Pangong Tso is a salt lake 134 kilometres long in the high desert of Ladakh, in northern India, and its colour comes from nothing that is in the water. There is almost no plankton and no silt to cloud it, so the colour you get is optics: the angle of the sun, the depth, and the sky it mirrors. Shallow shelves run bright green and deep water reads as near-black navy, and a passing cloud changes the whole lake in minutes. The water is empty for a reason. Pangong once drained into the Indus and was cut off long ago, so nothing leaves: the salt its streams bring in stays and builds up. Nothing lives in it but small crustaceans, and the geese that come in summer work the boggy ground at the stream mouths instead. A contested border runs down the water, more than half the lake lying beyond it, and the road east stops at a turnaround point that moves with the politics.
The Chang La comes first, a glacier-flanked pass out of Leh that leaves you breathless at the tea stall on top, then unwinds down bare valleys to the shore. Tented camps stand back from the water near Spangmik, where you sleep in canvas over a frame, mostly unheated. The generators run until about eleven, and nights drop below freezing even in July. Changpa handlers keep ponies at the viewpoints, and a ride along the gravel spares your legs at an altitude where even walking on the flat is work. Behind the beach the big shaggy animals are yaks; the smaller herds threading between them are changra goats. Their undercoat runs eleven to sixteen microns, finer than any commercial cashmere, because the plateau swings from minus forty to plus thirty-five, and it is combed by hand each spring. Most of India's pashmina comes off those animals. In winter the whole lake seals over in spite of the salt. Even then nothing stirs in it: everything alive at Pangong stands on the gravel around the edge.