Last Days in Leh

I am nearing the end of my time in Ladakh. Tomorrow I will take a walk to a village and spend the night and then return. The following day I spend two days in the Nubra Valley, a part of Ladakh northeast of Leh reached by a very high pass. Then on the 8th I start my way down to the plains through the Spiti and Kinnaur Valleys.

After the acupuncture treatment I wrote about in my last blog, my left leg was sore. It is better today. I rested a day, then had a fairly strenuous day of clambering around the palace. Now I have rested for two days and am ready to take my three or four hour walk to the village

A few days ago, I joined a French family who is staying at the same guest house as I am and we went to Phyang Monastery where they are having their annual festival. It was very hot and crowded and there were a lot of other tourists there. We stayed a couple of hours. In better conditions, I would have stayed longer. I liked the dancing. It is very simple and very repetitious, but the costumes and masks are great, and given more time and less distraction from the audience, I could have entered into the spirit of it. As we left other tourists were leaving and more local people were arriving so maybe it is better in the afternoon. The music consists of Tibetan trumpets (they sounded like reed instruments) and lots of cymbals and some drums. It was amplified and did begin to get in the blood.

The French family is three-generational and very sympathetic. I even spoke a little French which was fun if terrifying. I am calmer about speaking Hindi although my Hindi is worse than my French.

After the dancing, I came home, took a long nap and then read. I am reading five books right now. All more or less about Ladakh. I have almost finished Andrew Harvey's Journey to Ladakh, which is a description of a trip of spiritual discovery he took to Ladakh in the early eighties. It frequently makes me crazy, but there are good things in it.

Helena Norborg-Hodge's Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh also makes me crazy. She arrived in Ladakh when tourism first opened in the 70's and she has done a lot of good work here including founding the Women's Alliance of Ladakh. However, she has a simplistic view of the separation of East and West and somewhat distorts Ladakhi history to make her point. While the difference in scale is enormous, Ladkh has been a trading crossroads throughout its history and has never been the unified, almost Utopian society she depicts. Nevertheless, she has good things to say and her account is an interesting of one traveler's response to Ladakh and of what the rest of us might learn from this area.

Then I am reading two books about travelling in the Central Asian mountains. One is about "The Great Game," the competition between Russia and Great Britain for control of Central Asia and India. At the end, Russia got Central Asia and Britain kept India. The game involved Russian and British spies, often in native dress, wandering around the mountains, surveying and investigating the local economy and looking for a route between Central Asia and India that an army could cross. The only possible route, it turns out, is the one between Pakistan and Afghanistan, which is still a source of contention, although with different parties in play. The other book concerns trans-Himalyan trade routes centering on Ladakh. Ladakh has never been as isolated as we sometimes think. There has always been local trade between Tibet and the plains, and the long-distance trade routes connected Ladakh with St. Petersburg, Shanghai and Teheran.

I've been purifying my own water since I came to Ladakh and have been congratulating myself on my success. I have not been sick. Now I discover I have been drinking "government water" which has had some sort of treatment, the locals are unclear as to exactly what it is, but it is what everyone drinks, although my landlord filters it again. I am not stopping my purification treatments. Somehow drinking "government water" does not inspire me with a lot of confidence.

The longer I am in Ladakh the more time I spend just sitting looking at the garden, at the mountains, at the women yesterday who were stripping leaves from a leafy plant. They then spread the leaves on the roof outside my door, drying them for use in the winter.

Two nights ago, my landlord called me into his kitchen and fed me butter tea and "local food." The local food was a mutton stew with potatoes, spinach, and whole-wheat noodles that looked like and were about half the size of bow ties. It was very tasty. Half-way through he poured a white liquid in it which I think was thinned, partially fermented yogurt. He said "delicious" as he poured, and it was.

I waited in line for half an hour at the ATM. Locals, probably working for hotels, take five cards at a time into the booth. I understood this by listening to two men speak Hindi. I was very proud of myself, though between Hindi, French and English, I am barely able to speak or understand at all.

I hope to blog one more time before I leave Leh. Then for a week, I will be in fairly remote mountains and I don't know if there will be Internet access or not. I will try to blog briefly from my friends' apartment in Delhi.