You see it before you understand what you're seeing. Rounding a bend in the mountain road at 4,350 meters, after hours of driving through a brown-and-grey moonscape of startling, desolate beauty — the road suddenly reveals a lake of such vivid, impossible colour that the mind takes several seconds to accept it as real.
Pangong Tso. Blue. Impossibly, overwhelmingly, almost aggressively blue. The kind of blue that has no name in English — not sky blue, not aquamarine, not indigo, but something between and beyond all of these, shifting as the light shifts, as the wind moves across its surface, as clouds pass overhead.
The lake is 134 km long. Only about 60 km of it lies within India; the rest extends into Tibet, across the Line of Actual Control that separates Indian Ladakh from Chinese-controlled territory. It is a brackish lake — too salty to drink, but home to bar-headed geese, the highest-flying migratory birds in the world, and the rare Brahmin duck.
At this altitude, the air has about 60% of the oxygen found at sea level. Most visitors feel light-headed — and this, combined with the lake's extraordinary colour and the surrounding landscape of bare, sculptural mountains, produces a state of consciousness that is difficult to describe as anything other than altered.
The best time to visit Pangong is at sunrise or sunset, when the mountains surrounding the lake — the Pangong Range, folded in deep horizontal strata of red, ochre, and grey — are lit from extreme angles and the lake's colour shifts through its full extraordinary range. Staying overnight at a lakeside camp, waking before dawn to walk to the water's edge in the absolute silence of high altitude — this is, for many travellers, the single most powerful experience of their India journey.
Positive India Journey arranges overnight stays in well-appointed tented camps at Pangong Tso, with all meals, warm bedding and experienced guides. The lake is accessible from Leh (4-5 hours by road) and requires Inner Line Permits which we arrange on your behalf.