Leh

PART 1: MOUNTAIN BLUES

After something-teen hours of flying on China Southern Airlines, from Auckland to New Delhi via the industrial wasteland of Guangzhou, followed by another flight out from Delhi, we at last arrived in Leh. Leh is an ancient city that was historically a popular stop for traders moving between India and China, and with a population of just 30,000, it’s still a fun-size little desert metropolis in an area dominated by big-poppa mountains.

Leh lies at an altitude of 3500 metres, which is precisely high enough to cause altitude sickness, while being too low to brag to your peers about. Almost immediately after getting off the plane, the unwary sea-level dweller is met with some combination of a racing heart, dizziness, and shortness of breath, and not because he’s in love. The reduced oxygen level is responsible for these annoying symptoms, and the body takes two to three days to achieve a functional degree of acclimatisation.

The advice of Ladakhi administrators is clear: rest for the first day. You should not exert yourself, but should sit idle in a guest house or hotel and wait for the body to register what the hell you’re doing to it. On the second day, you may undertake some light activities – not lying supine all day, for instance. By day three, you should be able to get on with your life. It’s a pity my mother and I ignored the advice, and did lots of walking the first day. Whilst we felt all right during the day, if rather breathless, we paid dearly for our exertion the day after.

My mum was beset with a grisly combination of nausea and headache, while I found myself dizzy, out of breath, and slightly queasy. After a few hours of fruitless resting, we decided to go to the hospital. The taxi we had called from our guest house deposited us at a dusty, run-down complex that had somehow been billed as a viable healthcare facility. We wandered around the grounds in the 30-degree sun, trying to find someone who could point us in the rough direction of a lab coat or a stethoscope. Eventually, a plump Indian man with a white beard directed us toward a dim corridor, which we followed along until we ended up in what I can only suppose was the ‘emergency room.’

It is difficult to articulate how chaotic this medical room was. Devoid of any semblance of triage or order, the only way to see the doctor was to physically push your way into his office, and wave your summary form in his face. That’s if you could maintain your proximity, without some other patient sidling in around you. To be sure, others in the room seemed to have worse ailments than I. A grim-looking African man with an eyepatch sat opposite me, and the room was thrown into further disarray when a barely-conscious Israeli with skin the colour of condensed milk was rolled in on a wheelchair. But eventually I decided to push my way into the doctor’s quarters, in the knowledge that if I didn’t, I would be there all day.

Both my mum and I were directed to inhale oxygen for two hours, an activity that is almost impossibly boring. Never mind that my oxygen was already at 93% before I ever got on the damned machine, we were prescribed the paint-by-numbers therapy. The oxygen helped mum, while I was left no better than before – perhaps worse, as now my legs were stiff from sitting on a bed. Still, perhaps it conferred some secret benefit. The following day, I was feeling much better, and ready to take on the world.

PART 2: THE CITY

Bright-tailed and bushy-eyed, on day three I was ready to get out of the guest house and go explore the city. Mum would be ready to do the same a day later.

            Leh has none of the trappings of a developed, Western city. There are no skyscrapers, corporate franchises or neon lights that exist solely to look cool. Stylishly ancient-looking façades line the main bazaar, which is pedestrian-only. Individually-owned and run stores hawking pashmina shawls or dried fruits form the backbone of the city’s economy, which incidentally operates entirely in cash. Once you hit the shops, the only thing your visa card is good for is preparing a line of coke.

            Wandering down the stone or dirt streets, idle shopkeepers quietly profile your skin colour and stature, and use anything more than 0.25 standard deviations from the Ladakhi mean as a reason to greet you, ask you where you’re from, then try to lure you in to buy a product. Mum has been the subject of this more often than I have, admittedly. She cannot mutter the word ‘scarf’ under her breath without some fabric store owner three stores down whipping his head around, locking eyes, and breaking into a sales routine. It’s all good fun though. I’ll reply ‘julee’, the local greeting, if it is levelled at me. Ladakhi people on the whole are very laid back and not aggressive, which is probably at least partly to do with the Buddhist culture.

