"How can the mind take hold of such a country? Generations of invaders have tried, but they remain in exile. The important towns they build are only retreats, their quarrels the malaise of men who cannot find their way home. India knows of their trouble. She knows of the whole world's trouble, to its uttermost depth. She calls 'Come' through her hundred mouths, through objects ridiculous and august. But come to what? She has never defined. She is not a promise, only an appeal."
E.M. Forster
I had five more days to play with in Ladakh - what to do?
After the Markha Valley trek I indulged for a day in the vaguely modern conforts of Leh, Ladakh's only town - running water to wash with, a bed rather than a filthy mattress on a stone floor, mineral water rather than iodine-purified mountain stream water, and food that wasn't rice, dal and chapati (oh yes). Next day I took the bus to Likir, another few hours spent wedged against peasants carrying mini vegetable gardens in infinite paper bags (plastic bags are banned in Ladakh). They had all taken day trips to Leh to stock up on stuff they couldn't grow at home. Just after leaving Leh we stopped in a carpenters' yard and around twenty door frames were strapped to the roof. Loosely strapped, evidently - five minutes later they all slid off, just outside the Defence Ministry of High Altitude Research (whatever that may be), nearly decapitating a Ladakhi whose head was leant out the window. One piece splintered in two - oh dear, somebody's door would have to wait a while longer.
It is often said that Indian buses are the best place to bond with locals. Well, that probably has something to do with being shoved in an enclosed space with them for an extended period. They queue up to chat with you, though this 'chat' is usually the standard question and answer question session: "what is your country name; what is your home job; first time you going India?!" Though this happens less in Ladakh, where standards of English rarely exist. But occasionally the questioning develops into an amusing conversation. Weeks back on the bus the Shimla, a cheery local, on learning I was an English student, asked, "Good sir, are you good friend of Mr. William Shakespeare?" Why yes, I answered, I was "good friend" of Mr. William Shakespeare, and had he heard of my other pal, Mr. William Blake? He hadn't.
Likir was a one-yak town, but a one-yak town with a high school. A new development in Ladakh, where previously kids older than eleven had to go far from home to Srinigar or Delhi for further education, a move most Ladakhi families couldn't afford. There's a monstery a few miles up a gorge, the monks being of the Gelupka order (or Yellow Hat sect), a reformed school of Tibetan Buddhism formed in the fifteenth century, and the only order officially led by the Dalai Lama. The kushok in Likir is the present Dalai Lama's younger brother. The monastery is a great towering thing, fortlike from a distance, a reminder of a medieval era when Muslim invaders were ever at the gate, stroking their beards and scimitars, ready to loot and decapitate Buddha statues. But I was received by the monks as a friend and ally, being without a beard or scimitar. They showed me round the many chambers, one of which housed an intricate mandala sculpture inside a glass case. A mandala is a series of concentric circles, often with figures and other frilly bits added, and is an object of meditation as a model of the Universe. But a monk I questioned gave a more charming description: "mandala is best possible Buddha house."
Aside from this there was little else for me to in Likir but sit on my guest house veranda and watch peasants shuffle up and down wheat fields - something I was quite happy to do for half a day. Plus, my guest house was run by an exceptionally beautiful woman, as all guest houses should be - though sadly this is rarely the case. The cheapness by which one can live in this country never ceases to amaze and inspire me. If you're an idler avoiding employment, responsibility and life with a capital L, then look no further. In Likir I was paying 150 rupees (about £1.80) for my own room, plus all my meals besides lunch - a 40 rupee supplement. Score for me.
After a day of intense nothing, I set off next morning on the four hour walk to Yantang. I was joined by an earnest German couple with all the geeky trekking equipment money could buy - ski poles, walking boots you could lose a baby in, a drinking tube extending from the mouth to the depths of the rucksack, jackets that turn into inflatable lifeboats (okay, I made that last one up, but just you wait). This was bleak country, and when I mean bleak I mean BLEAK. No greenery, all rock. And at times it was like wading through a vast sandpit. Yantang came into view as a blob of precious green.
Yantang was another remote outpost, a day's walk from any motorable road. The clock rolled back to the middle ages - the peasants rose at sunrise, gathered crop or tended goats by day, and bedded down at sunset. I lodged at another homestay - not a guest house at all, just a family home where a corner in an upstairs room was cleared for me and a dirty mattress. During the day I sat at a low table in the dining room, watching the housewife chase her giggling kids around the house, before returning to the menial tasks that filled her day - moulding chapatis, churning milk, knitting clothes, and most importantly: endlessly serving me salted tea. No leisure time for these folk - the concept was meaningless. Sitting in a corner and reading a book never felt so decadent.
