A Traveler's Diary

Travel Story by Elizabeth Elliot

Ladakh, Tibet

Good evening and I hope that your sky at dusk may be a beautiful as Ladakh.

I write to you from Leh, capital of the Himalayan province of Ladakh, where I've just returned from the Nubra Valley, near Pakistan, part of the famous 'silk route'.

The trip comprised of a quite literally cliffhanging journey, bumping along mountainous roads, including the world's highest drivable pass at 5700m. With our friendly student guides Dolkar and Stanzin, we listened to a soundtrack of the Hindi blockbuster 'Kal Hoo Na Hoo' and sung along to it with much gusto! I am still in a perpetual state of astonishment at the landscape, which, often compared to the surface of the moon, is relentlessly dry and barren. Pockets of green that centre around the river are a miracle of life, and from it there is a whole different world - fields of barley, cows, apricot trees and farmhouses.

If you climb up somewhere high you realise what a small portion these little village oases are; all that can be seen in every direction is huge spaces of rocks and sand, ending in snow topped mountains, speckled with pale white chortens and gonpas (the Tibetan words for stupas and monasteries) that cling to the rock faces. These are always placed on the top of a steep hill, and contain marvels behind heavy doors - old dark temples with gigantic golden Buddhas, walls covered in fierce tantric deities and everywhere are intricate carving and painting; pervaded by the smell of incense and the presence of red-robed monks.

Ladakh is really a place where, in the too-often quoted phrase, ancient and modern meet: where in Leh, tourism is rampant and you can eat any kind of food without leaving a tranquil garden, whilst down alleyways bread is still being made on open fires; where in ancient darkened shrines are offerings of coca cola bottles and biscuits, and monks take calls on their mobile phones.

The highlight of the trip was surely that we had the good luck to arrive in Nanchuk village on the eve of a festival. Turning up early, there quickly collected a crowd of seemingly every kid in the district and we played exhausting games with them for a while. At one point I feared death by trampling!

I think we were the first tourists, first non-Ladakhis for that matter, ever to have been brought along to this occasion, and in the usual manner of such an event, were forcibly encouraged to join in the dancing, and to drink out of enormous teacups from the large vessels of chang. Of course, our best efforts were a very poor display against the elegance and grace of those who already knew how to dance: especially the older women, who wore elaborate headdresses of turquoise and coral, and had beautifully deeply wrinkled faces. They danced with great concentration and dignity, and I could not help but compare the obvious respect that their presence engendered to our own society's view of aging.

Ladakh is an intriguing place, not just because of its other-worldly landscape, but because it was only opened to the West in 1974. Before then, life carried on a well-ordered subsistence level, and I don't think that it is an idealisation to say that people were genuinely happy and content - this is something all researchers seem to agree upon, and the Ladakhi people are famed for their good humour and cheerful outlook, which has a lot to do with the strong influence of Buddhism. Of course, life was hard in some ways and in particular the prevalence of childhood mortality, due the harsh winters, but, my new friends tell me, people never worried, did not work too hard and always had time to enjoy themselves, whilst carrying out an intricately tuned pattern of living that utilised everything and wasted nothing.

Since the opening of the borders, Western culture has flooded in, causing alienation and confusion - for example, the new 'Westernised' school system, based on a much poorer version of our own, teaches children nothing about their own culture and effectively disables them from continuing to live in traditional ways. So, young people move to the town (Leh), adding to the urban sprawl of bad housing and faulty drains. Unemployment is high; they become embarrassed about their own culture, and they try to emulate what they perceive to be Western ways - after all, tourists appear to have an incredibly easy life! Subsidised grain is imported across the mountains creating more traffic on already congested roads, eroding traditional farming practices and creating dependence. With tourism and imported goods, a new 'money culture' is created that judges this bountiful region to be poor, and people begin to believe that they are.

