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Leh, Ladakh, North India
Leh, the capital of Ladakh, was once a stop
along the vast Silk Road that stretched across Asia:
a tiny Buddhist mud-walled town hiding in the shadow of the
royal palace that clings to a rocky hill directly above the
jumbled labyrinth of the Old City’s narrow lanes. Ladakhi
Gompas (Tibetan Buddhist monasteries) are perched even higher,
with golden yellow curtains flapping against whitewashed walls
where lines of prayer flags are stretched across the crystal
clear, deep blue sky.
With the summer high season in full swing, the town’s
bazaar hummed with whole Argentinian families in trekking
gear; blonde Swiss mountaineers; more stoned, stone-faced
and dread-locked Israelis than Manali; British social workers
doing farm projects in Zanskar; and clusters of chain smoking
French package tourists. Meanwhile, the locals tried to go
about their daily lives with dignity, snapped rudely in photographs
if they wore any turquoise or were carrying prayer wheels,
and even school children walking home from school had to carry
newspapers to cover their faces when tourists tried to take
their photos. Ladakh, with it’s similarity to Tibetan
culture (and all the exoticism westerners drew from it), made
it feel sometimes like a human zoo.
‘You!’ shouted a bearded man at me in the main
bazaar.
‘We met. Kabul Bazaar. Remember? You were traveling with
the German puppeteer…?’
‘I’ve never been to Kabul, sorry….’
‘Kabul! We Met in Kabul, last year. It was summer.’
He lifted his hands in frustration.
‘I told you, I’ve never been to Afghanistan….’
‘I’m sure of it. You bought a lapis lazuli necklace
and….’
No matter what I told the man while I was in Leh, he was
convinced I was the guy who married the German puppeteer from
Bremen, and every time he saw me he greeted me like some long
lost friend. ‘You! Kabul!’
he shouted each time.
That experience summed up perfectly what Ladakh was like.
Leh was packed with people escaping the monsoons in the south
and hardly a day went by when some character you had seen
on a train, bus or plane in India didn’t walk past you
in the bazaar: the crazy Frenchman from the Rajistani train
fistfight; the ditsy Australian from Dharmsala who had now
divorced herself from her holy man; the Austrian couple that
had gotten ‘more’ in their food than they had paid
for in Jaislmer; and the six Scots from Agra, still decked
out in their Pakistani wardrobe, made a brief appearance at
a Tibetan restaurant one night. Even the two anonymous travelers
that had bailed out of the jeep trip to Leh were found sitting
in a corner table of an internet café (and still smiling
sheepishly) after arriving from Srinagar, until the dagger
sharp looks from me, Brandon, Yael and Steven scared them
away like vampires from daylight.
‘The travel gods have yet to curse them,’ snarled
Steven.
With the phones never working, the power always off more
than it was on, and the internet eternally clogged, Leh was
great for catching up on our individual Indian journeys, feasting
on Tibetan and Indian food while watching the sun creep up
the hills as it set behind the glacier capped mountains, drinking
mint tea and fresh apple juice from Kashmir.
‘Hello, friend,’ said a tall blonde massage therapist
from L.A. (who I will call Phoebe) in my guest house the first
morning I arrived, shattered from the two day slog from Manali.
‘Welcome.’
She had just arrived in India and was here as a dedicated
'Spiritual Tourist' and had not only done a three week camel
trek in Mali, during which she had completed a native American
rite of passage (where she meditated on a mat with only water
for a week) she had also completed, she said with a smug smile,
four Vipassana
10 day no talking meditation courses in Big Sur.
Phoebe had only been here a week and was an expert already
in where the best trekking company was and where the best
vegetarian food was and where you could stay in a monastery
for free if you didn’t mind cold showers.
‘Come to Summer Bounty, tonight, friend,’ Phoebe
said slowly, referring to the veg/chill out restaurant on
Fort Road, ‘there will be some groovy people there.’
‘There’ were groovy people there that night, but
it felt like the Intergalactic bar in Star Wars, with practically
every nationality represented, freaked out to the extreme.
A poster on the wall announced a séance later in the
week for channeling the ‘Great Spirit of Bob Barley,’
Janis Joplin was on the sound system, and even the Ladakhi
waiters had dreads down to their knees. A Swiss woman was
warning her new found friends of the bacterial dangers of
sharing joints mouth-to-mouth, and was instructing them on
how to stick it in their noses to inhale; a stray lone Yak
had wandered into the restaurant and was eating the flower
arrangements off an empty table, a Scot was telling all about
the book he’d just read, claiming the Bush family were
space aliens, and when a German woman asked a man thought
to be a native of her country, ‘Where are you from?’
the Caucasian man
stared back at her and growled, ‘Goa.’