That evening was to be the wettest of my life. It all started as light rain at seven, but by eight things had gotten torrential. A storm had come, thunder, lighting, the works. Builders and architects are a recent incursion into Ladakh - traditionally the entire village would participate in building a home with the mud and stone to hand. But Ladakhis rarely take rain into account, this being one of the driest places on earth, and my homestay had gaping holes in the roof. The rain poured in, mixing with the mud that formed the roof to send down brown showers. Soon myself, my bag and all my belongings were drenched in muddy water. For nearly two hours I stood with a bucket under a particularly large hole in my bedroom, replacing it every minute and running out to slosh it over the balcony. But there simply weren't enough buckets - the entire house was raining, and dark water was pooling on every floor. There was nothing to do but wait and shiver, nowhere dry to run to and no dry clothes to change into - though the family eventually found me a vaguely dry jacket in some back room, which staved off pneumonia. But I was lucky to be under some kind of shelter - two young English chaps ran in at one point, having just escaped a landslide caused by the swelling of the river Wuleh, which had swept away their tent and all their gear, leaving one of the chaps shivering without shoes or warm clothes in just socks, light trousers and a T-shirt.
But even under these apocalyptic conditions (its not every day your house fills up with muddy water), the housewife managed to knock me up some rice and curried vegetables for dinner, plus some life-restoring tea. A remarkable woman - official winner of Best Housewife of the Year in the much vaunted Ben Dunant Awards. She even manged to find a dry corner of some room for me to curl up in for the night, my original bedroom now being a swamp. That said, the rest of my room still leaked, and I went to sleep to sound of "drip, splash, drip, splash," the room slowly filling up with water.
I awoke next day to a ruined house. It reminded me of the news footage of the recent New Orleans hurricane aftermath. The family quizzed me over breakfast on my plan for the day. "I'm going to head down the gorge to Rizong Monastery" - they emphatically repeated this was "no possible, no possible," without having the English to explain why. I arrogantly shrugged off their warnings and headed down the gorge anyway; it seemed unlikely that they'd actually checked the path themselves. But local wisdom proved true. I followed the path for a good twenty minutes and my hope rose. The soil erosion from last night's rain made the path crumble beneath my feat several times, sending me plunging down towards the Wuleh tokpo (river), though I managed to stall myself and scramble back up every time - yes, I was that good. But on I walked, untill I got to a point where the river had swollen to completely swallow the path, leaving only sheer rock faces either side of the water. So back I trod, and I tried an alternate route - walking for six hours to Temisgam. But the first stage invloved crossing the Wuleh topko just below Yantang, and the swollen river had completely smashed the bridge. There was nothing for it but to backtrack to Sumdo, halfway back to Likir, and from there I walked down a gorge to Saspol on the Leh-Srinigar highway, Ladakh's principal road. Next I pushed on to Alchi, but managed to hitch in a jeep to skip the ninety minute walk - and it was still drizzling. By that time I'd decided that I'd done quite enough walking for 2008.
Alchi monastery was built in the eleventh century, allegedly under the supervision of Rinchen Zangpo, the great translator, who spearheaded a great revival of Buddhism in Tibet and neighbouring lands known as The Second Spreading. He's literally a saint, and an impossible number of monasteries claim to be founded by him, though Alchi Gompa is believed to be the real deal. It's decorated in the Kashmiri rather than the Tibetan tradition, highly unusual for Ladakh, and its murals, still brightly coloured, betray a closer relation to the Hinduism from which Buddhism emerged. There were once many more such Kashmiri style monasteries in Ladakh, but these were largely destroyed by Muslim invaders from Balistan or the Kashmir Valley (don't you just love those guys). Indeed, there are few Gompas now in Ladakh that predate the invasion in the early seventeenth century of Ali Mir and his horde from Balistan. That Alchi Gompa was spared no doubt has much to do with its location, tucked discreetly down by a river rather than towering on one of the ridges favoured by most monasteries.
I took the three hour bus ride back to Leh that evening - another human sandwich. When I returned a Free Tibet march was threading the streets, that being the night of the Olympic opening ceremony in Beijing. A line of Ladakhis sheltering candles in glass jars was weaving its way to Leh's central gompa. It was a beautiful sight in the dark of the evening, utterly peaceful, and many of the armed Ladakhi soldiers keeping watch quietly joined in with the chanting of Buddhist mantras. They eventually all gathered in the courtyard outside the gompa, and speeches were made and quiet applause given. Apparently this was all in defiance of a curfew, but the soldiers obviously saw little trouble in the quiet proceedings. The Ladakhis of course have strong historical and religious links with Tibet, and Leh now shelters many Tibetan rufugees. Unsurprisingly, anti-Chinese sentiment is rife. It's spelt out in the graffiti around Leh, and a poster in the main market that read "Beijing will be the worst Olympic venue in history" was not taken down by the police for the whole month I spent in Ladakh. But then India and China have never been the best of chums.
The night before my flight was sleepless, as the rain and thunder spelt out my worst fears. Flights from Leh are often cancelled due to poor weather, and missing this flight meant I would miss my flight home in two days time - it's thirty-eight hours of continuous bus travel from Leh to Delhi (as opposed to 75 minutes by plane ), not that continuous travel is even possible, meaning you'd have to allow at least three days. But after waking up my panic rose for another reason: the taxi driver wasn't there at his alloted time, 4.30am - five minutes went by, then ten, then fifteen, then thirty. I thundered on the bedroom door of the guest house owner, who then walked down with me and thundered on the door of the room right next to mine, where it turned out my taxi driver was oversleeping. He seemed to think it was hilarious that I was running late, and I greatly enjoyed shouting at him. On the way he assured me with undisguised glee that my flight would definately be cancelled. It certainly looked like it, the sky still black and bruised.