            Indeed, Leh is a Buddhist city through and through. Nestled in surrounding mountains are dramatic white monasteries home to schools of orange-robed monks with shaved heads and sneakers. Mum and I visited several such monasteries over the course of our stay, each offering peerless views of the mountains, valleys and green pastorales of the region. After taking in the vistas, we would proceed into the monastery interior, navigating through clouds of scented smoke and musty corridors to find shrines, where offerings, prayers and incantations were made to massive statues of the Buddha. Wall art added further interest to these sacred rooms – full of symbolism, various paintings depicted historical or dogmatic elements of the Buddhist faith.

The influence of Buddhism is felt in all aspects of Ladakhi society. Smoking is uncommon, consumption of alcohol practically non-existent. Crime is low, with stealing being a non-occurrence. And most local dishes are vegetarian, with the exception of chicken, which gets a free pass, though farmers are not supposed to kill poultry inside of the Leh-Ladakh province. Even confectionery is barely touched by the locals. Notions of intoxication result in all these things being shirked by Ladakhi society, though increasingly locals are taking up smoking, and several Leh birdies have told me that things in the city may be gradually taking a turn for the Western.

            All in all, I have come to feel rather affectionate towards Leh, even as its lack of worldly pleasures is sometimes trying on my Western soul. The unbreakable peacefulness of the people has proven a refreshing change from home, where irate property investors are induced to fits of road rage by split-second delays.

So much, then, for Leh city. On day six of our stay, mum and I embarked on a trek.

 PART 3: THE TREK

The trek had been a long time coming. Truthfully, it was the main reason we came to Leh. After meeting with a couple of different tour agencies, going over options, and getting quotes, we eventually settled on a three-night four-day trek to Sham Valley, which was considered to be the easiest trek in the region.

            We walked to Adventure Studio in the morning, and took an overly sugary tea as we waited for our guide and porter to arrive. The porter, Lobzang, arrived first. A slight young man of nineteen, he had no trouble at all carrying our fifteen-kilogram pack, and over the course of the trek would prove to walk far faster than mum or I. The guide, Stanzin, arrived some time afterward. A friendly, outgoing man, we would talk to him a lot over the four days.

            Our crew having arrived, we set off down the road, which was in terrible condition, and met up with our driver. From Leh it was about a two-and-a-half-hour drive to the part of the Sham Valley where our trek began, but we kept ourselves busy by taking go-pro clips of the passing mountainscape, and chatting with Stanzin, whose English was decent. We arrived at the start of the track sometime after midday, wolfed down a ‘hot lunch’ that was predominantly cold, then set off on our journey.

           

Day 1

The first day of the trek saw us hike through a desert landscape that boasted less greenery than a fossil fuel company conference. As we marched over sandy foothills and through plunging valleys, I asked Stanzin to give me a Ladakhi language lesson.

“I want you to teach me some basic phrases,” I said as we ascended an arid knoll, causing me to suddenly feel like a nineteenth-century anthropologist. Stanzin was only too happy to oblige. We started with ‘hello’, which is julee, then ‘how are you’, rendered kamzang in na le, then a slew of other phrases that later proved useful in the homestays we slept at. I found myself trying to analyse the grammar, but soon realised that, with a vocabulary of about fifteen words, this was likely to be futile. Still, it was an enjoyable diversion for part of the day’s trekking.

   

      

The searing hot sun, combined with a mostly uphill gradient, eventually left mum feeling less than good. I was not too fazed, as I rather enjoy the heat. Alas, a plan had to be made. We found shelter in the shade of a few trees on the roadside for a while, mum not being sure she could finish the day’s trekking. Two hours or so remained, and it was still mostly uphill. Fortunately, sometime afterward, a car drove by, and mum was able to hitch a lift up to the destination village of Yangthang. Stanzin and I pressed on by foot, as I was still feeling zesty enough. Oh, and Lobzang? Hours ago he too had decided to catch a lift to the village in a car that was driving by. Fair enough, I guess.

            Stanzin and I arrived at Yangthang at 6pm, after a long descent from the mountains. We met up with mum and Lobzang, and then found our homestay. It was a quaint, if minimally-furnished little house, perched near the village stream. Our room contained nothing more than a large mattress on the floor, which was harder than an Egyptian stone pallet, but it was nevertheless sufficient for our purposes.

