A month or so ago I went to Leh, a small city in the Himalayas in Northern India.
Lovely place but tough on a sea level dwelling person, lugging the suitcases up the second floor of the hotel for the first time nearly floored me due to hypoxia.
I put together a few videos with the daytrips we did to the Khardung La mountain pass and Pangong Tso lake.
So here’s the way up to Khardung La, the pass is reputed to be the highest motorable pass in the world, but that’s not quite true since the real height is about 5.400 meters rather than the stated 5.600, there’s a couple mountain passes in Nepal (I think) that are slightly higher.
Still pretty darn high up there, we got stuck about an hour about 5 minutes into the return trip because an army truck broke down on the road, I got a taste of what sleep apnea is then, every time I dozed off in the back seat I would stop breathing altogether.
Although the distance from Leh to Khardung La is about 20 kilometers the trip takes about an hour and a half. Quite bumpy and although the narrow road with sharp corners (tangent to Paradise) are enough for a white knuckle ride, the most worrying thing are rock falls, on the way back I saw lots of rocks had fallen into the road, a boulder, half the size of a car embedded in a crater in the middle of the road, it definitely wasn’t there on the way in.
Next Pangong Tso through the Chang La pass(La means mountain pass in the Ladakh language). The lake is about 180km from Leh, we left at 7 AM and arrived five hours later, shaken and stirred, at some points the “road” is incredibly rough and at some other points, for example between the lake camp and Sakti village we had to drive through a mountain rock slide that had washed away the road the previous year, very bumpy indeed.
On the way back it began first to rain (at lake level, 4500 meters) and then to snow profusely going up the mountains. The road looked unnerving on the way in, but with the fog, snow and wet road it was plain scary on the way back. My girlfriend saw a car that had fallen down the mountain side.
I had brought with me a RC airplane and a tricopter with cameras, I wanted to get some aerial footage of the place and see if the things would fly at all at such height. Flying the tricopter (a Y shaped thing with three propeller on each end) was tricky since the air density at that height is about 60% from sea level; from all I know this may even be an altitude world record for this kind of aircraft.
So here’s the tricopter video, shot with a GoPro HD Hero camera, too bad the weather wasn’t very nice that day. I had only two weeks to learn to fly the thing before the trip so it bumbles around a bit.
And the airplane video here, keep in mind that it’s a very small plane, about the size of a pigeon and weighting around 120 grams, so it has a tiny camera not as good as the GoPro, also it bounces around in the turbulence more than the heavier tricopter.
The border between India and China (Tibet) cuts right through the lake, so I’m glad my little UAVs weren’t shot down by one side or the other… 