In the Indus Valley

"If a valley is reached by a high pass, only the best of friends or greatest of enemies are its visitors." Tibetan proverb

Leh has become a Mecca for two types: earnest (and possibly German) middle aged men in desinger trekking gear, and bangle and sarong sporting Euro-Israeli-American youth. The former are attracted by some of the highest, wildest and certainly most arduous trekking in the world. The latter by the peaced-out vibe (not my words), abundance of cheap and powerful Kashmiri charas (hashish), and that whole fashionable Tibetan Buddhism thing. Neither are disappointed. Me, I'm not sure which bracket I fall into - I vainly consider myself a high-brow cultural observer, a pilgrim of the intellect, one who not only answers the call of the East but gives it a thoughtful reply. At least this is how I reassure myself as I wonder around looking lost and smelly.

Leh's old town looks the part - a tangled mess of white-washed, stone-walled houses, decorated with Mani stones (devotional tablets inscribed with Tibetan characters). It has often been compared to Lhasa pre the Chinese invasion - there's even an imitation Potatala Palace, though smaller and empty after the the Royal family's move a few hundred years ago to the nearby village of Stok, where they still live. But outside the old town Leh becomes a mess of cultures, especially now during the two warm months of Ladakh's tourist season - the Manali-Leh road is snowed over but from late June till early September. You can still fly in during winter, when Leh returns to the Ladakhis, but you may have to face parky temperatures reaching minus forty degrees centigrade. But come late June this town of 25, 000 is colonised by Kashmiri carpet sellers, Delhi-ite tour operators and Western trekkers, replacing the Turkmen, Afgan and Tibetan traders of time's past, when due to its position at the foot of the Kardang pass Leh was the gateway to trade in Yarkhand, Turkestan. (At the closure of China's trade routes after the revolution, Ladakh lost all its trade capital and had to return to subsistence farming.) But this contemporary invasion is similar to the situation of the Sikkimese I witnessed last year in Gantok - during the summer months the Ladakhis appear to become a minority in their own capital.

But the most conspicuous intruder of all is the Indian army. It's not unusual to see machine-gun and khaki clad soldiers strolling nonchalantly through the streets. They have cute little sewn-on name badges, most bearing the Sikh surname "Singh" (meaning lion) - Sikhs after all refer to themselves as "the chosen race of warrior men." My guest house was right next to an Officer's Mess, and the guards outside, obviously shit-bored, kept trying to chat with me. It was the case of the usual Indian questions: what is good name sir, what is your country name, what is your father's job, how much do you earn in England, first time India? The Edwardian turn of phrase among Indians ("old chap" and "tip-top" are not uncommon), stuck in a pre-Independence time-warp, is the most charming legacy of the British Raj, particularly among the thickly-moustached military.

Conversations with Indians can be frustratingly circular, and often resembles a check-list of standard questions. Afterwards you realise you've discovered nothing about them, but they've discovered a lot about you. Indians are reluctant to reveal their individuality to strangers, and resort to standardised, comformist opinions when you quiz them on contraversial topics. For India, like much of Asia, is a collectivist culture where the individual most play second fiddle to the will of the community. It's hard to relate to coming from an our opposing, individualist culture. I also believe this explains why the Novel, the fullest artistic expression of individuality, is a phenomenon of the West, Indian novels being an apdaptation of the Western model. But one topic Indians really open up on is domestic politics. They hate and distrust their politicians more than we do. An eloquent Benares University student I met last year on a train through West Bengal had this to say: "In our India the politicians and gundas (gangsters) are interchangeable. Many state governers are awaiting sentences for mass murder and rape. This is India"