Jammu and Kashmir state has an (understandable) zeal for security, and Leh airport is not untouched. The searching is vigorous - I was felt all over - and after checking in your bag you're later asked to walk on to the tarmac to identify your bag before it can be loaded on the plane. It was a long, fidgety wait at the departure gate. My plane was circling above Leh for two hours, unable to land for the cloud cover. And the plane of another airline, due to arrive just half an hour after mine, was diverted back to Delhi - there seemed no reason why mine shouldn't also. There was actually a cheer as the announcement came: "the Air Deccan flight is now ready for boarding." Honestly, it was this close to being cancelled (the author is holding his thumb and forefinger very close together).
To arrive back in Delhi (just a bump above sea level) from 3500 metres was like being dunked in a warm bath. The air felt used and the smog blurred disitances. I wasn't used to the traffic, and on stepping off the airport bus in Connaught Place I was instantly hit by a scooter. I toppled over and the rider came off his bike, though neither of us was hurt, thankfully - it would have been pretty dire otherwise, what with me being in the middle of Delhi on my own with all my stuff on my back. Afterwards I once again had the pleasure of room-searching in the Paharganj area, which is rather like fishing for left-over food in a sewer. I settled on the less-than-palatial Radhjani Palace. I was shown a number a rooms, but it took a while to find one that didn't spell instant death - on checking out the first room I flicked on the bathroom light, causing a minor explosion. I eventually settled on a nice little room where a cooling system made the noise of a minor aircraft engine. A tranquil night awaited me.
That day I wondered around New Delhi in a daze, fending off ear cleaners and shoe repair men who homed in on my wrecked walking boots. I bought a trunk load of cheap clothes in an underground market, practicing my by now formidable bargaining skills. And that was really about it for that day. The next morning I arrived at Khan Market promptly before ten to meet a certain Vijay Vikram, a fellow St Andrews student and current Delhi-wallah of a highly questionable nationalist political bent. But he was held up for two hours by a bandh (strike) or BJP youth rally - I forget which - near where he lived. Khan Market is an upmarket retail enclave where the westernized Delhi elite can enjoy their cappuccinos or Subways before browsing The Body Shop, Prada and other western retail imports. It was fun to see them in their element.
Afterwards Vijay and I perused the Purana Quila, a sixteenth century Mughal fort allegedly built on the site of the legendary Indraprastha, the capital of the Aryans of 1000BC, immortalised in the great Hindu epic The Mahabharata. The Purana was part of Emperor Humayan's capital, labelled the sixth city of Delhi - historians now consider Delhi a grand pile-up of different historical cities, the British New Delhi being the eigth, Indraprastha the first. It's one of the 'Great Sites' of Delhi but there's little left to the Purana Quila now but a pretty mosque, and the experience was a damp one, literally - the sky truly opened as we entered the gates. The monsoon was not over, yet.
After some aimless wandering we strolled up Rajpath, the grand imperial roadway with India Gate at one end and at the other the exquisite, Edward Lutyens designed Rashtrapati Bhavan, built as the residency of the viceroy but now the home of India's (largley ceremonial) President, the dear old lady Smt. Pratibha Devisingh Patil, whose job it is to have tea all day with important sounding people - rather like our Queen. However, there is no hiding the imperial rhetoric of Lutyens architecture, and one inscription over a large archway reads in sturdy capitals: LIBERTY WILL NOT DESCEND TO A PEOPLE; A PEOPLE MUST RAISE THEMSELVES TO LIBERTY; IT IS A BLESSING WHICH MUST BE EARNED BEFORE IT CAN BE ENJOYED. It's a disturbing sight in modern India, and anyone who still believes in the inherent benevolence of the British Raj should be stood in front of it.
Vijay and I capped off a wonderfully laguid day - yes, contrary to backpacker mythology, it is possible to have a relaxing time in Delhi - with a visit to the Gymkhana club, a colonial relic, a beautiful white bungalow with an imaculate lawn. Formerly Indians weren't allowed to join, and a club joke runs that a sign once read 'Strictly no Indians or Dogs.' Inside are the furnishings you'd expect - chandeliers, portraits of former colonial patrons (plus one of King George V), oak armchairs and polished wooden floors. Attached was the 'Lady Willingdon Swimming Club' - it was almost too good to be true. But like any former colonial club, it was an attempt to keep India at bay, to escape to land far far away, a land which never really existed. Leaving its gates I had the impression of re-entering India. And it was then that I bade a sad farewell to Vijay and India, and rickshawed back to Paharganj to gather my things and head to Indira Gandhi Airport.
