Hot and Dusty

Woke up in the morning, got out of the tent and went to see how Scott was doing, he was still asleep. I thought best to leave him until he awoke naturally. This only took 15 minutes as the sun heats up the tents massively. Thankfully he was feeling a lot better and was wanting to get going. We packed up and set off to get breakfast, were Lara got a soft spot for a local baby girl in the dhaba, I told her it was insulting to offer money for a child and she sulked.Scott was able to eat and once done we bought another vast amount of water as we were to stop in the middle of no where again tonight.

Scott and Lara climbing out of Pang. The views as always were stunning, I had never seen landscape like this, the air was extremely dry and as soon as you drank water, 30 seconds after your mouth felt like Ghandi's flip flop. We all hoped we had enough water.
Scott was obviously feeling better. We gave him all our power gels to try and get some energy back in him. We climbed up to the 'More Plains' a high altitude dessert at 4700m. I am not sure any of us where prepared for just how dry and hot it was going to be.

It was just a huge dust bowel. The road disappeared and appeared leaving you to make your way in between it as you saw fit while trying to avoid deep sand.

There were a few reminders for us to keep going, again another place humans are not suppose to live. The More Plains are 60km long, with a very slight down hill gradient. As the day went on it got hotter and hotter, Scott and I really struggled with the heat.
I think even 'Lara the lizard' said she was a bit too hot which was really saying something. Then out of nowhere came Stevie, one of our friends we had met on the bus from Delhi.

It was great to see a friendly face, and it really lifted our spirits to see him. We chatted for about 10 minutes as it was too hot to stand still for too long, made plans for a beer in Leh and off he zoomed. All of us secretly thinking, "motorbikes, now there is a good idea".

After a few hours of the heat, Scott and I started to overheat. Being a desert it is not the obvious place to find shade, but not put off lightly, we found some and sat there for a while cooling down.

As we looked down the valley there was cloud forming.

With the promise of bigger shade we sped off to find it. It was glorious, and again another lift to the moral. It is amazing how such small simple things like shade and friends that most people take for granted can really boosts ones moral.

By now Scott was starting to really suffer, his sickness over the last two days had really taken it out of him. Thankfully we came across a dhaba, no one ever told us it was up here and it wasn't on the map (hardly a surprise as it is a useless map). To our great delight the Spanish were there, we had caught up with them.

We decided to ride a few more Kms to get to a quiet place just below the pass that we were to ride up the following day.

We arrived in a seemingly tranquil spot and pitched tents (picture above taken in the morning, that is why the sky is blue). Well we thought it was a quiet spot. Out of no where, around 40 of the local road workers appeared and just started watching us. Lara needed to go to the toilet and there was no where to have privacy with them all around. We thought they would just get bored and leave. After 40 minutes of them just staring at us we had enough. They were not rude, just curious. But I had to ask them to please leave us in peace.

I took this picture when they left, I daren't take my camera out whilst they where standing there as it might have given them something more to be interested in and we were trying to be as boring as possible! The picture shows about a 1/3 of them walking back to there camp. Lara was relieved.

We spent the night chatting with Luiz and Pepe. Pepe tried to steal my wife off me, he produced three bars of Lara's favourite chocolate. She had now gone the best part of 2 weeks without dark chocolate. David who? She was gone.

Once again they were so generous with their food, we with our freeze dried magic meals, them with amazing Spanish hams and cheese. Thank you Pepe and Luiz, you two are great.

The sunlight faded and it was time to go to bed, as tomorrow was the biggest pass of the trip - the Tanglang La.