            Dinner was served at around 7pm. The room where Stanzin, Lobzang, mum and I ate was separate from the area where the family ate, which made it feel more like a guest house than a homestay. But the food was quite tasty – some combination of dal, lentils, and rice, totally vegetarian. The family seemed pleasant enough, though since they didn’t speak a lick of English, our interactions were limited to whatever Ladakhi phrases my capricious memory had decided to retain. I must have sounded somewhat obsequious to them, as I kept saying “ma zhimpo ragh”, which means ‘it’s very delicious.’

            The four of us played cards after dinner – rummy. Playing cards was to become an evening routine for us over the course of the trek. Sometime later, we headed off to our hard mattress bed.

Day 2

After devouring some breakfast chapattis, we set off on the second leg of our trek. Today’s leg consisted of a gentle couple of hours to the base of a pass, followed by a decidedly less gentle slog up that pass. We took it slow, of course, and eventually made it up, though we were overtaken twice, first by a sinewy quinquagenarian carrying a saddle, and second by an Indian-American woman on a day trek. Lobzang had gone on ahead once again – we found him at the top of the pass, where he had been waiting for quite some time. At the summit, we also encountered a solo German trekker who had apparently nearly had heat-stroke after taking a wrong turn the previous day. The perils of the mountains! We then had a descent to the next village, called Hemis Supakchen, and arrived in the early afternoon. 

            Up until now I have declined to mention Indian toilets. The reason for this omission has been a combination of disgust upon recollection, and ambivalence about the necessity of elaborating on it. However, such was the base condition of the toilet at the homestay in Hemis Supakchen that I cannot but speak out.

            It is bad enough that latrines across India are holes in the ground. Rather than call them what they are, which is ‘long drops’, Indian sign-fitters euphemistically and insolently call them ‘toilets.’ So I was not expecting a pristine, flushing lavatory in this far-flung village locale. However, in other locations, I had at least been graced with a square for a hole – an orifice with a decent area in which to ‘deposit the goods.’ Here, the toilet was a mere slit – a pitiful rectangle whose width could not possibly allow for tidy work to be done. So base and poorly conceived was this toilet that my mum and I literally dreaded using it.

            Were it not despicable enough already, it was located up a flight of uneven stone steps, which required the utmost care when navigating in the dark. And perhaps most disgustingly, the toilet floor was crawling with large black beetles who only became more frenetic and haphazard under the light of a head-torch. Suffice it to say I could not, drawing upon every ounce of my creative juices, contrive a toilet so repulsive and degrading as that which I encountered at Hemis Supakchen.

            The homestay was great though! The husband and wife who ran the place were exceptionally welcoming and interactive, even as they spoke almost no English. Much human communication takes place by means of gesticulation, and by the end of the evening I had apparently become a professional mime. This time, we played Hearts, a more challenging game than Rummy, and so channelled the last of our energy for the day into counting cards.

Day 3

This was the last trekking day of our trip. It was also the most challenging, and left us wondering why the Sham Valley trek had been billed ‘the baby trek.’ After a fairly easy ascent from the village to the top of a hill, we were confronted with a steep descent down a narrow and uneven mountain path. This was difficult to negotiate for mum, so we went down slowly holding hands. Stanzin was apologetic, though he perhaps didn’t quite comprehend the difficulty, being a local with a heart like Superman. After what must have been an hour of this, we eventually reached a flatter section of track, which was nonetheless not much wider, and certainly no more even. Stanzin recounted a ghoulish anecdote about a young Israeli woman who had died on a nearby section of track not long ago, due to falling boulders from intensive construction work higher up the mountainside. We shivered as we carefully negotiated the sketchy path, and after a while reached the true challenge.

            Looming above us was a tall mountain which we needed to pass over. Lobzang had long since conquered it, of course. He sat watching from the peak as we dawdled up the narrow track that was etched into the side of the mountain. Below us, a cliff that might as well have been sheer plunged down into the valley. An agoraphobic would have been appalled. The extra altitude, topping out at 3850 metres, made the ascent harder, though admittedly the weather was merciful, as it was drizzling and quite cool. We must have taken over an hour to climb up the pass, and were certainly glad to put it behind us, as exhilarating as it was.