The Indians' Edwardian handling of the English language (where "just bung you coat down there" and "what is your good name?" are common phrases) flourishes in the strangest of places. For instance, a woman announced through the airport speakers that a Mr. Somethingrather was holding a plane up, and she implored that this Mr. Somethingrather proceed through security "in a jiffy." Yes, my ears did not deceive me. But that was all the interest my journey home afforded. Everything went seamlessly and Heathrow loomed before I knew it. The cool air was welcoming - honestly, say what you like about the British weather, but compared to the Indian plains we live in a luxurious climate. Just you try Delhi in June.
It's nice to be back in London. But then it's always nice to be back in London. To walk again among familiar objects, if not familiar faces. But something bothered me at first, something missing from day-to-day interactions. It was that quality of difference, which comes to define you as a traveller, born in the manner locals acknowledge you, in lingering stares and earnest questioning. To arrive home is to be lost in the crowd. You are no longer that exotic specimen, the representative of a brighter world where money trickles from sky-scrapers and death happens only very nicely. It is to become distressingly ordinary.
I will return to India, many times. I know it for sure. But what is it that calls me back? I'll put it down to a dark fascination - yes, that sounds suitably profound. India is a puzzle that only deepens, its cultural layers ever-receding. I've learnt a great deal, but I feel little closer to understanding India and Indians. Perhaps I never shall, but I'm happy to keep on chasing a ghost. I am fond of India, but there is so much that disturbs me, things beyond the obvious, the more disquieting for being beyond language. It would be wrong to say that I love India - that would imply an intimacy I cannot share. More than anything, travel - especially solo travel - teaches you quite how much you are a product of your own culture, ultimately irreconcilable to the visited culture. That is the point: you play the role of the visitor; the country is to be visited, not lived in. The pyjama clad hippies that still clutter India kid themselves they have an intimacy. But they stop short where the Hindu starts - they do not share his belief that desperation is the simple lot of man and that the world is a cruel illusion. Buddhism shares this nihilism - "all life is suffering," teaches the Buddha. These are philosophies of defeat, of retreat into a cosy darkness. While the Christian or Muslim conceives heaven as a Kingdom of Light, Nirvana is simply oblivion. Above all Eastern religions teach a calm acceptance of the world - it is their goal. For me this is too much like death. It is as if the Human Spirit - which should never 'accept' the world and always seek to shape it - has thrown in the towel.
I am not an Indian, I am an Englishman. But I shall once again be an Englishman in India.
Ben Dunant
(India 27th June-14th August 2008)
Saturday, 16 August 2008
Wednesday, 6 August 2008
Ben treads deeper into The Land of High Passes
"Above all do not lose your desire to walk. Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts and know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it." Gautama Buddha
Now, where was I?
Food poisoning. At the close of the last post I declared my recovery - a false recovery. My trips to the toilet become more disconcerting. I could hardly eat a thing for three days. I attempted brief, abortive walks in Leh's nearby villages. I sat in my guest house room and felt sorry for myself. I waited.
On day four I took a day trip to Phyang Monastery in Phyang village, to gauge my recovery. Another delightful bus journey where the bus broke down half way. But Phyang was the picturesque Ladakhi stone village I'd become accustomed to: bursting flowerbeds surrounded by rock, and filthy, smiling kids asking for "one pen, one pen." It's the chant of village children throughout India. They rarely ask for money, sometimes demand "cho-co-late," but pens are clearly the ultimate commodity. Forget water or food shortages, India is clearly suffering from a chronic pen drought. There are no doubt fierce debates in parliament about it, with much Indian theatrical arm waving.
Above the white houses soars Phyang monastery - monasteries always seem to find some commanding mound or other to soar on. In the courtyard the resident monks, teenagers to the elderly, were practicing for a masked Cham dance the next day, the day I'd start the Markha Valley trek - damn, bad timing, but I'd seen a Cham dance last year in Rumste monastery in Sikkim, and this in Phyang was a near dress rehearsal. A Cham dance is something like a religious pantomime, where monks dress up as Tibetan saints, gods and demons, and dance out Tibetan legends and saintly deeds. Well, it's not so much dancing as vaguely coordinated wobbling. Buddhist monks are certainly not trained dancers, but it would be hard for anyone to move gracefully under those heavy embroidered robes and giant (and often terrifying) masks. The stress is on visual spectacle. And these two day events are extremely auspicious to witness, the faithful gathering from miles around. Good karma and all that.
I took a lighter approach to my next trek, seven days through the isolated Markha Valley - I simply hired a guide and stayed in "homestays" in passing villages. Well, not physically lighter - here I was "backpacking," carrying all my gear on my back, the favoured approach in the West and Nepal. But Ladakh is a far higher kettle of fish. The passes are frequently in excess of five thousand metres and the trails often go uphill for days at a time. At this altitude it was like giving Gordon Brown a piggy back, all day. And backpacks have this mysterious capacity to grow heavier as the day goes on, as if a gremlin were gradually piling it with bricks. This was tough trekking, I kid you not. At least I can now look down at the wimps that mince round Nepal each year.
