Ladakh

LEH

Wednesday 28th July 2010
Arrived in Leh around 10pm. Some of the group were startled to discover Leh was a town, and not a medieval, mud brick village. We found a room at the Yak Trail Inn and fell asleep. In the morning most of the group moved up the hill to a guest house reccommended by the Lonely Planet. I decided to stay in a lovely guest house I saw in the area of Chubi, called Green Villa. It had a large garden, every square centimetre planted with potatoes, tomatoes, Kos lettuce, broccolli, cabbage, carrots, barley, and many other vegetables. And lots and lots of lovely flowers. Green Villa is self sufficient. It also is host to 14 - 16 guests a night during the summer season of June, July, August. They make their own butter, jam, flour. They have fields further up the mountains where they keep their animals in the summer months. They harvest apricots, mustard seeds, walnuts. They cut the flowers and grasses for fodder for the animals. Ladakhi homes have a colourful profusion of plants pots with geraniums, poppies, cornflowers, sunflowers.

The gardens are irrigated by an intricate system of shallow channels which run to the base of trees and curve around them, run along the rows of vegetables and are damned off at the ends with small sluice gates of slates secured in place by old pieces of clothing. At first one wonders why there are random bits of jumpers lying around in the ground, then I realised it was to further secure the tiles of thin stone or slate that acted as diverters for the channels of water.

The food in Green Villa was the best I tasted in Ladakh and India. The Mother of the house - ama le - would go into the garden and pick the leaves and vegetables for the lunch and dinner. The food was fresh, clean, healthy, light. We had soup, vegatables and rice, then sometimes a warmer, heavier dish made with a sort of homemade pasta. I think this dish would be good in the winter cold. They also had chillis growing in the garden, and this Ladakhi dish had a spicey edge to it.

LEH AND GREEN VILLA

Green villa is representative of the home of a Ladakhi family who are reasonably well off. The younger daughter of the family is studying a Masters Degree in political science from Delhi University. The older sister is married and her husband works as a guide for people who wish to go trekking. The couple have a baby boy called Karma Wangdey Gyatso. The sisters names are Rinchen Dolma and Rinchen Angmo. Rinchen Angmo is Wangdey's mother. The sisters were named by the lama.

Green Villa is a lovely, large home. It is new, having been built only 6 or 7 years ago. It is unusual in the area, as the first floor is constructed entirely from stone. Ladakhi houses are usually built with a stone foundation, then dried mud bricks form the house walls. Nowadays, the majority of houses have steel reinforcing rods between the courses of bricks. Previously, I am unsure what they used. The ceilings beams are whole Willow trunks. The tree is left whole. Thin Poplar sticks line the spaces between each beam. In good construction, the Poplar has a slice shaved off each end of the stick so it can sit flat on the beam. After the Poplar sticks are laid close together to form the ceiling of the room below, paper is laid, then brush similar to dried heather is placed over, then earth is smoothed over the top to seal it all. Above the windows and doors in traditional Ladakhi homes are wooden lintels. Some are very intricate, comprising stepped borders of carved pattern. They are a beautiful addition to a building. It is expensive to have these lintels as they are carved by hand.

All homes have lines of prayer flags fluttering from the corners of their roofs. It is lovely to see and makes the buildings seem very alive. The winds carry the prayers to the universe. The Om Mani Pad Me Hum prayer is all encompassing and very popular on the flags.
Green Villa has running water and flushing toilets. Outside the Poplar stick garden gate is a fast flowing stream. The family wash in this stream, allowing the guests access to the piped water. Most guests who stay at Green Villa are sympathetic to the traditional Ladakhi way of life. So, guests can be seen washing their clothes, and occasionally their face, in the freezing mountain water.

A traditional Ladakhi compost toilet is available for the use of the guests. This comprises of a small elevated room with earth on the floor and a rectangular hole cut in the floor. After one has made use of the facility one just pours a shovel full of earth down the hole. This is a very efficient, clean sewerage system. There is no smell, and the compost will be used in the future to maintain the garden production.

I slept and rested most of the day of Thursday 29 July. Leh is at an elevation of around 3600 metres. The air is thin, and until one becomes acclimatised the slightest exersion leaves one breathless. The only way to adjust to is rest and drink plenty, plenty, plenty water.