The whole place was horizontal: people’s bodies were
scattered all over the carpeted floor, lying stretched out
on pillows smoking chillums and talking in low voices. As
soon as I walked in, I felt vertical, and self consciously
crouched down until I recognized Phoebe crashed out in the
corner showing off her Masai warrior scar to some stringy-haired
Kiwi girl.
‘Hello, friend,’ Phoebe said, introducing me to
her ‘smoking’ buddies, who peered at me sagely through
a haze of a thousand lifetimes smoking hash. No one even acknowledged
me, and even Phoebe went back to explaining the meaning of
her scar/tattoo. When the waiter took my order, a girl across
from me blew pot smoke in my face and started to cackle like
a witch.
Maybe it was the altitude, or the choking incense, but before
my drink, or food, even came, it was time to for Alex to leave
the Rabbit Hole.
And the altitude was fierce. The town sits at over 12,000
feet, and on my second day in Leh, I was crouched down for
a few minutes buying some apricots.
When I stood up, suddenly the world went black, spun around
like a washing machine and I was falling through a tornado-hole
in the ground…. when I came too I was staring up at the
sun, a Ladakhi grandmother was screaming in my face and fanning
me with her silk hat, and my now useless legs were blocking
traffic, both bovine and vehicular: a huge cow and a massive
army jeep loomed over my head and somehow I managed to crawl
out of the way before being first trampled and
then run over.
Though Leh won hands down over Manali for freakdom, as always
in India, it was religions that defined the odd Masala mixture
of the transient visitors to Leh:Islamic Kashmiris, always
ready to strike a bargain for a pashmina shawl over bottomless
cups of mint tea; Ladakhi Tibetan Buddhist monks on pilgrimages
visiting historic gompas in the Indus valley; Jewish Rabbis
flown in from Israel by their government to celebrate the
Sabbath each week at the Leh Jewish House, to keep the newly
discharged, and disgruntled, soldiers, Jewish; Catholic diamond
cross wearing Europeans, celebrating weekly masses at a different
hotel; and even a few hardy naked Saddhus that hung around
the main square, looking for alms to fall into their hands.
And day and night, all over Leh, on swirled the World’s
Finest Freak Show: free, weird, surreal, and always entertaining.
‘Whee!!!!’ shouted some French girl as she spotted
a stray cow chewing on some garbage.
‘UNE VACHE SACREE!!!!!!” she wailed to the night
sky, bowing down before the bovine creature reverently as
though she were in the presence of some great celestial being,
as the cow, now wary of this woman, munched on.
TIKSE GOMPA
Unable to sleep one night due to the altitude, I left one
morning before dawn to caught a bus to the Tikse Gompa,
17 kilometers from Leh, where the dawn Puja (cleansing) ceremony
takes place in a musty room holding an enormous bronze Buddha
statue, with walls painted with scenes from hell, amid the
strong stench of rancid yak butter tea.
The Gompa complex covers an entire hillside, modeled on the
Potola Palace in Lhasa, and has priceless views of the glacier
covered mountains across the Indus river valley. With over
one hundred and fifty monks in residence, they rise each day
at dawn to the sound of two yellow Mohawk hatted young monks
who blow bone white conch shell horns encrusted with turquoise
stones and silver work from the wooden roof, and they come
in, one by one, smiling at each other and saying ‘Ju
Le!’ ('greetings!) before filling the rows of straw mat
covered benches in descending lines of age, from 80 down to
just 8-years-old. When the venerable Rinpoche of Tikse is
seated, they strike a yak skin gong, and the chanting and
meditation of the Puja begins.
Slowly, as the daily ceremony gets underway, the monks began
to rock back and forth in their seats, eyes squeezed shut,
hands at their sides as the Rinpoche, wearing the same yellow
robes and 70’s-esque John Denver style sunglasses as
the Dalai Lama, conducts the pitch and tone of the mantras
and phrases repeated by all in attendance.
