Sunday Drive by Hormazd Sorabjee: On top of the world
Only a special car can take you to the peak of the new highest motorable road on Earth, the Umling La!
The readout on the pulse oximeter clipped to my index finger is an alarmingly low 84. I’m finding it hard to breathe and after taking a few steps I feel like I’ve run a marathon. Hang on, it’s not what you think! In fact, what I’m experiencing is absolutely normal for anyone standing where I am, which is exactly 19,300 feet high. Oxygen in this rarefied atmosphere is in short supply and half of what your lungs inhale at sea level. Himalayan mountaineers know the feeling and now, so do I. The big difference is that I reached this lofty height without having to trek or walk one bit. Instead of a climbing rope or an ice axe in my hands, I was holding an Alcantara-wrapped leather steering wheel and cocooned in a cabin sealed off from the elements with the temperature dialed up to a toasty 23 degrees.
Let me welcome you to Umling La, the summit of the new highest motorable road in the world, officially opened by the Border Roads Organisation (BRO) just a few months ago. Umling La in Eastern Ladakh is a good thousand feet higher than Khardung La (18,370 feet) the ‘original’ highest road in the world, which is also in Ladakh. Khardung La competed with the volcanic Uturuncu mountain road in Bolivia (18,953 feet high), which is higher, but the claim seems dubious because the highest bit isn’t a road but just the rocky side of the volcano which SUVs and bikes scrabble up to earn their bragging rights. So, Umling La settles any argument once and for all. This is the Mt Everest of roads, the highest point on the earth you can drive to and a new bucket list place for adventurers on wheels to set their own personal records.
Breathing easy
Where exactly is Umling La? The top of the pass is 84km from Hanle, a small town in Eastern Ladakh, which itself is at an altitude of 15,000 feet and is famous for having the highest observatory in India. The Umling La road goes beyond the summit of the pass to connect the remote hamlet of Demchok, nestled very close to the Line of Actual Control (LAC), with the rest of Ladakh. In fact, the BRO has been building roads at a furious pace and in record time to improve connectivity and allow easier and quicker movement of troops and supplies in these regions.
To experience a special road like this, we just had to get a special car and what better than the 650hp Lamborghini Urus, the most powerful SUV you can buy in India, to best appreciate the great work done by the BRO? More importantly, the Urus’s turbo-charged engine meant no loss in power, unlike a naturally aspirated engine which depends on atmospheric pressure and hence loses three per cent of its power for every 1,000 feet increase in altitude. Do the math and you’re looking at a near 60 per cent power loss at the top of Umling La! There were no such problems for the Urus whose 4-litre engine’s eight cylinders were nicely force fed by a pair of turbos.
Great job, bro!
To reach Umling La from Hanle you have to first do a bit of cross country driving for around 30km across dirt tracks that cut through a magical countryside that Ladakh is known for. The barren, treeless landscape with jagged mountains in different hues from purple to yellow has a haunting beauty that, along with the altitude, takes your breath away.
And then, suddenly after driving on no road at all, you hit a perfectly paved piece of tarmac which makes the drive seem all too easy for the last 50km or so to the summit. This brilliantly engineered road has minimal hairpins and gradual gradients. The Urus is in its element on this stretch. I don’t have to worry about damaging the low profile tyres on this smooth road and can happily whip this uber quick SUV which seems to shrink in size the faster I drive it.
Reaching the summit of Umling La was a bit of an anti-climax simply because of how easy it was to get there. The hardest part of this road was building it. That the BRO could build such a smooth road in sub-zero, oxygen-starved altitudes, where just walking is an exhausting task… one can only imagine what it’s like to break rocks and pave tarmac in these extreme conditions. Umling La is a true tribute to human endurance. The BRO must be saluted for this monumental achievement.
The views expressed by the columnist are personal
From HT Brunch, October 31, 2021
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