A journey to the source of the Ganges, India’s ‘Mother River’

Berinder and Karin are half hidden beneath their loads, only their legs visible as they pull onwards and upwards. Our porter team is a ragged line of colour, weaving in and out of mounds of rock and ice, disappearing and then reappearing. On all sides, ice climbs upwards in shards and shattered pyramids while frozen pillars tenuously support huge boulders.

The largest glacier in Asia, Gangotri is the prime feeder of water to India’s holy Ganges river and plays host to our team as we move further into a sacred Himalayan zone and towards the source of one of the greatest waterways on the planet, which Hindus know as the “Mother River”.

Our team is laced along a fractured kilometre of angled path. Behind me, bundled up against the cold, is Debra Tan, director of Hong Kong-based non-profit organisation China Water Risk. City resident and mountain lover, she is willing herself upwards to investigate one of the pressing issues of our times. The water-from-kitchen-tap culture of our cities spawns a comfortable apathy, but here the plight of water is crystal clear.

It is Berinder – unsmiling and tiny, in his pink woollen hat – who I track amid this maze of ice and stone. Having volun­teer­ed to take a double load of supplies for the entirety of this almost month-long journey from Gangotri town, in the Indian state of Uttarakhand, close to the Tibet border, he pirou­ettes under a crippling load, and the admiration I have for these porters – philosophers and fine-boned titans rolled into one – only increases. It is their sinuous power and knowledge of these mountains that can carry a journey (or unravel it), and they will be lifelines and compatriots in the weeks to come.