Home/Farewell to Ladakh

I arrived home about 2 p.m. Los Angeles time last Wednesday afternoon. I was a little wobbly after ten weeks away, thirty hours of traveling and a thirteen hour time shift. In spite of that, I am all in one piece, at least as healthy as when I left, and very pleased with my travels. It was a wonderful trip. Although many things did not go as planned, I always landed on my feet and had many wonderful surprises.
The trip had five parts. The first two, studying Hindi in Nolunna and then in Mussoorie, I have covered. The third, Ladakh, has only one installment left to go. Yet to come is my car ride through the Spiti and Kinnaur Valleys, and my last few days in Delhi.
This was a great trip. Except for Delhi, I was in parts of India I had never seen before. Some of them, because of constant clouds and rain, I haven't seen very well yet. I have clothes still airing on the back porch because the damp invaded them. They have a weird smell that even laundering doesn't entirely remove. I'm hoping the Los Angeles sun will do the trick.
So Ladakh. It is an amazing place. First of all, the altitude alone makes it an interesting place to visit and the walking, hiking, trekking, climbing possibilities are inexhaustible. However, I am more of a sedentary traveler -- except for my overnight, I mostly stayed in Leh, the capital, except for a few excursions with other travelers I met. For the last couple of days, I was supposed to go to the Nubra Valley which is a day's ride over a very high pass away from Leh. Unfortunately, one of the people I was to travel with became sick so the trip was canceled. Instead, a hired a car by myself and took a ride west along the Indus valley to see some monasteries. The road is reasonably good and the landscape gradually changes, the valley becoming narrower and the mountains more variegated. It had rained a little the previous two days down in the valley, so there was beautiful, fresh snow up on the mountain tops. The first morning we stopped at Likir monastery. Unfortunately, it is one of those gompas that has melded into a large, mysterious gompa of which I have no recollection of the individual parts except for a painting on the side of a window in the library showing the ascent of man. He starts as an apelike creature crawling on the ground beside a gray elephant. As the man and his companion elephant ascend a mountain, the man becomes more and more civilized eventually adopting monk's clothing and the elephant becomes whiter and whiter until only his back heels are gray. Then the elephant is all white and ascends a pathway in the air and the monk flies circles around him finally ascending so high the elephant is left behind.
Shortly after noon, we arrived at the guest house in Alchi which was filled with the usual complement of French tourists. After a good Indian vegetarian lunch, I wandered over to the monastery. Unlike most, it is built on the plain, not on the side of a mountain. It consists of a series of buildings and stupas that border the Indus river. The apricots were ripe and in one courtyard, people were pitting an enormous pile of them. The apricots were laid out to dry, and the pits were saved to be turned into oil.
The Alchi monastery is very old and the prayer halls are dark and it took awhile before my eyes adjusted, but eventually I began to see and I turned off my flashlight and the images seemed to float in the semi-dark. In one the halls there is a small window through which you can see the head of a very large Buddha seemingly detached from any corporeal support. There is much sculpture at Alchi, but the walls of each room are covered with murals -- mandalas, Buddhas, bodhisatvas, demonic looking guardians, processions, enormous panels of 1,000 Buddhas, and purely (I think) decorative elements. While the tour guards exhaustively turned the buildings into art museums, I tried to escape them and find myself alone in some dark corner. Some of the paintings are about 1,000 years old, painted long before artificial light so the painters knew that some of them would be scarcely seen. Viewing seems to have low on their list of priorities, creation and existence being much more important.
After the monastery I walked in the fields surrounding the village. I am beginning to think I would like to live around farm animals. I have never cared much for house pets but I like being around working animals. I also love to look at crops growing in the field. And the sound of running water. Although Ladakh is very dry, there is usually a stream of snow melt running within earshot. If I ever move from where I live now, a will look for a place with farm animals, gardens and the sound of water.
The next day we went to Lamayuru which has a spectacular setting in a heavily eroded canyon. I do not remember the interior very well, but there was a stupa surrounded by prayer wheels and I followed an old woman around, turning the prayer wheels after she did. I liked that.
Then finally, we came to Basgo which I almost didn't visit. It is not one of the more commonly visited monasteries. There is a lot of climbing involved, but it is worth the effort. The paintings have been recently restored and they are very well done. With my taste for ephemeral art, I am not usually in favor of restoration, but these prayer halls were well done and it was nice to be able to see the images clearly. In the last hall, an elderly monk was sitting chanting by a huge prayer wheel. He kept insisting that I turn the wheel, but it was very heavy and hard work. I would give it a turn or two and then stop and then he would gesture to me to keep turning it, which I did until he stopped chanting and left.
Then it was back to Leh and my wonderful guest house run by a gracious Ladakhi family who gave me a shoulder bag with "Om" embroidered on it as a going away present.