Friendly and fantasitc Leh

We arrived to Leh and decided to stay in the same hotel as a French man and Isreali woman we shared the bus ride with. Our guest house was built in the typical style of the family homes in the Ladakh area: large mud bricks make up the walls of the 2 story roomy buildings and lots of poplar beams and sticks are laid on top for the roof. The family that put us up were very friendly and helpful and that too turned out to be common in Ladakh. The people from that region are just friendly and open to visitors. We were greeted with friendly smiles by honest people everywhere we went in Leh and the Nubra valley.

Juley is the first and most important word you can learn if you plan to visit Ladakh. It means Hello. Also it means please, thank you, excuse me, good bye… kind of like Smurfy does for the Smurfs. One of the shops we frequently found ourselves in was a very environmentally friendly multi service shop. Due to the arid landscape water is rare and precious. At this shop they did laundry in a water conserving fashion, as well as re-filled your water bottle with boiled water to cut down on wasted plastic bottles, and they made juice from fresh squeezed berries. The tsetsalulu (aka sea buck thorn) berry was ubiquitous, but unfortunately for us we couldn’t develop a liking for the strong citrus taste. The thorny bush itself is used dried as a topping for mud brick yard walls to keep animals from climbing over.

We enjoyed the late summer days in Leh so much we decided to stay for 2 weeks. During those weeks we saw the temperatures constantly drop as the summer ended and passed quickly through fall and headed right to winter. The town is a provincial capital but due to the severe winters and high passes, it gets cut off to road traffic for 6 months out of the year. That terrible yet magnificent road we spent 19 hours on to reach Leh has to be re-plowed and fixed every year in spring before trucks can again get in or out.

Our arrival coincided with the start of the end of summer festival, celebrating the culture of the Ladakhis. We enjoyed parades of men and women wearing the traditional costumes, drummers and musicians, and dancers. These performances were all on the polo grounds in the center of town. One of the most interesting outfits was worn by a group of small elderly women and included silver flashes around the front, and a headdress studded with dozens of pieces of turquoise. Dancers moved in a slow gait and this worked well for the men that did a group dance involving balanced pitchers of liquor on their heads while revolving in a circle and spinning. Of course they drank from the pitchers after they had completed the dance without spilling a drop.

The city council had organized numerous events to showcase the Ladakhi traditions and tourist draws, and this gave us the opportunity to watch and partake in archery, river rafting, and a chaam – a Buddhist mask dance. The chaam was wonderful. It was held in the nearby Thiksey monastery on a bright sunny day. The monastery is located on top of a steep hill and the climb up the stairs was arduous in the thin air. We were caught gasping for air every 30 steps. But the reward of exploring the monastery and seeing the monks spinning and dancing out the stories of fighting demons and old fables was well worth it. Accompanying music was played by monks on large drums, 5 foot long horns, as well as with shorter flute like instruments.

We saw a few polo matches of non-stop action. There were no pauses, even when country folk inadvertently got caught on the field while taking a short cut, nor when cows or dogs wandered in. The teams were made up of the local armed forces and they took the competition seriously. The stands were 5 feet from the pitch, and this made for harrowing scenes as the ball often bounced off the bottom seats and came to a rest a few feet from us. Riders would gallop up jockeying for the best angle to hit the ball. Then an almighty WHACK! and they would send it hurtling off down the field while you cowered with your arms over your head.

The river rafting was great fun, except it was freezing whenever the sun went behind clouds. We travelled from Phey to Nimmu down the Zaskar mountain range running along the Indus Valley. We saw great scenery of the raw mountain peaks and the rough river, and enjoyed the company of a mixed bag of travelers. There was an Indian couple touring from south, an Isreali couple that we befriended and later hung out with more, a Colombian boy taking a break from his internship, and a crazy German girl who decided that the best remedy from freezing from the water was to strip down to her underwear. We tried to ignore her and her screams as the water splashed over the edge of the raft and she kept falling into the bottom and rolling around. Danny and Rachel, the 60 – 70 year old Israelis we befriended were a hoot to hang out with. They had a great perspective on life and were so open to this new culture. We ended up eating a few meals with them and watching some of the dances and polo matches later on during the week. We saw one of the more spectacular dances with them, a mock wedding dance. This dance showed the tradition of how a girl and boy married in Ladakh and the huge family effort involved.

We really enjoyed the people of Ladakh and got some great information about the changes they have faced in the last 3 decades when their region was opened up to tourism in 1976. The Women’s Center provided a great resource for learning about the people, mostly from the efforts of Helena Norberg-Hodge. We could see a real difference between the outsiders and the locals. Most of the guest houses were owned by Ladakhis, yet most businesses were owned by Kashmiris who came only for the 4 month tourist season. Bargaining with a Ladakhi is not done the way it is with the rest of the Indians. They give you an honest price, and if you try to reduce it, they get a little miffed and explain it was a good price. We reduced our hotel bill because we stayed so long, and they were fine with that. But when we were buying miniature paintings from a Kashmiri shop, we did some price comparisons at other shops, and managed to bargain him down to about 1/3 his asking price. The Kashmiris will try to entice you off the street into their shop, while the Ladakhis sit with their friends enjoying tea or liquor talking in small circles not pushing you to come in and buy something.