            The remainder of the day’s trekking was an easy downhill, passing through a village called Ang, before reaching the destination village of Thimosgang. Ang was bizarrely difficult to get through. There seemed to be no way through the village that didn’t involve deep mud, strange inclines, or walking through crop fields. In the end we encountered all three, but eventually made it out, and then had an easy walk to Thimosgang, where we found our last homestay.

           

Day 4

On the fourth day, we drove back to Leh, though we made a significant diversion to see a monastery at Lamayuru, an unsurprisingly remote mountain village. After that, I certainly felt that my monastery quota had been well-fulfilled. The only thing left to do was don a robe and embark on my path to Enlightenment.

            No, we were enlightened enough by the trek, which in spite of its difficulties had been very enjoyable, and afforded us some of the most spectacular views we’d had in the region. Stanzin and Lobzang had been good company, and had given the trek another dimension that enhanced the whole experience. While something was definitely amiss with the track billing office when they called Sham Valley a ‘baby trek’, all has been forgiven, and we don’t regret doing it.

PART 4: WINDING DOWN & A RANDOM ANECDOTE

Returning from our trek was like entering purgatory; we’d done the main event of the Leh leg of our trip, but two full days remained until our departure to Kazakhstan. I now consider those two days to have been ‘winding down’ days, akin to the last eighth of a story after the big climax.

The day after we returned from our expedition, we booked a taxi to take us up Khardung La, a mountain pass that happens to boast the highest motorable road in the world. With a peak of 5359 metres, this behemoth is as incredible as it is dangerous. Many a motorcyclist and driver have run into trouble up in the pass on account of the altitude, and some have even died. It was seemingly for this reason that when we arrived at a police checkpoint some 4500 metres up the mountain – the checkpoint where the authorities review your passport and visa – we discovered that the road had been closed in our direction. There was too much traffic, explained our driver, so it was not safe to keep the road open for us. Alas, c’est la vie. We managed to snap some pretty decent photos on the way up and down, and in the grand scheme of the universe, our missing out on the extra thousand metres was about as important as the ingredients list on a bottle of cooking oil.

I would like to finish with an anecdote that I could not find space for in the other sections. The story starts and finishes at a downtown money exchange.

Now, as I explained earlier, Leh’s economy operates pretty much exclusively on cash. You just can’t pay for anything with a card. The city’s various tour companies are no exception, and so when mum and I came to booking our trek with Adventure Studio, I was politely informed that the company only accepted cash.

“OK,” I said with a forced smile, as I signed the waiver, or whatever the form was. It shouldn’t be ridiculously difficult gathering 35,000 rupees in cash over the next two days, should it? 700 New Zealand dollars is no mean sum, but neither is it particularly enormous.

            Mum and I both knew that individual ATM machines in Leh imposed 24-hour withdrawal limits of 10,000 rupees. According to a local source, the reasoning for this involves cracking down on tax evasion, though I won’t bore you with the details, especially since I only half understand the train of logic myself. So then, we thought, we would simply visit different machines, and take advantage of the two days we had to amass the cash. How dismayed we were to discover that all the ATMs in town were closed for the next two days, because they had literally run out of cash. Yes, that’s right. The state ATMs and the international bank ATMs had all run out of cash, and would not reopen until the day we were due to leave for our trek.

            Zoinks, Scooby! Things were looking bleak. We were on the verge of cancelling the trek, and trying our luck with a different company. But, all was not lost. Amid the urban squalor of downtown Leh, a shining beacon of hope caught our eye. A money exchange! Surely such a seedy banking racket would be strapped with enough paper to meet our needs. So we strode into the joint and informed the staff of our request. We needed 35,000 rupees in cash, and would pay for it with a visa card. The chubby, materialistic-looking Indian man behind the desk was only happy to help. It would be simple. We would pay him 37,000-and-something rupees, and he would get us the cash. A tidy commission, but at least he had the greenbacks in his office.

            Mum swiped her visa card through the machine. This was it! Finally, we would be able to get the cash we needed. At long last, after our fruitless wandering around town, we had found the answer to our woes.