LIFE IN LEH, SUMMER CAPITAL OF LADAKH

Friday 30 July 2010
Morning in paradise. The sun shines from 6 am onwards. Sitting in the garden on the handkerchief of grass allocated for the compact dining table, the sky is all around one. You feel you are living in the sky! The blue is different to the colour it is in Islay. This is because the air is drier and the light is not refracted so often before it reaches the eyes. Also, one is closer to the outer atmosphere up here. It feels very strong and secure. The mountains fill your vision, but the enormous, open aspect of piercingly clear blue sky expands your heart and mind.


Breakfast is homemade individual, round flat bread with homemade apricot jam and homemade unsalted butter. Mint tea for me and salt butter tea for Ama-Le and other hardy souls.

This afternoon I explored Leh town itself. There is an old town area and a new town area. The old town has narrow, winding medieval streets lined with old, mud brick buildings. The buildings comprise one room open to the street with old, wooden shutters forming the wall to the street. The wood is old and green and the planks are splintered and rounded at the ends.


The shops are silversmiths or metal smiths, cheese and curd makers. Dusty rooms with red and brown and dark blue striped folded wool blankets. There are also rooms containing raw, skinny carcasses with flies buzzing around. A single old man sits in each room working at making curds in a large, shallow metal basin, or stitching something or talking to his friends. There are many shops selling metal work items. The traditional Ladakhi house cooker is a magnificent, enormous oblong L shaped metal stove with an area for a fire and a bit for a stove pipe. The more expensive ones have intricate metal designs welded on the walls of the stove. If the stove is a dark colour the designs are in silver and gold metal. I think traditionally the Ladakhi people exhibited their wealth by their kitchen utensils. An old fashoined Ladakhi home will have dozens of different sized silver basins. Some the size of a soup bowl, some large enough to bathe in! The first time I saw the kitchen of my family in TackmaChik I thought they did catering for weddings! But it was just Stanzin's own kitchen utensils. They also have copper bowls, and many brass and gold coloured goblets which are filled with apricot oil and used as lamps on the alter, which is in every home.


That evening, outside in the garden of green villa, I had a yoga lesson from Baljit Singh. Baljit is a tour guide - and a classical guitarist! He has a battered old guitar with the varnish worn off the fretts from continuous playing, and he is GREAT at playing it. His tour company takes people to places where they can reconnect with the natural world and remember what it feels like to be whole and at peace. Which is all very well until disaster stikes! There was not much peace or tranquility ahead for Ladakh over the next few weeks, but that evening we were blissfully unaware of this.
Link for Baljit's travel company. (Just now the pound is roughly equal to 70 rupees.
http://www.thetopcamp.com/

LEARNING FROM LADAKH ~ ISEC

Saturday 31 July

Ladakh means 'the land of high passes'. Ladakh comprises two semi autonomous areas, Leh district and Kargil district, in the region of Jammu and Kashmir, the northernmost state of the Republic of India. Ladakh lies between the Kunlun mountain range in the North and the main Great Himalayas to the south. The Indus river forms the backbone of Ladakh.

The population is around 260,000 souls, being either Tibetan, Mons or Dards peoples. Unlike the rest of Jammu and Kashmir, which is mainly Islamic most Ladakhis are Tibetan Buddhist. There are also a small number of followers of the old, old Bon religion. Most Buddhists follow the tantric form of Buddhism known as Vajrayana Buddhism.

I have been fascinated with Ladakh for many years. Ever since I heard Helena Norberg-Hodge talking about it on Woman's Hour on radio 4. Helena runs an organisation called International Society of Ecology and Culture http://www.isec.org.uk/ This organisation seeks to relearn from Ladakh the ways we in the West have lost in our new economic culture. Ways of community and local food production. Happiness in a non economic way. It also seeks to reafirm to the Ladakhi people that their traditional ways and social structures are a good thing. Women are respected and are not devalued in traditional Ladakhi culture.

When I was young, Gaelic language was denigrated and we were advised to learn French and German at school. What use was a dying, old fashioned language to us as we were making our powerful, successful way in the world? Now we know, to our detriment, we need our language. The very structures of our consciouness are formed by our own language. Subtle ways of interpreting our surroundings, our social structures, our very being, are lost to us if we lose our language and traditional ways. In the west, we are struggling to bring back what we have lost.