I took the bare minimum with me, including a sleeping bag. But my guide's bag was a third of the size of mine. Enter Tenzing, the guide who I met in Leh, a man of few words and even fewer needs - he could apparently do without a sleeping bag and warm clothes for the evening. He didn't appear to need sleep either. He was the same age as me (twenty!), had been a guide for two years and was previously in the army in Assam (North East India) for three years before a medical discharge. He beautifully summed up the whole military experience as "good fun but hard on the back." Quite. A child of two Tibetan refugees who had literally walked away from Chinese oppression, Tenzing lived in the summer in a refugee camp on the outskirts of Leh, moving for winter to another Tibetan refugee camp (India has quite a few) way down in Bangalore, Karnataka. Most of my time on the trek was spent trying to keep him in view as he sped on ahead unawares, expecting me to catch up. On day four his haste was justified - we had to make a river crossing before the afternoon, the Markha river piling up with glacial melt water as the day goes on. There was more treacherous (and icy) knee-deep wading to be had on the same river the next day, boots over the shoulder etc. The fun never stopped.
The homestays were as charming as they were rustic - all you got was a filthy mattress slung on a stone floor. I'm not sure I'm into the whole camping thing - under a tent you could be anywhere. But it is inside the village homes that Ladakh feels closest. They were wonderful ramshackle stone structures, half collapsed and coated in peeling whitewash. The roofs were lined with prayer flags and were occasionally (and rather disturbingly) decorated with severed bull's heads - a tantic gesture no doubt, a reminder of mortality, like the severed horns that dot the trails on raised platforms.
Inside the houses are little rooms centred round a grand dining hall cum sitting room, supported by carved wooden pillars. Here you sit on carpets and eat or sip chai on low painted tables. The finest ornaments are displayed on shelves with carved niches, beautiful brass pots too shiny for regular use. These overlook the traditional Ladakhi stove, heavily decorated in brass Tibetan characters and fueled with animal dung. These dining halls are statements of grandeur amid poverty, the visible wealth of a family. But it is also centre stage for the life of the household. In a dark corner sits some elderly grandparent in heavy red robes, spinning a prayer wheel, having earned the right to silence after a life's hard toil. In the foreground there's usually some heated activity over some arcane tool. An example I witnessed was the milk churner - milk is placed in a wooden bucket, a paddle is placed in the milk and cloth is wrapped around the paddle, to be pulled back and forth, back and forth, churning the milk to curd and cheese. I watched a housewife man this primitive rowing machine - she just went on and on and on and on, and on, and on. And on. And. On.
In the bitter winters the entire extended family beds down in these dining halls. Now during the summer I met only a fraction of the family in the houses, the rest staying away in shepherd huts on high pastures or off assisting trekkers as ponymen. The men were largely absent, but not invariably. As in Tibet, it is a custom that a woman keep several husbands at once, usually brothers. This is due to the nomadic lifestyle of the men, off traversing the mountains on errands for many months of the year, and ideally the system ensures there is always a man to command the household. This leaves children calling several men "daddy" and all the adults of the village "uncle" or "aunty." There were often numerous children lolling around the houses I stayed in, and it was unclear whom they all belonged to.
The villages I stayed in were often simply a couple of houses around a few acres of wheat. They were without telephones or even a postal service - messages had to be trusted to ponymen who wander from village to village. Electricity was often set up but failed to work. But there were a few odds and sods of the twenty-first century visible, comically thrown into relief. Examples were isolated items of clothing - the housewife of my first homestay was traditionally dressed in dark robes and bangles, but topped it all with a baseball cap - wait for it - turned backwards. The children also wore odd, ill-fitting items of Western clothing, most of which looked as if it had been salvaged from a dustbin. But it would be wrong to call these villages poor - they lived a scaled down lifestyle where needs are easily met. The real poverty here is water poverty. This is one of the driest places on earth. The houses are without taps; clothes and crockery are taken down to the river, however far, to be washed. When I wished to wash myself I had to fill a bucket from an ice-cold mountain stream, take it to quiet place and pour it over my shivering self. That or bathe in the stream itself. I'm still unsure whether it was worth risking hypothermia for cleanliness.
But it's the loos that deserve special mention. "Dry" loos. It involves squatting over a hole and unloading into a chamber below, then shoveling some earth down over your deed. The accumulated poo is later collected to fertilize the fields, animal waste being reserved for fuel. A problem in Leh is the introduction of flush toilets in hotels to please tourists. This has put huge strain on Leh's scanty water supplies, especially as the town expands. And poorly maintained septic tanks have polluted streams essential for the life of surrounding villages.
It's hard to imagine anything dramatic happening among these quiet people. But on arrival at Markha - the valley's largest village, a beast of two hundred people - I witnessed two Ladakhi woman in combat. They were possessed, tearing at each other, and they began to pick up stones... Somehow is fizzled out and a meeting was called in the village's grandest residence - my homestay. The dining hall was packed with uncharacteristically animated Ladakhis, everyone shouting, nobody listening. The matter was eventually settled over lashings of Chang, a local beer which each household brews for itself from excess wheat. It resembles off milk and is mixed curiously with tsampa (flour), but it has a rich, fruity flavour- rather tasty. It was often offered to me in the cold evenings. It's certainly preferable to the local commercial larger, Godfather ("the golden water of Kashmir"), a noxious, fizzy liquid where a creepy Father Christmas figure leers at you from the label. Booze has an ambiguous status in Jammu and Kahmir state: it's never listed on restaurant menus but is often served, though the bottle must remain discreetly under the table during the meal. In some places alcohol is served out of teapots into teacups - very 1920s America.