            …The machine didn’t work.

The Indian man smiled nervously, and asked us to try swiping again. We did so. It did not work that time either.

“It’s OK,” he said, the magical spirit of avarice in his countenance scolding him. “Sometimes the machine doesn’t work in here, because of bad reception. We can go down the street – I know a corner where it works.” OK, so we were going to walk down the street with the banker and do the transaction down there.

            We got about halfway down the road before mum informed us that she was too tired. It was the end of a long day, and she was understandably not in the mood to participate in this farcical vignette. And yet, we needed the cash. So I offered to do the transaction on her behalf, asking her for her PIN number to do so. There was seemingly no other way. The banker and I said our farewells to my mother, and continued down the bazaar.

            After what seemed like an eternity, during which the banker engaged in brief and random conversational exchanges with acquaintances of his on the street, we arrived at the end of the main bazaar, the fabled location where the visa machine would work. He told me to take a seat on the ground, an instruction I was reluctant to comply with, seeing as there was a never-ending stream of pedestrians walking through that piece of terrain. But I acquiesced, and he took a seat next to me on the asphalt.

            “Now,” he said, queuing up the machine, “How much was it again? Thirty-seven thousand, two hundred and something. Two hundred and…” I stared at the banker vacantly as he struggled to recall his own rate.

“Let’s say forty.” Great. I was pleased that the money-man had settled on a random integer for his commission, which would then be charged to my mum’s card. His stocky fingers depressed the appropriate buttons to line up the transaction, and he then passed the machine to me, asking me to enter my mother’s PIN. I did so.

            …The machine didn’t work.

“Let’s try again,” he suggested, ever the supplier of good ideas. So we tried again. The outcome was no different. The banker remained calm.

“OK, I have one more idea,” he said. “I have another shop back down the bazaar. It has a visa machine. We’ll try it there.” Excellent.

            The Indian money-exchanger and I stood up, brushed off our pants, and set off back down the street. As we walked, he held the machine in one hand, my mother’s visa card sticking out of it. This seemed totally unremarkable to him.

“Here, try again,” he said, passing me the machine as we walked down the bazaar, where hundreds of other people were moving around in close proximity. I numbly entered my maternal parent’s PIN again, as the banker waved at an acquaintance.

“It didn’t work,” I said, passing the machine back to him.

“OK,” he said, “We’ll wait till the shop.”

            It was quite a long walk to his shop, which wasn’t his shop at all, but another man’s store that sold expensive-looking shawls and jewellery. By this point, I was doubting whether anything would come of this wild goose chase. We walked into the upmarket joint as a falsely earnest looking Ladakhi salesman explained the integrity of some gemstone to a smartly dressed Indian lady. The banker greeted his fellow racketeer and retrieved the visa machine from behind the counter, before queueing up the transaction once again. He seemed to be clearer on the details of his commission rate this time, which sped up the process somewhat.

            “OK, here you go,” he said to me, passing me the machine for the umpteenth time. I sighed internally, then proceeded to enter the PIN.

            …The machine worked!!!

The cash-man and I shared a laugh as we celebrated the success of the transaction device.

“OK, now we’ll go back and get the cash.” And so, once more, I followed the banker, utterly sick of his silly gait, but relieved nonetheless that the last half hour had not been completely wasted.

When we arrived back at the main store, one of the banker’s co-workers opened up the till and began counting out 500 rupee notes in front of us. After counting out seventy, she recounted, then passed the notes to the banker, who counted them himself. I silently audited his arithmetic as he deftly passed each note into the other hand, looking impossibly stereotypical for his profession. Fortunately, the two of them had got it right, and having cross-checked the amount about five times, we at last took the wad of cash and the receipt, and got the hell out of there.

In sum, Leh was a better-than-expected destination for us. From mountains to monasteries to dusty streets to rural idyls, Ladakh supplied us with plenty of anecdotes and experiences to recall with varying levels of affection in the years to come. We now journey to Almaty, Kazakhstan, where some actual ‘stories of the steppe’ might unfold. I hope that when I can finally be bothered writing an entry about it, you will read it as faithfully as you have read this.

Ya julee