Pangong Tso stretches across the high-altitude desert of Ladakh at more than 4,200 metres, its waters shifting from turquoise to cobalt with the changing light. Surrounded by stark mountains and almost treeless terrain, the lake extends for roughly 135 kilometres, with much of it lying across the border in Tibet. Its extraordinary colour, silence, and immense scale make it one of the defining landscapes of the Himalayas.
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Three chortens facing a valley that was desert until somebody dug the first channel.Built facing down the valley, watching the one road anything has ever arrived by.Bactrian camels, left behind when the Silk Road stopped needing them. They found other work.You get about four minutes of this. The dunes have been waiting a few thousand years.The rainbow lands on a mountain nobody can get to. That is usually where they land.Fresh tarmac laid across a riverbed. The river will want it back.Snowmelt, about an hour old, still deciding which way to go.The loudest thing for twenty kilometres is ankle-deep.From up here the village is a green thread. From down there it is the whole world.Half of this water is in another country. It doesn't look divided from here.Twenty seconds later. I could not make myself put the camera down.The colour is not an exaggeration. Nobody believes that either.Wind came up and the lake stopped being a mirror. It was never trying to be one.The colour drains from the bottom up. By the time it reaches the peaks, everyone has gone inside.One cloud still holding the sun, long after the water gave it up.Everyone drove off an hour ago. This is the part they missed.
