Gurudongmar Lake

Far up in the north of Sikkim, a few kilometres short of the border with Tibet, Gurudongmar Lake lies in a bare, wind-scoured basin well above 5,000 metres. The state government gives its height as 5,430 metres, while survey maps suggest a little over 5,100, but by either measure it is among the highest lakes in India and in the world. Its water, an intense turquoise against brown moraine and white peaks, is fed by the Gurudongmar glacier and held back by a moraine dam. This is no longer the green, forested Sikkim of the lower valleys: the lake sits on a high, treeless plateau that belongs to the Tibetan side of the Himalaya, north of the Khangchengyao range.

The lake covers about 118 hectares, with a shoreline of more than five kilometres, and for half the year it is locked in ice, typically from November until the middle of May. Streams leaving it run into Tso Lhamo, another high lake, and together they form one of the headwaters of the Teesta, the great river that later cuts through Sikkim and West Bengal on its way to the Brahmaputra. Despite the thin air the basin is not lifeless: yaks graze its margins, and blue sheep and other high-altitude animals live on the surrounding slopes.

The lake takes its name from Guru Padmasambhava, the 8th-century teacher revered as Guru Rinpoche, who brought Buddhism to Tibet. Local tradition holds that when he passed this way the people asked for his help because the lake stayed frozen and gave them no water; he touched a small part of the surface, which from then on never froze, and the lake became holy. It remains a place of Buddhist pilgrimage. Around the turn of the millennium the lake was briefly the focus of a dispute after an army unit built a Sikh shrine on its bank; a state committee concluded that the site was an ancient Buddhist sanctuary, and in 2001 the building was handed to the monastery at Lachen.

Getting there

The lake is about 77 km from Gangtok in a straight line, but around 190 km by mountain road, which runs north through Chungthang, Lachen and the Thangu valley before climbing to the lake on National Highway 310C. The nearest airport by distance is Paro International Airport (PBH) in Bhutan, about 98 km away, but it lies across an international border and offers no practical route; travellers arrive through Bagdogra Airport (IXB) in West Bengal, about 153 km away in a straight line. The nearest major railway station is New Jalpaiguri near Siliguri, from where roads lead up to Gangtok and on into North Sikkim.