Except for two. The youngest monks sitting right in front
of me whispered continuously back and forth so much that when
a senior monk walked past he bashed their shaven heads with
prayer books. The youngest, Problem Child, was the worst,
and he acted as though the whole Puja was just a joke and
all the monks were there just for him to laugh at them. Even
more funny were the foreigners sitting with their backs to
the walls, appropriately sitting as far away from the Buddha
as possible (and directly beneath fierce portrayals of blue-headed
demons smashing the skulls of the wicked and deceitful).
During the three hours, Puja Problem Child didn’t close
his eyes for a second, he just hummed some nonsense song that
clashed with the monotone chanting, and in punishment got
himself assigned to tea duty: he had to lug huge brass teapots
around, filling all the senior monks bowls with tea in penance,
bowing to them deeply as they continued their mantras and
chanting.
Finally when it was over, the monks spilled out into the
thin desert light and continued the chores they were meant
to complete before the next Puja at noon. Problem Child took
off down the stairs like it was the last day of school.
SHANTI STUPA
Perched high over the town, Shanti stupa is Japanese built
and features a shiny round Buddha statue facing in the four
sacred directions. With more staggering views over Leh and
the Indus river valley, it’s a favourite place to watch
the sunset, and like everywhere in Leh during the high season,
there was a battle to deal with the crowds of people jostling
for space.
Steven and Yael were leaving on the flight to Delhi the next
morning, and we decided to brave the 600 steps at about 5.30
pm when the suns fierce rays had finally died off. We took
about fifteen steps and practically collapsed, gasping for
air in the thin atmosphere as Ladakkhi school children laughed
at us, scampering up them as easily as if they were walking
down, instead of up.
By the time we reached the top, the sun had slipped behind
the mountains, and the valley floor, now darkened, stretched
before us. We could see a Ladakhi polo match on, we could
hear the distant calls of prayer from the Kashmiri mosque
in town, (where a Pakistani flag fluttered, defiantly, most
days) and watched great armadas of Indian Army trucks and
vehicles trailing even greater dust clouds as they drove off
to their distant army bases near the Chinese and Pakistani
borders.
When we finally reached the platform in front of the Shanti
Stupa, high and isolated in the most remote reaches of the
Himalayas, it felt like Rome in August, awash with two camps:
cows and meditators. The place reverberated with the usual
Tower of Babel languages you hear everywhere from Angkor Wat
to Copacabana Beach.
As the only independent travelers there, we dropped our voices
immediately (hard for Yael and Steven who shouted most of
the time) and crept around the lotus-seated foreigner Meditators
with care, watching out not to smash any fingers. We avoided
the herds of cows/tourists (and their guides who looked at
us contemptuously like we were army AWOL’s without our
General to tell us where to eat and what to see in their country),
we used hand signals to communicate and found an empty place
near the precipitous edge where we could shoot our photos
without disturbing either the tourist/cows or the meditators.
All around us was The Silence.
‘CLICK,’ went Steven’s camera, with the precision
of a rifle.
‘HUM,’ went Yael’s, with the scream of an AK-47.
‘WHINE,’ went mine, as though magnified through
loud
speakers.
There was a murmur of disapproval from the cows, and rustling
of angst among the meditators, and we exchanged glances and
hand motioned to cut the photos out.
It was too late. A tour guide snapped his fingers at us,
and a tall blonde foreign woman went a step further, emerging
from her bliss, swiveled her neck around like a Buddhist Exorcist,
shot us a Look of pure hatred, and screamed: ‘CAN YOU
TAKE YOUR GOD DAMNED CAMERAS AND JUMP OFF THE MOUNTAIN!!!
SOD OFF!!!!!’
‘BAKERY HOPPING’ IN LEH
Most evenings the power was dead, and the ‘nightlife’
consisted of Bakery Hopping, from the English to the Swiss
to the German to the Dutch, and around again. We sat around
before flickering candles, draped in our hideous purple and
blue $2 wool Kashmir shawls, talking travel and drinking the
only, and most awful, beer available in Ladakh - Kingfisher
- made by an Indian multimillionaire from the south who likened
himself to Richard Branson, and was going to start a low cost
airline in India the following year that would be a cross
between Southwest and Hooters Air. The bakeries were run by
Nepalis and Sikkimese who had cornered the Bakery market in
Ladakh and distributed every chocolate croissant, apple crumble,
and peach cobbler to the highest bakeries in the world.