But of course, this is only one side of the picture and it would be hypocritical as a Westerner to want to deny people access to everything that I take for granted out of a misguided sense of tradition. There has been a lot of work done to try to counteract this trend, and Leh is apparently much cleaner than it used to be. I think the most interesting point that has been made to me is that the problems in Ladakh are actually not so different from anywhere else; it has just happened more obviously, and in a shorter time - for example, the shifting away from local towards large scale food production, and breakdown of communities and so on. The damage has been done, now, but it seems that there are many positive actions being taken to move forwards. It's amazing to see the roofs of houses in villages covered in shiny solar panels: the story behind this is that as reliance has shifted to imported fuels for heating, it is not now possible psychologically for people to go back to traditional heating methods (and why should they?) - but the introduction of renewable technologies is helping to dispel this reliance on the outside, and create a new kind of sustainability.

Tashi Rabgyas, one of Ladakh's leading scholars, seems to view tourism in quite a positive light:

"What impact has tourism produced on our culture? The tourists made us conscious of our own culture. In fact, our approach to modern tourism has been our own, based on our culture."

It is certainly true that tourism, whether good or bad, is now a vital and highly competitive part of the economy. It was interesting to hear about this from a Tibetan perspective as I went on a guided walking tour around the Tibetan refugee settlement and school south of Leh. Although the Tibetan and Ladakhi cultures are incredibly similar, the obvious link being Tibetan Buddhism, language, music and dance; there is still a prevalent local vs. refugee mentality, and a surprising amount of discrimination. Consequently, it is very difficult for a Tibetan to get a job in anything other than manual labour.

The guide told me firmly that there is no poverty in Ladakh, and no debts - an extraordinary claim to be able to make about one's country, and certainly not one we could make!

*

After a couple of days, I hitched a ride onto Lamarayuru, a village based around a temple west of Leh. It is an indescribable place. It seems as though the mountains have given up any pretence of being composed of anything other than rock, not even sand – just rock – composed of gigantic contorted formations, and in spectacular colours: green, purple, white, grey: even the river is pink. There are long lines of giant weathered white chortens, and prayer walls of coloured stone, each inscribed with om mani padme hum, reaching far into the distance. Apparently once upon a time the carving of these was used as a punishment, to put offenders to work and improve their karma.

The gonpa itself, again very old, is set on a hilltop, with a friendly and active community of monks who do a great puja (prayer ceremony) three times a day, with some top-of-the-range chanting and a sort of multi-instrumented 'monk jam'. I sat with the lively gang of 'baby monks' of around 9-11 years who spent most of the time fidgeting, hitting each other, blowing bubbles, throwing fake spiders around etc, and they gave me butter tea...some of them also took me right up onto the roof of the gonpa where they blew into a conch shell, which makes a plaintive wail to call the monks to prayer.

Despite all this, it's also a very peaceful and meditative experience to sit inside the temple while all this is taking place. I generally ate lunch with the monks in the communal dinner hall, and hung around the place, gazing at the mountains in a dreamy sort of way. Lamarayuru feel much more remote than other communities I've visited, and it is a good place to watch life pass through a Ladakhi day - leisurely old women and men twirling prayer wheels, children playing in irrigation streams, herds of donkeys wandering by and the chaff and rhythmic singing of the gathering of the barley harvest.

However, last night I had a most traumatic experience which should be a lesson to all travellers. After leaving the temple, I put on my sandals...only to realise that they were not mine...exactly the same, just a couple of sizes smaller. So I spent the next few hours wandering hopelessly around the steep roads of Lamaryuru in the dark, searching for the elusive Frenchwoman who I believed to have made off with them. You can imagine what a pathetic picture I made, staggering into guesthouses brandishing my sandaled feet and trying to explain my predicament in various languages. I was close to hysterical exhaustion! I eventually discovered her at 6.45 this morning on a campsite, about to depart with my sandals. Any of you who have travelled in hot countries will know the practical and symbolic significance of one's trekking sandals.

Then I waited around a little nervously to see if my adopted Dutch companions, Rebekka, Jose and Jildao would turn up with a jeep. There are no phones you see. Thankfully, jolted on our way to Kashmir with many respective tales of adventure to tell.

Illustration by Bob Veon
(Bob Veon's Website)

Read more about the author of this story:
Elizabeth Elliot