Letter from Leh

Our second day in Leh. Have walked the streets of the 30,000 strong old capital of Ladakh. A beautiful town, with a large 17th century castle, modeled on the Potala Palace in Lhasa. We are staying in Old Leh, a district of narrow winding streets that a pinto would have trouble navigating, lined with 6 foot walls made out of a mud brick that matches the color and consistency of the mountains that encircle the city.


Leh is clearly an entrepot to central Asia, the faces, garb and hats of the people clearly reference their ethnic and religious affiliation. There are Tibetans, Ladakhis, Muslims of different Turkic groups and of course, sikhs and regular Indian Hindus. Leh is certainly the most comfortable place we have visited thus far. There is a calm that has to do with the size of the city, its proximity to nature but also with the culture of Ladakh. The marginalization of Tibetan populations throughout Central Asia by the larger powers seems to have forged a greater unity among the different ethnic subgroups. Whereas India is a severely class and caste stratified society, the exile communities and even the broader population of Ladakh itself does not exhibit these fissures. The viciously competative spirit of Delhi has given way to what feels like a genuinely liveable and yet culturally rooted Central Asian/Subcontinental city. To digress from pure description for a moment, our journey has meant day after day of travel and then on days within a particular place, perpetual planning for the next stage. This involves going to banks (always an experience rife with absurdities), travel agencies for trekking, and bus stations, which make walking through Times Square feel like a leisurely stroll in the open countryside. By the time we had reached Manali, my experiences of only 5 days in India were sufficiently consuming that each day functioned as prism of memories that so distorted the previous 24 hours that Stanford, and the US came to seem as distant mirages, or like the traces of dreams hours after one has woken up. The ride from Manali to Leh further reinforced that mode of remembrence. 23 hours in a jeep over some of the highest passes in the world was an experience too overpowering to be captured in words. This was my sentiment at the time. As we passes through Indian army checkpoints at the outset of our journey, I couldn't imagine the beauty of the tiny farming villages perched on the edge of cliffs, their terraced fields creating a ripple effect on one's visual field. These ripples of green (probably a hearty crop like barley) gave way to tan and silver sheer moutain faces which soared up to snowy peaks. Much of the Manali-Leh road was a trip through valleys--some narrow, some wide, all enchanting. Altitude sickness concerned Paul and I. I had never been above 8000 ft in my life. But as we began our steep climb on the road to the first major pass, Rohtung-La (3850 m/13000ft ), and the air thinned, and the glacial waters turned from running streams to frozen masses, it became clear that there was no turning back. We drank gallons of water, layered up--shirt, shirt, fleece, fleece, coat, hat, gloves--and breathed deeply hoping our headaches and mild nausea would soon subside. All, in all, we were successful--no serious altitude sickness. As we pressed on from village to village, the mountains peaks ranged higher and higher and the road often dissipated to a crumbling mass of stones and mud. Passing over the washed out portions of the road not yet repaired by India's BRO (Border Roads Organization), we shot up and landed hard, tossed about the jeep like popcorn kernals. Then a stretch of reasonably well-paved road would provide us with a reprieve. The intensity of the beauty and tumult that characterized my experience on the Manali Leh road faciliated a greater psychological remove from the West and the "civilized" life. The discipline and order within Western society's now seemed a distant dream. In Leh, I begin coming to terms with that break.