Part of the ISEC aim is to form friendships with the Ladakhi people and to share our different ways of living. The Learning from Ladakh programme I was on, allowed me to stay with a Ladakhi family and over time become part of their family. Through forming bonds of friendship we could speak to each other about the difficulties and good things in each others lives and cultures. In Scotland we have to reclaim what we have lost in terms of culture, language, community. In Ladakh, if they are aware of what happened to us and other cultures, perhaps they can find new ways to integrate into the 21 century, without leaving their strength and traditions and culture behind.
Links to the official websites of Leh and Kargil regions
http://leh.nic.in/
http://kargil.nic.in/

OFF TO TACKMACHIK

Tuesday 3 August.
At last the adventure proper begins. Today we left Leh at 11 am to travel in a lovely old fashioned, bone shaker bus with curtains and the luggage tied on the roof. We were going to Tackmachik, a village of about sixty families, 100 km up the road in a Northern direction. We were travelling along the main Leh to Kargil road. This is the main artery to the Ladakh border.

Yesterday, Monday, several of us went to the 'Amchi' to get medicine and pick me ups to keep us well on our visit to the remote villages. The Amchi is the traditional Tibetan/Ladakhi medicine woman, or man. She determines ones state of health by assessing the type of pulse you have. You sit quietly and she puts the three fingers of her right hand in a line down your pulse vein. She can tell if your pulse is rolling, light, heavy, erratic, constant. What depth it has, what type of rhythm it has. From an accurate assessment of your pulse she can tell where your aches and pains are, what ails you. I was lucky. She said 'not much wrong here' - and that was before I gave her the minature of Bruichladdich! But she prescribed me wee, spherical pills made from herbs and barks to be taken 3 times a day for the next ten days. This would keep me at optimum health, and it did!
Before I left Islay, Bruichladdich and their kindly team gifted me with a tray of minatures to share with the people of Ladakh. It is traditional to give the Amchi something in return for their help, but nowadays people just pay for their perscription and the Amchi is paid a salary from the hospital.

So, now on Tuesday, we were all excited and happy to finally be going to meet our families and see what our homestay would be like.
I loved the bus journey. At first, we traversed a huge plain. All tiny scrub and endless sand and gravel. Then we moved up into the mountains through a narrow torturous route, very windey and the bus wheels were right on the edge of the precipice. We then decended to drive along the banks of the Indus. The heavy, turbulent water was pale brown in colour from all the soil and alluvial deposits it carries on its journey down the mountains. It took us all day to reach Tackmachik. We arrived in the village in late afternoon. Tachmachik means 'medal 1', Chik means 'one'. So, I took it to mean 1 medal - 'first prize village'. When I told Stanzin my interpretation she thought it was good!

MY FAMILY AND TACKMACHIK

Most of the families who were taking part in the Learning from Ladakh programme were having two people from the group to stay with them. My family were having me and a woman called Laurel.
Our family consisted of
Phutsok Dorge - 90 years
His wife - Soman Pasket - 75 years
Their son - Tsering Angchok - 56 years
His wife - Rigzin Dolma - similar age, I presume
Their daughter in law - Stanzin Dolkar - 27 years (married to their son, Punchok Paldan - 30 years, working as taxi driver in Leh for the 3 summer months)
Their two sons - Jigmet Dorge - 9 years
And last, but certainly not least - Jigmet Chopel - 2 years and 3 months.
There are four generations in the one house - how wonderful is that?

On the Tuesday we arrived we were shown to the house by the group organiser and introduced to two women. We then went back to the bus for our bags, and went with other members of our group to meet their families. We returned to our house - Kaptopa Khangbu - about 40 minutes later. When we went in the gate and round the path running along side the house, we met a middle aged man sitting leaning against a pile of sacks, with heaps of fresh apricots on the ground in front of him.
'Jullay, jullay' (hello, hello, welcome, welcome, thank you, thank you) we said in our best Ladakhi. The man waved slowly and measuredly to us and smilingly replied.
When we reached the privacy of our own room, I said to Laurel, 'that man was pissed!'
'Oh surely not', she replied in her nice English way, 'they're Buddhists'.
I didn't say any more but I thought to myself - I know a drunk person when I see one - Buddhist Ladakhi or not!
Sure enough, it later transpired Tsering Angchok was fond of the chang - the homemade barley beer - and his wife was the village bootlegger!!