In the second episode of High in the Himalayas Andi Wittmann & Guido Tschug suffer the effects of Altitude over 4000m, drink ginger and garlic tea, and have a near death experience crossing melt water rivers. Hopefully they get acclimated for episode 3 and can’t start doing some proper riding on those massive mountains!
Pain digs his way through to my consciousness. A dull hammer knocks from inside at my temples and wakes me up again. Obviously I try to turn around and find a better position to fall asleep, but after a thirty minute battle I give up. My nose is stuffed, the dry air tortures my throat. I want to go home.
But let´s start were we ended up last time. Attentive readers might have noticed that I wrote under the first episode that we were 60 pretty intense hours into our trip and really attentive readers might have noticed that 60 hours hadn’t past over after the first episode.
So, after the first day and honestly just one beer each in Solang we had about three hours of sleep before leaving the place at 3am in the direction of dry unshredded soil.The Rohtang Pass is known for being one of the most deadly roads on planet earth. Also because of the traffic that we wanted to avoid. By the way, Rohtang unfortunately means ‘the land of the dead’ – good luck.
The pass also devides the humid and green parts of the Himalaya and the dry high altitude valleys. This is why we came here. We pretty much stayed consistently over 4000 meter and after another 12 hour ride over roads that sometimes reminded me more of singletrack we arrive at our camp in Sarchu, an army controlled area inside the centre point of nowhere, to use the well known words of Cam McCaul.
Falling asleep was not easy, even now there is finally time to really sleep after meeting some 60 hours ago at the Munich airport. Coming to this altitude and not having the time to proper acclimatise costs some pain. The morning after is described in the beginning and I’m still proud that we took some pictures the same day worthy of being shown. Enjoy episode 2.
