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