17,582 feet, prayer flags snap in wind—colors faded to soft whispers. A small painted shrine. Yellow steps. Blue walls against barren slope.
I look back the way we came.
The lakes are there. Holding light. Shifting color. Existing with a completeness I only partially witnessed.
Fragment: Ibex
On the descent, they materialize on the hillside. Eight or nine. Coats the exact color of scree.
They watch us with the calm indifference of those who belong.
We stop. They don’t move.
Then they turn and pick their way higher.
We continue down.
The Silence I’m Leaving
At the lakes, there was water and mountains and sky. That was all.
Wind. Water. Stone. Light moving across surfaces that have watched light move for millennia.
The silence was so complete it became a thing you could feel. Like altitude. Like cold.
Now, descending toward Leh, I can feel that silence ending.
The Road
In the photographs it curves through immense landscape—thin line against massive slopes, winding through folds that have been there longer than the idea of roads.
Someone surveyed this. Someone decided where to cut. Someone maintains it—patches cracks, clears rockfall, marks edges with small painted stones.
The road is an argument with the landscape.
The landscape permits it. Temporarily.
Every meter traveled is a meter of distance from what I’m leaving.
I watch the kilometers accumulate.
What the Passes Took
Hours of tedium. Each switchback looking like the last. The landscape changing so gradually you can’t say when brown became gray, when vegetation became stone.
Bored. Uncomfortable. The body laboring against thin air. Every breath noticed.
But even the tedium had clarity. Even boredom at altitude is boredom stripped to its essence. No distractions from the boredom. Just: this is boring, and you’re here, and there’s nothing to do but continue.
Scale
The mountains show what I couldn’t hold in real time: the wrong scale of everything. Those folds look close enough to touch. They’re kilometers away.
Brown. Gray. Rust. Occasional streaks of mineral green.
Layers of rock tilted vertical. Ancient seabed turned to stone, lifted into sky. Time compressed into stripes.
The light at this altitude defines every fold with precision that seems engineered.
Everything visible. Nothing close.
What Stays Behind
Right now—this exact moment—Pangong Tso is some specific shade of blue I’ll never see. The angle of sun, the quality of atmosphere, the temperature, the wind—all conspiring to create a color that exists for maybe an hour, then changes into something else equally temporary.
Tso Moriri is holding light on its surface. The kiang are grazing. Or not grazing. Moving or still.
The nomads are tending their animals. Cooking. Sleeping. Living their lives in that landscape I visited briefly and left.
The ibex are on their slopes. The prayer flags are carrying their mantras into wind. The geothermal vents at Puga are still breathing steam into cold air.
All of it continuing. None of it needing me to continue.
The unwitnessed moments. The colors I won’t see. The complete day unfolding at the lakes while I travel away from them.
The presence of what I’ve left behind. The absence of me there.
Arrival
By the time Leh appears in the valley, the light goes horizontal and warm. Whitewashed stupas catch it.
The air marginally thicker. Breathing marginally easier.
We’ve descended. Returned to electricity humming, running water, voices from adjacent rooms. Generator noise. Clocks requiring attention. The constant small distractions that pass for normal life.
The wilderness is behind us now. The high passes. The lakes doing things I’ll imagine but never verify. The silence replaced entirely.
Changed, perhaps. Or unchanged and just convinced I’m changed because I want the difficulty to have meant something.
Either way: unable to stay.
The lakes will be different tomorrow. Different light. Different wind. Different color.
I won’t see it.
The road having done what roads do.
Led away.