Along the trekking paths the Ladakhis have left a devotional presence. In some of the remotest corners prayer wheels have been erected, so trekkers can generate their own good karma - as long as they spin them clockwise. Prayer flags flutter at the tops of high passes. Mani walls divide the paths and must be passed to the left - hip-height walls of gathered rock topped with smooth tablets on which mantras have been carved, mostly reading "om mani padme hum" (the jewel is in the lotus), the great mantra of Avalokiteshvara (or Chenresig, to give his Tibetan name), the bodhisattva of compassion of whom the Dalai Lama is an incarnation. Another random feature along the trails are the "parachute cafes," where enterprising locals serve weary trekkers tea and over-priced bottles of 7up cooled in mountain-stream water. These cafes are sheltered by discarded military cargo parachutes, hence the name. Military activity has littered Ladakh with army junk, now being put to inventive use, as well as cluttering the markets of Leh.
As I've said before, Ladakh is one dry place. And before recently summers would see no rain at all. But climate change is fixing that. Since I've been in Ladakh it's already drizzled a fair few times. But it was while settling down at Nimaling - a high altitude pasture (4700 metres) used by shepherds from the lower Markha Valley in summer - on the sixth night of the trek that the sky really opened. It was borderline apocalyptic - even the goats looked startled. Nimaling is reputably cold at the best of times, but that damp night in that damp tent - this was the only night of the trek without a homestay option, but I managed to rent a tent off an entrepreneurial shepherd - was among the coldest my life. It was right up there with the night I spent last year in the ashram at the foot of the Gomukh glacier, the sacred source of the river Ganges, also in the Indian Himalaya. The rain persisted all the next day, the last day of the trek, making for a treacherously slippy descent from the Gomgmaru pass (5100 metres). I'd almost forgotten what it was like to feel permanently damp. It was like a homecoming.
The Markha Valley trek is confined within Hemis National Park, "the Snow Leopard capital of the world." I saw many a Blue Sheep (not actually blue, tragically) and golden Marmot (which allows you to get very close before squealing loudly and disappearing down its burrow) but alas no Snow Leopard. But as there are only 50-70 of them kicking about the national park, this was no surprise. No wolves sighted either, though Markha village had a wolf trap at its outskirts - the wolf walks in, can't escape and is collectively stoned to death by the villagers, thereby circumventing individual responsibility for its death in this devoutly Buddhist village. Buddhists excuse themselves for eating meat in a similar manner - it is the butcher who is the sinner, while they are simply purchasing a dead animal. Consequently Ladakh's butchers are practically all Muslim.
I also missed out on the giant ants spotted by Herodotus, the first European visitor to Ladakh. He described (in the words of Reeve Heber and Kathleen Heber) "a land of wonderful ants, who in burrowing out their homes in the earth threw up gold. These ants are said to be nearly as large as dogs, and still more ferocious, with a keen sense of smell and great fleetness of foot. This made it very difficult for the Indians who wanted to obtain the gold, and the only method found possible was to fetch the gold day by day when the ants slept, and bear it away on swift horses." But the Ladakhis had evidently dealt with this ant menace before I arrived.
I write from Leh, safe and sound. I have about a week left in Ladakh, The Land of High Passes. I dread the flight back to Delhi on the 12th. Methinks I'll explore some of the villages in Ladakh's North West, such as Likir, Yantang and Alchi. But for now I'll continue to potter around this not-so-bustling metropolis (the home of the world's highest tennis court), looking tired and far from home.
All the best,
Ben x
Now, where was I?
Food poisoning. At the close of the last post I declared my recovery - a false recovery. My trips to the toilet become more disconcerting. I could hardly eat a thing for three days. I attempted brief, abortive walks in Leh's nearby villages. I sat in my guest house room and felt sorry for myself. I waited.
On day four I took a day trip to Phyang Monastery in Phyang village, to gauge my recovery. Another delightful bus journey where the bus broke down half way. But Phyang was the picturesque Ladakhi stone village I'd become accustomed to: bursting flowerbeds surrounded by rock, and filthy, smiling kids asking for "one pen, one pen." It's the chant of village children throughout India. They rarely ask for money, sometimes demand "cho-co-late," but pens are clearly the ultimate commodity. Forget water or food shortages, India is clearly suffering from a chronic pen drought. There are no doubt fierce debates in parliament about it, with much Indian theatrical arm waving.
Above the white houses soars Phyang monastery - monasteries always seem to find some commanding mound or other to soar on. In the courtyard the resident monks, teenagers to the elderly, were practicing for a masked Cham dance the next day, the day I'd start the Markha Valley trek - damn, bad timing, but I'd seen a Cham dance last year in Rumste monastery in Sikkim, and this in Phyang was a near dress rehearsal. A Cham dance is something like a religious pantomime, where monks dress up as Tibetan saints, gods and demons, and dance out Tibetan legends and saintly deeds. Well, it's not so much dancing as vaguely coordinated wobbling. Buddhist monks are certainly not trained dancers, but it would be hard for anyone to move gracefully under those heavy embroidered robes and giant (and often terrifying) masks. The stress is on visual spectacle. And these two day events are extremely auspicious to witness, the faithful gathering from miles around. Good karma and all that.
