I awoke with the sunrise this morning, feeling strangely well rested. Fern is just waking up but I’ve been sitting in bed enjoying the peace and quiet. For the first time in a while we are in a place that feels very homey and all the various energies buzzing through our minds and bodies can settle. There are two windows in our room. One looks to the south where there are craggy mountains off in the distance with a light dusting of snow on the peaks. The clouds seem low and cling to the rocky horizon but in fact we are at an altitude of somewhere between 11,000 and 12,000 feet so the peaks off in the distance are actually approaching the clouds, and not the other way around. The other window faces west and looks over a large garden, almost a small farm, filled with hardy brassicas and surrounded by coarse handmade stone walls which keep the freely roaming cows from plundering the garden. Another smaller mountain range sits behind that, very close, and reflects the morning sun brightly.
This is our third place in Leh, a beautiful small town in the far north of India, in the province of Jammu and Kashmir. After a week or so of traveling from New Delhi it feels quite different from anything we’ve experienced so far, even in India. This is the Himalayas and the people here are mostly Ladakhi with a considerable influence from the many Tibetan refugees who live here. Tibet is a short distance away, as is Pakistan, and it feels a world away from the culture of Delhi. I’ve been fascinated for a long time with Tibet (thanks, oddly enough to my time living in Bloomington, Indiana where some of the Dalai Lama’s family lives) and this may be about close as we get since the People’s Republic of China doesn’t make it very easy for a couple of independent Americans to wander over there and see what they’ve done with the place. Tibetans have some of the most beautiful smiles, warmth and light shining through a weathered exterior.
To get here we took a bus from Manali which slowly twisted and bumped its way through the mountains over the course of two long days. The bus climbed over several high mountain passes, the highest of which was over 17,000 feet and altitude sickness affected not only us, but the locals too. Our steady diet of motion sickness pills kept us sane enough so that we could enjoy the unbelievable scenery. That will most likely be the subject of another post.
It was our intention to find a place in Leh to call home for a while – someplace relatively inexpensive and comfortable so that we could literally catch our breath, restore ourselves, and explore the surrounding area at a leisurely pace. We found that home, walking around and inquiring at various guesthouses and doing a little hard bargaining. A nice lady and her two sons live here and they have several rooms for rent but it seems that they haven’t quite put the place on the market yet so we’re the only ones here, maybe even her first guests. We noticed that her guesthouse had an incredible view of the mountains and approached her as she was tending her lush garden.
I’m sipping a cold concoction of UV sterilized Indian tap water, Nescafe instant coffee, sugar cubes, and buttery tasting cream from a small carton kept cool by keeping it near the window. Shake until dissolved. Hot real coffee is almost impossible to come by so this does the job, although I’m eager to try one of the local specialties – salted yak butter tea. For a journey of this length it’s far more economical to take care of things like morning coffee, and a good percentage of our meals, ourselves rather than going to restaurants and cafes for everything.
The internet has been rather uncooperative up here. Everyone blames it on the inflammation of an ongoing conflict in the Kashmir region between India and Pakistan but frankly, I haven’t exactly figured out why that causes constant outages in telecommunications. It’s not like there are explosions blowing up the telephone lines 20 times per day. As far as I know things are relatively stable with a massive Indian military presence in Kashmir. Regardless of the vague reasons, I haven’t had the opportunity to contribute to the blog for a while but at our current spot the internet is somewhat decent and I look forward to catching up on some posts about Sri Lanka and India.
jim@snorkelbandits.com