Working in India: Ponda Views (Part 4)

One of the great things of living in the Himalayas (or at least their foothills) for two years was the views that greeted me every morning when I left my room in Ponda for work. Views like this:

Looking southwest from my room at Ponda.

And the winter version:

Ponda view in winter. Precipitation would fall as rain below the snow line.

In the two photos above, you can see a large bare patch at the bottom, just to right of centre. This is a large landslide. Just above the bare area, several abandoned houses still stand, amidst what I suspect is the remains of a small apple orchard. The snow-covered area up and slightly to the left is another, smaller, landslide. Landslides were common, and frequently interfered with the roads and telecommunications to the area. Here is a closer look at the slide:

Large landslide seen from Ponda. It has grown over in the years since it occured.

Following are some of the other views from, and around, the Ponda camp where I lived for two years.

Wisps of fog would often stream over tops of ridges on the mountains around us.

View looking north over the expatriate camp. The camp was built on the side of the hill, and required several lines of retaining wall to provide enough level space for the camp.

Close-up of the mountain ridge in the background of the previous image.

A young boy poses for a photo with the mountain south of Ponda in the background.

Large fire across the valley from Ponda.

Man-made forest fires were not an uncommon sight in the spring, as local residents tried to renew the grazing areas for their sheep and goats by burning the grasses. These fires often got out of hand, like this one, and continued on into adjacent wooded areas and could burn for days. In the absence of wind from the sides, the fires would tend to go straight up the mountain until they ran out of fuel near the top or where the treeline ended, whichever came first. This fire was just south of Ponda Camp, but on the opposite side of the valley, and was probably the largest fire that I witnessed during my time in India. Goats and their human keepers were some of the most destructive forces in the Himalayas, besides Mother Nature herself. The goats would strip hillsides of vegetation, causing severe erosion, and their owners would light fires like the above. Trees would sometimes be killed by these fires, and when the dead trees could no longer hold onto the side of the mountain, they would sometimes come tumbling down. In one case while I was there, one of these falling trees hit a bus on NH 22, and knocked it over the side killing (if I remember correctly) upwards of 20 people. The driver who took me back to camp that night had passed the accident and tried to help - his shirt was spotted in blood when he returned to the office.

Satluj River looking north east from Sholding. The green water of winter would give way to increasingly brown waters in the spring and summer, as the river went from maybe 300 cubic metres per second to roughly 2000, and sometimes up to 8000 cubic metres per second in a flood.

One of many sunsets I witnessed there.

Power transmission lines take power west from one of the hydroelectric projects further up the river.

Bands of cloud made for interesting photography on many occasions.

While I don't miss the isolation, I do miss these views.

Working in India (Part 3)

Also in my first months in India, a bunch of us ventured once again up the Satluj River, but we turned south near Karcham and headed up the Sangla Valley. It would have been March or April, probably, and there was plenty of snow left on the mountains, and even down in the valley itself. 

Sangla Valley.

One work-related scouting expedition had us looking for a potential new source of aggregate for our crusher plant, to add to our concrete. There was a source of river-deposited rock up one of the northern side valleys from the main Satluj valley, at a place called Katgaon, north-east of Wangtu. From Wangtu, we climbed the Wangtu-Kafnoo Road through several switchbacks.

Looking down at a washed-out bridge from the road above Wangtu. The watercourse in the photo is only a tributary to the Satluj, which runs left to right just outside of the top of this photo. Abutments for a new bridge we were building can be seen just beyond the wreckage of the old bridge.

One of the roads above Wangtu, looking east.

A small tributary stream.

On our way to Katgaon, we investigated the first of two potential quarry locations. It was scenic, but didn't pan out.

View from a potential quarry. Nice view, but it wasn't selected.

The second location we scouted, at Katgaon itself, required us to cross the river and do a bit of hiking.

Probably not at Katgaon itself, but this gives you an idea of the typical villages that seem to grip every moderately level portion of the hillsides in this area of the country.

We had to walk up what was literally a goat path.

Working in India (Part 2)

I regret now that I didn't do much travelling within the country during my two years in India. For the most part, my travel was limited to the trip back and forth to Delhi every 5 months or so for my time off, which I spent outside of the country. That said, I did make three trips further up the Satluj River during my time there. The first was necessary, to have my residency paperwork updated, while the second and third were purely sightseeing with some of the other ex-pats on the project. There was actually a fourth "sight-seeing" visit that I took, but I will cover that one separately for reasons that will become obvious. In addition, there were a number of work-related scouting expeditions during which I managed to take some photos of the landscape.

The regional administrative centre was in a town called Reckong Peo / Kalpa, which is less than 50km up the Satluj River from where our offices were in Sholding, but it probably took at least 2 hours of driving to get there. The condition of "National Highway" #22 left something to be desired for most of its length - it was subject to frequent landslides and washouts. 

The road near Wangtu - actually a fairly good bit, all things considered.

How would you like to trust your life to the masonry "guards" on the site of the road?

Still, before NH 22 was built, I believe the main route was the narrow path showing as a line half-way up the mountain in this view looking west from our camp at Ponda. So I shouldn't complain too much.

Reckong Peo / Kalpa are situated on the west bank of the Satluj River, and look east towards the 6050m high peak of Kinner Kailash. The settlement is quite high up the mountain, although I suspect it plateaus a bit, as there is a fair amount of fairly level areas around the town.

It was kind of hard on the nerves to be so high up that you could look down on other high up settlements, without having a rail between your vehicle and the drop.

The "parade" ground outside the government building where we got out papers.

View from a schoolyard looking east towards Kinner Kailash.

This rock wall and fence is on the edge of a school yard, a fair ways up the slope of the mountain on the north bank of the Satluj. The cloud at the top of the photo is obscuring the peak of Kinner Kailash.

The schoolyard itself. Classes were held outside that day.

My next post will cover some other travels up the Satluj River.