I took a lighter approach to my next trek, seven days through the isolated Markha Valley - I simply hired a guide and stayed in "homestays" in passing villages. Well, not physically lighter - here I was "backpacking," carrying all my gear on my back, the favoured approach in the West and Nepal. But Ladakh is a far higher kettle of fish. The passes are frequently in excess of five thousand metres and the trails often go uphill for days at a time. At this altitude it was like giving Gordon Brown a piggy back, all day. And backpacks have this mysterious capacity to grow heavier as the day goes on, as if a gremlin were gradually piling it with bricks. This was tough trekking, I kid you not. At least I can now look down at the wimps that mince round Nepal each year.
I took the bare minimum with me, including a sleeping bag. But my guide's bag was a third of the size of mine. Enter Tenzing, the guide who I met in Leh, a man of few words and even fewer needs - he could apparently do without a sleeping bag and warm clothes for the evening. He didn't appear to need sleep either. He was the same age as me (twenty!), had been a guide for two years and was previously in the army in Assam (North East India) for three years before a medical discharge. He beautifully summed up the whole military experience as "good fun but hard on the back." Quite. A child of two Tibetan refugees who had literally walked away from Chinese oppression, Tenzing lived in the summer in a refugee camp on the outskirts of Leh, moving for winter to another Tibetan refugee camp (India has quite a few) way down in Bangalore, Karnataka. Most of my time on the trek was spent trying to keep him in view as he sped on ahead unawares, expecting me to catch up. On day four his haste was justified - we had to make a river crossing before the afternoon, the Markha river piling up with glacial melt water as the day goes on. There was more treacherous (and icy) knee-deep wading to be had on the same river the next day, boots over the shoulder etc. The fun never stopped.
The homestays were as charming as they were rustic - all you got was a filthy mattress slung on a stone floor. I'm not sure I'm into the whole camping thing - under a tent you could be anywhere. But it is inside the village homes that Ladakh feels closest. They were wonderful ramshackle stone structures, half collapsed and coated in peeling whitewash. The roofs were lined with prayer flags and were occasionally (and rather disturbingly) decorated with severed bull's heads - a tantic gesture no doubt, a reminder of mortality, like the severed horns that dot the trails on raised platforms.
Inside the houses are little rooms centred round a grand dining hall cum sitting room, supported by carved wooden pillars. Here you sit on carpets and eat or sip chai on low painted tables. The finest ornaments are displayed on shelves with carved niches, beautiful brass pots too shiny for regular use. These overlook the traditional Ladakhi stove, heavily decorated in brass Tibetan characters and fueled with animal dung. These dining halls are statements of grandeur amid poverty, the visible wealth of a family. But it is also centre stage for the life of the household. In a dark corner sits some elderly grandparent in heavy red robes, spinning a prayer wheel, having earned the right to silence after a life's hard toil. In the foreground there's usually some heated activity over some arcane tool. An example I witnessed was the milk churner - milk is placed in a wooden bucket, a paddle is placed in the milk and cloth is wrapped around the paddle, to be pulled back and forth, back and forth, churning the milk to curd and cheese. I watched a housewife man this primitive rowing machine - she just went on and on and on and on, and on, and on. And on. And. On.
In the bitter winters the entire extended family beds down in these dining halls. Now during the summer I met only a fraction of the family in the houses, the rest staying away in shepherd huts on high pastures or off assisting trekkers as ponymen. The men were largely absent, but not invariably. As in Tibet, it is a custom that a woman keep several husbands at once, usually brothers. This is due to the nomadic lifestyle of the men, off traversing the mountains on errands for many months of the year, and ideally the system ensures there is always a man to command the household. This leaves children calling several men "daddy" and all the adults of the village "uncle" or "aunty." There were often numerous children lolling around the houses I stayed in, and it was unclear whom they all belonged to.
The villages I stayed in were often simply a couple of houses around a few acres of wheat. They were without telephones or even a postal service - messages had to be trusted to ponymen who wander from village to village. Electricity was often set up but failed to work. But there were a few odds and sods of the twenty-first century visible, comically thrown into relief. Examples were isolated items of clothing - the housewife of my first homestay was traditionally dressed in dark robes and bangles, but topped it all with a baseball cap - wait for it - turned backwards. The children also wore odd, ill-fitting items of Western clothing, most of which looked as if it had been salvaged from a dustbin. But it would be wrong to call these villages poor - they lived a scaled down lifestyle where needs are easily met. The real poverty here is water poverty. This is one of the driest places on earth. The houses are without taps; clothes and crockery are taken down to the river, however far, to be washed. When I wished to wash myself I had to fill a bucket from an ice-cold mountain stream, take it to quiet place and pour it over my shivering self. That or bathe in the stream itself. I'm still unsure whether it was worth risking hypothermia for cleanliness.