LIKKIR and ALCHI
But most days in Ladakh I rented a vintage Vespa and puttered
around the Indus River Valley, so deep sometimes it made the
Grand Canyon look like child’s play, stopping off at
Tibetan monasteries in Likkir, Alchi, Spitok and Hemis, all
hidden behind dry, cracked, Martian looking mountains, where
more elaborate Puja ceremonies took place, more ancient wall
paintings hung in darkened rooms, and where wine-red robed
Buddhist monks shuffled around, sweeping the earth, tending
to their apple orchards, or happily sitting to talk in the
bright sunlight about their experiences traveling abroad,
with the Dalai Lama, and the marvel of the Western Groupies
who fell at his feet in airports, universities and independent
bookstores from Berkeley to Syracuse.
I rested in tiny, lush villages where the bells from spinning
prayer wheels sounded off over the barley and sunflower fields
hemmed in by tall shimmering Aspen trees. After 4pm, school
children sold fresh apple juice along the road in the Ladakhi
version of a lemonade stand.
With a conspicuously free seat on your motorbike on Ladakh’s
roads, you invariably served as a free taxi driver to uniformed
school children, friendly monks, fierce looking Sikh soldiers,
stern policemen and wizened grandfathers, all of whom sat
behind me for many kilometers, clinging in ones and even twos
as I struggled with clutches and gears up, around, down and
through the deep gorges and passes desperately trying to deliver
these total strangers, and now fast friends, to their police
posts, schools, homes, and fields without crashing.
And there is a lot of crashing in Ladakh. Many trucks miss
the tight curves of the road, and go right over the edge;
one such accident I saw had a truck, and its driver, deep
in a rocky valley, the truck’s tires still spinning and
bloodied sheep carcasses splattered all over the place.
The road builders, the Himank corporation, are the self prescribed
‘Mountain Tamers’ and have devised clever, but ultimately
annoying, slogans and sayings all over the walls to keep the
drivers, and their bad driving, in check:
IF YOU MET GOD, WOULD YOU HAVE ANYTHING TO SAY?
IF MARRIED, DIVORCE SPEED
BRO DON’T LOOK BACK
SAFETY ON ROAD MEANS SAFE TEA AT HOME
FALL ASLEEP, YOUR FAMILY WILL WEEP
WHY HURRY?
The signs were so frequent, and so lame, that I imagined
truck drivers swiveling their necks around to read the sign,
“DON’T WORRY, BE HAPPY’ before ‘happily’
sailing right over the precipice.
‘These are about the gayest roads I’ve ever seen,’
sneered a Canadian, when forced to drive along a 500 meter
drop off curving and snaking around blasted boulders and rock
seams that had no barrier to prevent him from plunging into
the Indus river far below. All he did was talk about the straight,
and easy, roads of his native Edmonton.
Heading back before sunset one night, and before the deep
chill that followed it, I realized my headlight was dead,
Leh was four hours away, and the sun was already gone, the
shadows creeping ever higher on the canyon walls. I would
have to drive at least three hours in the dark.
Cursing and remembering that in Ladakh, roads were potholed,
rutted, and always under construction, and without any lighting
whatsoever, I gunned the engine as fast as I could to cover
the 120 kilometers back to the capital, which sat beyond three
huge gorges, which had no barriers and went straight down
into the seething Indus, choked with glacial melt water. ‘Pray
for a moon,’ I thought.
Only, there was no moon that night, and would be no moon
all the way back. For the first hour, I was able to sense
where the road slipped off the edge, but as the sky turned
the color of dark corduroy, and then black as coal, the road
disappeared completely. Inching along, in the middle of nowhere,
the nightmare was only eased when the few approaching trucks
lit the way with their feeble headlights.
On one corner, I turned and nearly collided into a solitary
man walking towards me, holding a bundle of hay and walking
his yak towards the river.
‘Young man,’ he asked me sternly in excellent English
when he had determined that I was not Ladakhi. ‘Where
are you going at this ungodly hour?’
‘Leh.’
He sucked in his breath. ‘You’d better wait for
the convoy to Kashmir,’ he advised. There will be dozens
of trucks that will come through here, and you can use the
light as guidance.’
I thanked him and asked him when it would be coming through.
‘Any minute now.’
And he was right. Ten minutes later, up ahead I could see
a line of trucks, and as I thanked him before the rumbling
beasts came too close to make conversation impossible, I said,
‘How did you learn to speak English so well?’
‘The BBC.’
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Travel Writers: Daring Dave Pt 5: Altitude Attitude in Little
Tibet by Dave Lowe
