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.

My Beautiful Trekette

I am safely back from my hike a little way's up the northern flank of the Zanskar Range which is just north of the Great Himalayas. I had a driver/guide and we drove for about an hour and a half over a very bad road until we could go no farther. Then he walked with me for about two hours or so up along a stream to a village called Rumtuk. It has somewhere between 10 and 20 houses. It's hard to tell because they are all sort of intertwined with one another. They are usually two or three stories high with room for cattle on the ground floor and a prayer room on the roof. I had arranged a home stay at a house in the village. We arrived about noon and I was completely wiped out. I'm not sure how high we hiked from the valley. It was a gradual but steady climb. It was high enough for me to detect a change in altitude. I had a headache most of the night. I slept for a little and then had rice and vegetables for lunch. Then the driver went back to the car because there was a threat of rain and he was worried about where the car was parked. I slept again and when I woke up I discovered the only door was chained from the outside so tightly I couldn't open it. I went up to the roof and discovered a place where I could put a ladder I found there and climb down. I wanted to walk in the village and the fields. The village's fields are quite extensive. Each field is about the size of one to three average American front yards. The fields are often but not always surrounded by stone walls. The ground is full of stones and they have to put them somewhere. The cattle are tethered in the paths between the fields grazing on the grass and weeds that grow there. A woman and a boy about two or three came to move their calf. The boy found me quite exotic and smiled shyly. Then he put on a great show of helping his mother reposition the cow, shouting at it and trying to slap it on the rump although he hit his mother more often than the cow. The setting was beautiful. The valley here divided into several smaller valleys or gorges. It is a major trekking stop and there is a large campground just below the village. A few trekkers wandered up the only street to an old palace but not many. The valley walls were mainly a soft sediment which had large flows of scree down the sides or a more solid composite stone which eroded into jagged shapes and crests. My Israeli friend Talma said they looked like baby's teeth. Maybe a baby dragon. They looked sharp and ferocious to me. They are a dark grayish-brown with large patches of a reddish lichen brightening them up.
About four one of the two daughters, both in their twenties, came in and started cooking. She had turnips and was slicing the greens and cutting up the turnips. She also had a small plate of already-chopped onion and a green that could have been scallion tops or something else. The family had a bottled gas stove on which they boiled water for tea and a metal-covered mud stove for cooking almost everything else. The other daughter came in and kneaded dough for noodles. It was the same dough as in the other Ladakhi meal I had, but this time instead of bow ties they made a rope and twisted off small pieces, roughly cube shaped. These were put in the broth with the turnips. I think there was some turmeric in the broth, but it was very lightly spiced. The turnip flavor came through bright and strong. It was simple but tasty. Afterwards, we had a small hard white candy that seemed to be made from fermented milk. It had a very grainy texture and was only very slightly sweet. I was not crazy about it, but one of the daughters ate a lot.
The family that was there was a mother and father, a grandfather, and the two daughters. Other people, including a couple of pony men drifted in and out. The older daughter and the mother then took turns churning butter. It is a long process, taking at least two or three hours, but they took frequent breaks. They used a large metal kettle to hold the milk. There was a vertical churn which was supported by two pieces of wood with a hole in the center which were fastened by rope to one of the support poles of the kitchen. These kept the churn vertical. They they wrapped a piece of leather around the churn several times and pulled it back and forth. It made a very satisfying sound. During one of the breaks, the small boy who helped move the cow wandered in during one of their breaks and started to try to churn. Nobody paid him much attention. He couldn't manage the supports so the churn stood at an angle, but he did a credible job of making it turn. Then the mother gave him something to drink. Fruit juice perhaps.
I sat there until about eight o'clock, listening to Ladakhi, and watching people wander in and out. Between six and seven, there was Ladakhi news on the radio and they had two small transistor radios but they took a lot of shaking and moving around the kitchen from spot to spot to make them work.
The bed was comfortable. There was a thick comforter, and I slept well.
In the morning, I had a fried egg and chapattis for breakfast. The chapattis were just like in the plains but they didn't toast them in front of an open fire after they were baked on the griddle.
Then I walked back down. For the first hour I was by myself. I had a little trouble finding the path. I started out on the pony track and then realized my mistake. I had noticed the day before that a while before the village the ponies went down to the stream bed which required the pony man to do a lot of jumping across the stream. I didn't want to do that so I went back and found the people path. It was a great walk. On the way up, I was working too hard to really take in the scenery, but on the way down, I knew where I was going and and the leisure to stop and look around. The valley constantly varied, now wider, now narrower, now mostly rock, now mostly scree. The dust from the scree causes lung problems and whenever the wind blows the locals usually cover their noses and mouths with a scarf. They also do this when working around the open fire in the kitchen because the smoke also causes lung problems.
After an hour, I started meeting trekkers who seemed a little startled to see me walking alone. Many of the guides stopped me and told me my driver was waiting for me. Apparently he had told many of them to look out for me.
I feel that I am a very fortunate person. Even if it was only a two hour hike, I was very happy to be walking among the mountains at the top of the world all by myself.
My trip to the Nubra valley was delayed because Talma had a bad headache and it seemed a bad idea to head out across the highest motorable pass in the world. We go tomorrow so I leave Ladakh on the 9th instead of the 8th. Ladakh is a beautiful place and I have met a lot of great people here, both local and foreign. At my guest house there have been a lot of French people so I have spoken a little French which was fun. One of the French women works here in the summer for a travel agency working with French tourists. She knows a little Hindi, or as they say here, Urdu. So I have spoken that a little with her and with the guest house staff who come from Manali on the other side of the mountains.
I might not blog again until I reach Delhi on the 16th, but I might get a chance to report on the Nubra Valley before I head down the hill.