We shared a jeep trek with 2 Israelis, Noemi and Miriam, along with our driver Norbu, north into the Nubra valley. This was a 2 night trip, and started with crossing the highest motorable pass in the world, Khardung La at 5602m. It was snowing at the top, and was beautiful. The drive down into Nubra valley was amazing, a delicate looking canal had been dug to supply some of the fields and the golden crops were barely kept in place on the rocky landscape through terracing. We passed an army camp at CENSORED ; ) which was well covered in a variety of camouflage paint schemes, each of them somewhat clashing with the others, but maybe it was effective from the air. This army base must have been part of the border forces that skirmish with Pakistan. We were very close to both the Pakistani and Chinese borders, and for this reason we had obtained a special permit to allow travel this far. Permit checks were frequent and gave us good opportunities to survey the land and talk to other travelers.

Our first day of the jeep trek took us through the villages of Khalsar, Diskit, and we stayed the night in Hunder in the Snow Leopard Inn. The morning in Snow Leopard Inn found us in the company of 7 different nationalities and so we said: good morning, go moron, gut morgan, bon jour, shalom, and buon giorno. After breakfast Norbu insisted we visit some double humped camels that plied the high desert. Norbu was hoping we would go on a trek and his camel driving friends would get some money. But we were all seasoned camel riders and knew better than to ride these smelly beasts. They were different looking from the camels we got to know and loath in the Sahara. These had shorter legs and bigger heads. But they still looked just as ugly and they had more saliva dribbling down their chins than Yogi, my Aunt Pat’s Newfoundland dog.

Then it was on to the Hunder Gompa, which was situated right on a bridge that led toward Pakistan. Up the hill from the Gompa we explored a mani wall, made of prayer stones carved with bas relief holy words and phrases in the Tibetan script. Then a steep scramble up lead to shallow caves that monks had made by dislodging some of the granite rocks. These caves offered poor protection from the elements, yet Buddhist monks will lodge themselves there for weeks to meditate in seclusion. We found some shrines built high on this hill, a real testament to the dedication of the monks and villagers who supported them.

Then we drove back to Diskit to see the Diskit monastery, a magnificent 500 year old gompa high on a hill. This gompa houses a few artifacts of interest, including a sandalwood Buddha that saved the local population from a certain disease, which may have been gout by the monks description, by absorbing the disease into his own body. The statue is known to weep for his people’s suffering. Another statue was carved in the image of a warlord who protected the Gompa from invading Mongols by cutting off the head and arm of their leader. The statue holds the actual skull and arm in his hands to this day, which looked creepy, but at least they did not smell.

Then it was on to the Panamik hot springs, which were sulfurous and hot. They were not so interesting in themselves, but we did bump into a large group of sea buck thorn berry harvesters on the road during that side trip. The group was made entirely of women and children, and they did not want their photos taken. They must live a very hard life as they gather these small berries from very thorny branches located at ground level. The sun is relentless in the day and once it goes down, the cold sets in fast.

Noemi knew of a lake that did not feature in the Lonely Planet and got Norbu to drive us there. Noon Lake was a strange place, located in a bowl on a rocky outcrop in the middle of the mostly dry river bed. The path up to it was filled with previous traveler’s precariously balanced piles of rocks. The absence of life in that desert landscape and yet the fact that you knew there had been so much recent activity made for a slightly alien scene.

Following this surreal scene we drove to the Samstemling Gompa in Sumur. It paled by comparison to the Diskit and Hunder gompas, and so we stayed only long enough to watch the monks playing football and cricket.

Our drive back from Sumur the next day gave us a slice of what life in the Himalayas is like. On the way Norbu had brief discussions with passing truck drivers to assess the road conditions of the pass. News was not good, and we found that the pass was snowed in and we might be spending another night in Nubra valley. We drove as far as North Pullu, an army and road construction camp, and huddled in the snow with everyone else waiting for the weather to improve. We sustained ourselves with fatty mutton soup, made from goat not sheep. The army post at the top of Khardung La was letting vehicles pass toward us in our direction only. In the afternoon they stopped that traffic, and allowed our long convoy over the pass in single file. Sometime in the next few weeks it was going to be shut for the winter and would remain closed until spring when it would have to be cleaned off and re-fixed. We arrived back to Leh happy and full of fantastic visions of the desert plains at the top of the world.

We had kept in touch with our friend Guy by email, who we had travelled with in Pelling, and were able to bump into him on our last day in Leh. We would have missed him, but our flight out that morning was cancelled due to fog. We were able to catch up with him and heard about his experiences going to Shrinigar and the west of Kashmir. We advised him that since he had already made one trip over the mountains in a bus, he might as well fly back to Delhi like us instead of facing that huge drive south.