I stayed in Changspa, the backyard of Leh, which has managed to retain a rural feel, all green fields, paved alleyways and meandering goats. There's not a great deal to do in Leh - that's rather the point. Much of my time was spent drinking apricot juice (Ladakh's great export), munching on buttered Kashmiri bread and being pensive in a gompa (Buddhist monastery). I discovered Leh to be a more divided community than it first seemed. Much of the Kashmiri population are permanent settlers, and the large and beautiful Friday Mosque (built by a King of Leh in the sixteenth century under pressure from Kashmiri invaders) is a reminder that 45% of Ladakh is (largely Sunni) Muslim. Its call to prayer plays a main role in Leh's soundtrack. The ninties sall communal violence between Leh's Buddhists and Muslims, but things appear pretty stable now, perhaps due to the oppressive military prescence. However, Ladakh still resents being part of a Jammu and Kashmir state, administered from Srinagar by Muslims who have little sympathy for their Buddhist culture. Such cultural imperialism is seen in how Ladakhi primary school children are taught in Urdu (and later English), instilling in their young minds that their own language is a backward peasant tounge. Their educational system is a bastardised take on the Western model, and they are taught nothing of their own culture or history, further entrenching an inferiority complex. For years Ladakh has been lobbying the government to become a union territory, administered directly from Delhi. An effort Delhi has done its utmost to ignore.

Much is made of Leh's path to modernity, and environmentalists have made it a cause. Ladakh's harsh, dry climate and traditional lifestyle requires the most sensitive developmental approach possible. But the changes over the past decade have bewildered the locals. Traffic has increased tenfold, as has litter, beggars (many of whom travel up from the Indian plains for the tourist season), power cuts and water shortages. Legions of Ladakhiss have migrated from their traditonal rural lifestyle to Leh to join the money economy. The beauty and peace that attracts tourists is set to disappear. And these changes are being egged on by the Indian governement, which considers Ladakh a backwater that needs to participate in India's economic rise. But this economic rise is not the happy-clappy party celebrated by the Western press.

It's worth conisdering that the same hope was lavished on Indonesia during President Suharto's first decade in the 1970s. The country was frequently hailed as an "economic miracle" by Western journalists. And what happened to that miracle?

But I must confess, before my first visit to India last year I believed the hype about the "economic miracle that is India." Some British journalists even went so far as to describe a "golden age." I was geared up to witness a brave new country. But I learnt that figures - economic growth rates, mobile phone ownerships, foreign investement - don't tell a partial story, but no story at all. It's hard to believe these journalists have even been to India, or at least not to the medieval countryside beyond the major cities, where the majority of Indians still live. Sure, a metropolis like Mumbai has an awesome and growing ability to create wealth, and some of the highest office rents in the world. But the logic that this new wealth will "trickle down" to the rural power - the arguement of free-market puritans - is laughable. Prices will simply rise - as they are doing at the moment, uncontrollably - and the lot of the small-hold famer, who comprises the majority of Indian agriculture, will the stay the same. He will become unable to support his family and most likely join one of the peasant-communist groups now practicing terrorism in Andra Pradesh, Chattisgarh and Bihar. India already has enough rebels on its plate, not least in the tribal North-East (formerly Assam), but numbers look only set to increase.

But even India's cities are harsh places of cruel contrast, where emaciated beggars sprawl on pavements outside diet clinics. Mass migration to cities have seen rapid growth (exciting economists), so very speedy that transport, sewage systems, rubbish disposal or any other facet of infrastructure has been unable to catch up. Such an insupportable explosion is already taking place in Leh, where a plague of concrete suburbs is creeping its way down the Indus valley. Rows of crude concrete boxes, like much of India's new architecture, useless in heat or cold, cramped spaces where communal violence flares easily. The inhabitants are removed from their traditional environment, and are dependent for their rations of water on trucks that pass daily. Since Independence Indians have built like people without an architectural tradition - comparison with classic Mughal architecture is too depressing to bear. Modern architecture has become one the of the Great Indian Tragedies.

Leh's local buses are over-crowded, unreliable and generally just crap. I enquired about times in the station office. The chap behind the desk pointed to a board behind, listing only the first and last buses of the day to each destination. He pulled a profound smile, as if this board displayed the the meaning of life, the universe and everything. I pressed on: "but what about the buses in between?" He employed the strangely effective Indian strategy for dealing with confrontation: the dead face, which effectively says, "COMMUNICATION HAS BEEN TERMINATED INDEFINATELY."

