TREADING LIGHTLY AMID LADAKH'S WETLANDS

Outlook Traveller

We left Leh at 4am. As we cruised through snoring villages, lines of whitewashed chortens slipped by like ghosts, and ancient forts and monasteries loomed overhead. We traversed the Indus Valley quickly on smooth empty roads, and were soon winding our way up into the mountains. Slabs of winter-hardened snow lay by the road, grey like granite in the moonless night. Gradually the snow began to creep across the road, first in blackened patches, then in fresh white. The jeep's heater kept us warm, but it couldn't stop the cold from slicing through the floor, making our feet restless.

We were headed for Pangong Lake, which lies like a giant snake, 130 kilometres long, partly in India, partly in disputed territory. About one quarter of it lies in Ladakh. Another quarter lies in the Aksai Chin region, claimed by India, held by China. The rest is in what some people refer to as China, and others prefer to call Tibet.

Geographically and ecologically, we were more in Tibet than India, on its vast western plateau known as the Changtang. There are 22 wetlands on the Ladakh side, havens for many unique species which are now endangered in Tibet. Inaccessible to tourists until 1996, these windswept borderlands are a place of desolate beauty, and home to a nomadic lifestyle which is slowly disappearing.

Finally we crested the Changla pass, which a sign told us was 17,800 feet (5,500m). Ahead, the sun was painting amber streaks on the snow. We leaned towards it, wishing it on ourselves as we descended into a valley dominated by a gigantic crag, its puckered rock making demon faces like some protector deity from a monastery gate. The mountains were apricot, plum, champagne, sometimes crinkled with veins of snow. A frozen stream threaded its way through a sandy bed, the colour of fried egg.

India and China fought a bitter war over the region in 1962, but the two sides have a healthy respect for each other these days. Indian army camps were everywhere, barren collections of crumpled corrugate iron. But a new presence is making itself felt in the region: ten thousand tourists a year, who are starting to impact the delicate ecological balance.

Pangong announced itself as a triangle of silver at the end of a geological rainbow. Gone was the harshness of the valley road. Serried peaks shimmered above the water, ethereal amid a blue haze, subtly shifting colour and shape as they marched into the distance.

"Is that Tibet?" I asked Namgyal, our driver, keen for a romantic image. "No, it's India," came the reply. There was obviously more to the lake than met the eye.

We pushed on to Pangmik, the last village before the road is closed to civilians. A lone horseman skirted the lake shore, sometimes walking, sometimes riding, the saddle blanket a splash of Tibetan reds and blues. We stayed with him, besotted by the storybook image.

Lunch was a handful of biscuits, and it was time to go back. The valley was glorious in the sunshine as we retraced our journey, as chestnut horses grazed in stone enclosures and greenish-yellow moss carpeted the streambeds. But the wind ripped at our ears whenever we got out of the jeep. We pushed on back to Leh, conscious that we had another early start the following morning.

If Pangong suggests the hallucinatory beauty of Tibet, our next destination, Tso Moriri lake to the southeast, is a haven for some of its fabled wildlife. Species such as the Tibetan gazelle and the kiang, or wild ass, endangered in Tibet since the famines and slaughter that followed the Chinese invasion, find a haven on the Ladakhi side, much as thousands of Tibetan refugees did in the 1960s. The area is also home to blue sheep, black and brown wolves, red foxes, Tibetan gazelles, snow leopards, Asiatic ibex, marmots and mouse hare.

We followed the Indus upriver, its milky green waters gradually accumulating platforms of ice and gradually dwindling to a frozen thread. The route was a corridor of ochre   mountainsides, which at one stage turned to burgundy as dense as an ink blot, before finally transforming into rolling hills. The small lake of Tasang Tso lay before us, a disc of water beneath a mountain tiger striped with snow. Four kiang, gorgeous creatures with reddish backs and cream chests, grazed at the far edge as we skirted the lake. Entering a shallow valley, we descended until we hit Tso Moriri, a 20 kilometre stretch of salt water encircled by golden hills and two of the highest mountains in Ladakh.

We pulled up at a nomad camp where scores of tiny lambs bleated in stone enclosures, and mahogany faced women and children greeted us awkwardly, or fled into yak wool tents. As roads are built in the area and the government subsidises food supplies, more and more nomads are abandoning this harsh life. Salt mining at nearby Tso Kar lake, once a lucrative business for nomad families who traded the commodity for meat, grain and wool in the Zanskar valley, is no longer practised, while others are turning to rearing pashmina, which some environmentalists argue is doing unsustainable damage to the grasslands.

A little further on, we were confronted with the impact of our own presence: a fence to prevent jeeps driving too close to the lake's shore and damaging nesting grounds. A number of organisations, including WWF, are becoming concerned about the impact of tourism on the area, and are developing policies which call for tourists only to camp in designated areas, only to drive and walk on designated trails, and not to approach or disturb animals.

Yaks and horses grazed on the foreshores as we arrived in Karzok, a tiny village that constitutes the only permanent settlement on the lake. By the end of April the first of about 1,000 bar headed geese would begin to arrive   here to breed. Tso Kar, four hours drive away, is even richer. Each year five or six pairs of the highly endangered black necked crane come here to breed, along with ruddy shelduck and about 70 other species. On its twin lake Tsartsapuk, hundreds of great crested grebe converge between May and August, making floating nests.

As we drove out the following day, we came across another herd of kiang, twenty or so strong. They would soon be gone, up to the higher pastures, along with the nomads and their herds, as summer arrives and the lakes become the preserve of the birds. We would be gone even sooner, from this exquisite place which humans have so far failed to conquer.