But it's the loos that deserve special mention. "Dry" loos. It involves squatting over a hole and unloading into a chamber below, then shoveling some earth down over your deed. The accumulated poo is later collected to fertilize the fields, animal waste being reserved for fuel. A problem in Leh is the introduction of flush toilets in hotels to please tourists. This has put huge strain on Leh's scanty water supplies, especially as the town expands. And poorly maintained septic tanks have polluted streams essential for the life of surrounding villages.
It's hard to imagine anything dramatic happening among these quiet people. But on arrival at Markha - the valley's largest village, a beast of two hundred people - I witnessed two Ladakhi woman in combat. They were possessed, tearing at each other, and they began to pick up stones... Somehow is fizzled out and a meeting was called in the village's grandest residence - my homestay. The dining hall was packed with uncharacteristically animated Ladakhis, everyone shouting, nobody listening. The matter was eventually settled over lashings of Chang, a local beer which each household brews for itself from excess wheat. It resembles off milk and is mixed curiously with tsampa (flour), but it has a rich, fruity flavour- rather tasty. It was often offered to me in the cold evenings. It's certainly preferable to the local commercial larger, Godfather ("the golden water of Kashmir"), a noxious, fizzy liquid where a creepy Father Christmas figure leers at you from the label. Booze has an ambiguous status in Jammu and Kahmir state: it's never listed on restaurant menus but is often served, though the bottle must remain discreetly under the table during the meal. In some places alcohol is served out of teapots into teacups - very 1920s America.
Along the trekking paths the Ladakhis have left a devotional presence. In some of the remotest corners prayer wheels have been erected, so trekkers can generate their own good karma - as long as they spin them clockwise. Prayer flags flutter at the tops of high passes. Mani walls divide the paths and must be passed to the left - hip-height walls of gathered rock topped with smooth tablets on which mantras have been carved, mostly reading "om mani padme hum" (the jewel is in the lotus), the great mantra of Avalokiteshvara (or Chenresig, to give his Tibetan name), the bodhisattva of compassion of whom the Dalai Lama is an incarnation. Another random feature along the trails are the "parachute cafes," where enterprising locals serve weary trekkers tea and over-priced bottles of 7up cooled in mountain-stream water. These cafes are sheltered by discarded military cargo parachutes, hence the name. Military activity has littered Ladakh with army junk, now being put to inventive use, as well as cluttering the markets of Leh.
As I've said before, Ladakh is one dry place. And before recently summers would see no rain at all. But climate change is fixing that. Since I've been in Ladakh it's already drizzled a fair few times. But it was while settling down at Nimaling - a high altitude pasture (4700 metres) used by shepherds from the lower Markha Valley in summer - on the sixth night of the trek that the sky really opened. It was borderline apocalyptic - even the goats looked startled. Nimaling is reputably cold at the best of times, but that damp night in that damp tent - this was the only night of the trek without a homestay option, but I managed to rent a tent off an entrepreneurial shepherd - was among the coldest my life. It was right up there with the night I spent last year in the ashram at the foot of the Gomukh glacier, the sacred source of the river Ganges, also in the Indian Himalaya. The rain persisted all the next day, the last day of the trek, making for a treacherously slippy descent from the Gomgmaru pass (5100 metres). I'd almost forgotten what it was like to feel permanently damp. It was like a homecoming.
The Markha Valley trek is confined within Hemis National Park, "the Snow Leopard capital of the world." I saw many a Blue Sheep (not actually blue, tragically) and golden Marmot (which allows you to get very close before squealing loudly and disappearing down its burrow) but alas no Snow Leopard. But as there are only 50-70 of them kicking about the national park, this was no surprise. No wolves sighted either, though Markha village had a wolf trap at its outskirts - the wolf walks in, can't escape and is collectively stoned to death by the villagers, thereby circumventing individual responsibility for its death in this devoutly Buddhist village. Buddhists excuse themselves for eating meat in a similar manner - it is the butcher who is the sinner, while they are simply purchasing a dead animal. Consequently Ladakh's butchers are practically all Muslim.
I also missed out on the giant ants spotted by Herodotus, the first European visitor to Ladakh. He described (in the words of Reeve Heber and Kathleen Heber) "a land of wonderful ants, who in burrowing out their homes in the earth threw up gold. These ants are said to be nearly as large as dogs, and still more ferocious, with a keen sense of smell and great fleetness of foot. This made it very difficult for the Indians who wanted to obtain the gold, and the only method found possible was to fetch the gold day by day when the ants slept, and bear it away on swift horses." But the Ladakhis had evidently dealt with this ant menace before I arrived.
I write from Leh, safe and sound. I have about a week left in Ladakh, The Land of High Passes. I dread the flight back to Delhi on the 12th. Methinks I'll explore some of the villages in Ladakh's North West, such as Likir, Yantang and Alchi. But for now I'll continue to potter around this not-so-bustling metropolis (the home of the world's highest tennis court), looking tired and far from home.
All the best,
Ben x
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