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| The Indus River Valley at Leh, Ladakh |
4. Leh, Ladakh, India
This is the final posting in this series set in northwestern India in late September 1980. Having successfully made the two-day bus trip to Leh (Ladakh) from Srinagar (Kashmir), we passengers felt as if we deserved some sort of medal after being scared out of our wits as we crossed high Himalayan passes, sometimes inching along close to an edge with no guard rail in order to pass a truck or bus coming in the opposite direction. Of course, it was the driver who deserved the medal.
Leh seemed a charming town, part Muslim, part Buddhist, with clean air, sparkling skies, inviting glades of trees, little glacial-melt channels, and views of the young Indus River flowing across the valley. A room in a hotel (all of which were quite spartan) cost a couple of dollars. (Ours had icy water to bathe in, no heat.) Then the altitude (11,500 feet) left one a tad dizzy--needing to stop and take good deep breaths every so often and fend off high-altitude headaches.
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| A Muslim mosque in front and a Buddhist monastery on the hill behind. From Leh's main street. |
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| Women selling vegetables in the heart of town. |
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| Typical Ladakhi house |
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| Tin cans around tree trunks prevented animals from killing the tree by eating the bark. |
SOS Children's villages can be found throughout the world for the orphaned and abandoned. This one for Tibetan/Ladakhi children lay a few kilometers out of town. We were given a lunch of brown bread and mildly curried radishes and potatoes, the latter two being the dietary staple (preserved by burying), especially during winter when the Zoji-la was closed.
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| Choglumsar SOS Children's Village. |
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| Mani stones on which Tibetan Buddhist mantras are written. Piles of them are often found beside roadways, as this one was. |
On visiting Thikse Gompa, even farther out of town, we found old paintings in a courtyard of entities representing Power, Wisdom, Compassion ... as well as representations of demons so that people could learn to overcome their fear. Inside, with its smell of burning butter lamps, we saw old and smoky thangkas (religious paintings) plus a library of prayer books bound in cloth and stacked on shelves.
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| Thikse |
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| Thikse's Maitreya Temple housed a two-story-high Buddha. This temple was built on the occasion of the Dalai Lama's visit in 1970. |
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| Looking down onto the Indus Valley from the Gompa |
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| Harvested fields where groups threshed and sang a harvest song that carried up to us. |
Down below, people and animals were hard at work. In various fields, six, seven, or eight animals, graduating in size from the smallest donkey in the center to the largest horse on the outside, were being driven round and round a pole, breaking seed heads as they trod and as people kept forking grain under their feet. Nearby, women winnowed in the wind.
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| The Himalayan Nun-Kun massif as seen on the flight back to Srinagar. (It took 25 minutes to fly what had taken 20 hours to drive.) |
I felt singularly privileged, indeed, to have visited this newly-opened, unique, and splendid part of the world and to have done so before many years of tourism had altered its character. But I also felt that by wanting to see the unspoiled, we tourists, all, were too rapidly helping to advance time in this "other-century" town.
Part 1. Bus Trip to Srinagar
Part 2. Srinagar, Kashmir, India
Part 3. Bus Trip to Leh
Part 4. Leh, Ladakh, India
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