Travels in Himachal Pradesh V: The world’s most treacherous road

From Kaza the Spiti river winds for miles Eastwards towards Tibet through steep narrow gorges, interspersed with all too brief openings of wider, fertile valleys. This sixth day of our trip was to be one of the longest, most challenging and most inspiring.

Above us, the rocky mountains towered unbelievably high, stretching up to the clear blue skies. Huge scree slopes with impossible paths traced across them alternated with enormous rocky outcrops. It was as though nature itself was challenging humankind to defy it. These mountains that had taken millennia to form, thrust up from the very foundations of the earth.

And humans had risen to the challenge.

Our road tracked along the side of the river: sometimes cutting through hard rocks close to the river bed itself, at other times, rising high above it in multiple bends to overcome the sheer rock faces rising above the raging torrents.

After a stop for breakfast and a visit to the home of a student from the school Laji and Sheila had established in Manali, now a primary teacher in a small school in Tabo, we carried on Eastwards to the checkpoint at Sumdo. Here, the river turned south, skirting the Tibetan border and continuing down through ever more challenging gorges.

Signs along the side of the road proudly proclaimed this to be ‘the world’s most treacherous road’. And, to complement, this, the Border Roads Organisation (BRO) had commissioned a series of road safety signs, all bearing the signature Deepak. Whoever Deepak is, he clearly loves playing with words, so we were treated to a host of amusing philosophical musings, puns and rhymes:

‘Always Alert, Avoid Accidents’  

‘After whisky, driving risky’

‘A cat has nine lives, you only have one’

‘Stay alert, accidents hurt’

 

Once again, we had to marvel at the skill of our driver, and that of the countless other tourist vans, army vehicles, trucks and buses, as they made their way along this awesome highway. The BRO is working hard on a highway improvement scheme, gradually transforming this unsurfaced, single track road into a wide two-lane highway. But most of it remains single track (without passing places), and much either untarmacked or undergoing grading and surfacing. The most unbelievable incidents came when two vehicles met on one of these stretches. It is amazing just how narrow a road two large trucks can pass on, particularly where there is no clear edge to the road, a sheer cliff rising above you (and often overhanging above you) on one side, and an equally sheer cliff dropping down to the tumbling river far below. It is a wonder there aren’t more tragedies along these roads.

There seem to be three main occupations in the Spiti Valley: growing fruit and vegetables for export (the cool, high altitudes particularly favouring apples and peas, which are shipped out each season in trucks piled high with boxes of produce); the tourist industry, with all the restaurants, hotels and home-stays, tour experiences, and building works to support it; and road maintenance.

The skill of the engineers building and maintaining the roads is quite phenomenal. Each winter, the harsh temperature (dropping to -30°C or less), snows and rock falls wreak their havoc on the existing roads, so from April to October, there is a constant programme of clearing, regrading and surfacing, let alone any upgrading of the main routes. In places, the roadway has been literally chiselled out of a sheer, unforgiving rock face. In others, the challenge is to create a secure surface on the loose shingle of a scree slope.

Part way down the South-flowing route, we were held up for an hour as a huge digger worked to clear a rockfall that had completely blocked the road. We concluded this was a planned part of the upgrading programme, as there were workmen above the road at this point, painstakingly drilling dynamite holes in the solid rock. So much of this treacherous work is done by hand, with ancient pneumatic drills, hammers and stone chisels, all wielded on the sides of these precipitous rocks and with a minimum of safety equipment.

After another police checkpoint, the Spiti river joined the Sutlej river flowing through from Tibet and turned West into the region of Kinnaur. As darkness fell, the landscape gradually transformed, becoming increasingly green as we once more came out of the rain shadow of the lesser Himalayas. The road, too, became easier, with more and more of it paved, mostly wider, and with clear, marked sides. The remote, barren landscape was being replaced by signs of industry and commerce, huge hydro-electric projects, and sprawling towns spreading up the mountain sides, their myriad of lights shining out in the darkness.