So I took the save-the-planted approach of renting a battered bicycle to visit the nearby monasteries of the Indus valley, of which I managed only Shey and Rumste. Tibetan Buddhism is far removed from the teachings of Gautama Siddhartha. The Lumbini prince pleaded that he should not be idolised after death, but Tibetan Buddhist monasteries are crammed with Buddha statues, before which the faithfull leave offerings ranging from flowers, packaged foods and half-empty whisky bottles. Add to this numerous depictions of Boddhivistas (enlightened beings who have chosen to forgoe Nirvana to instruct the living), various Demons of the Sky and Earth, and an impenetrable symbolic system. The old pagan Bon religion of Tibet was not wiped out but given a new, more sophisticated home. The loud, clanging rituals of their pujas (collective prayers) certainly has the hysteria and theatre of pagan ritual. Borrowings from Hindu Tantricism (the funky belief that sex and drugs aid communion with the divine - a grossly simplified but fun definition) are seen in the statuettes of Boddhivistas straddled by naked women, the psychedelic wax sculptures before the altars and the murals of flayed skins, both animal and human, found in (often locked) side chambers.

High altitude (Leh sits at 3,500 metres) robs you of oxygen, and has the effect of halving your fitness. The cycle uphill back to Leh almost destroyed me. Yet two days later I was back on a bicycle, but undertook a less strenous expedition. Some other travellers and I were taken by jeep to the top of the Kardung pass, the peak of allegedly the highest motorable road in the world (5, 600 metres - it was freezing in just a T-shirt), and we were left to cycle back down to Leh on loose gravel, trying not to die. Before we left, the bike shop owner shared a few pearls of wisom: "when you go sharp corner, break before turn, not during turn, please. Otherwise you skid and go off cliff. This is big problem for me."

A couple of days later I clubbed together with three Franks for a five day trek from Lamaryu to Chilling. An agency provided us with a guide cum cook, some donkeys to bear our luggage, and some charming inbred donkey men, whose job was to egg their animals along - namely walk behind them, shout and beat them with large sticks. Yes, we were entirely incapable of fending for ourselves in the Ladakhi wilderness, a barren place of few villages. On the jeep ride ro Lamaryu we passed many dark-skinned Bihari labourers, looking lost and cold in these Himalayan climes. They are drawn far from their villages to maintain Ladakh's roads for 80 rupees (one British pound) per day. It's dangerous work, and stone memorials by the roadside commemorate the unlucky. Such is the state of Bihar.

After exploring Lamaryu Gompa and exchanging many a "Julay" (Ladakhi greeting) with cheery peasants, the donkeys were loaded and we set off. Our guide cum cook was an interesting mongrel called Rahoul, of Tibetan and Bengali parentage, but born and bred in Dharamsala (Himachal Pradesh), that large-scale Tibetan refugee camp turned backpacker magnet (where Westerners can look and point at Tibetans in their cute clothes and bangles - oh dear). The food he managed to knock up out of rusty pans in a cramped tent was some of the best I've had in India. It ranged from Punjabi to Bengali to Tibetan to Italian. But Rahoul's persistent cheerfulness began to wear on me - surely no one has the right to smile like that all the time? Ok, sorry, I musn't let my misanthropy rear its ugly head again.

After so much solo travel, moving in a group felt claustrophobic. And I disliked being "guided." Furthermore my French trekkers partners, agreable as they were, were unfit, uninterested and demanded stops every half an hour. We even cut short most of the last day's trekking, forgoeing a high pass, because the dear Franks couldn't take it anymore. We diverted to a nearby road to wait for a jeep back to Leh. In the long evenings my trekking partners held lengthy conversations, in French, me nodding inanely at the side. But all things considered, the trek was an incredible experience with stunning scenery, and allowed access to Ladakh at its most traditional and picturesque, remote from any motorable road. There was one alarming incident. On the last night we idiotically set up camp next to a slope piled with loose rock. During supper large stones began to tumble down towards us. One sharp bastard hit me hard on the foot. After moving our tents behind a clump of trees we felt safer. Marginally.

Immediately after arriving back in Leh I fell to food poisoing - possibly a boilded egg in that day's packed lunch, which smelt fine but looked a little fluffy (but by that time I felt industructable). I spent a sleepless night groaning and making messy trips to the toilet. That was last night, but I've almost recovered now. I'm already planning my next trek, eight days in the Markha valley, this time just hiring a guide and sleeping in villages. Can't wait.

All the best to those in Blighty and elsewhere,

Ben x