AUG-A-3
INTERVAL EVENTS IN
LEH,
BETWEEN
“LADAKH-02” AND “LINGSHED-02”
Canceled Climb of
Stok Khangri, Shopping, Send-off to Ladakh-02 Team,
Stranded in Hotel
Khangri, Visits to Shey, Hemis, Stokmo Gompas,
And Laptop Work in
Hotel While Awaiting Lingshed-02 Team
July 31—Aug. 2,
‘02
I might have been camped in snow on a steep glacier tonight, but, I am instead cooling my heels in the Hotel Khangri, where I have been re-packing in the long Leh interval until the next team arrives for the Lingshed-02 trek. When I had arrived in Leh on return from Tso Morari, I visited Tsespol at Shangri-La Expeditions, and posed this time with the skull of an ibex they had found on their last trek and the most recent finding was the skull of a “bharal”, the Himalayan blue sheep. I have bagged more high mountain exotic trophies so far this trip than if I had gone to Kyrgistan on the hunt that George Service had tried to arrange for me into Marco Polo sheep country to bag a trophy Ibex next month!
I had been writing emails to him and also talking with him for the past three years about climbing their highest peak in Ladakh, Stok Khangri, the namesake of the Hotel in which I have been moved to a down market room for the interval wait. Now would be the prefect time. I am already here and have five days to wait between excursions after sending one team off and awaiting the other. This means that I have acclimatized to both the twelve and a half hour lag, and am sleeping at night and awake by day after two weeks of readjustment to the far side of the globe. And, I have been at a minimum of 12,000 feet for two weeks, most recently camped at the 15,100 foot level of Tso Morari, and have transited through each of the three highest roadways on planet Earth from the high 17,000’s to the mid-18,000’s. And, if I am going to climb over 20 K, it should be during this decade rather than in the next one.
Leh is at 3,500 meters; snow-capped Stok Khangri is 6,200 meters or 20,460 feet. I have an outfitter who is free for the next week’s since there have been so few tourists secondary to US and UK “travel advisories” to India in general and to Kashmir state most specifically. He has piled up the equipment (crampons, ice axe, tents) and I have brought my own winter gear—gloves, down coat, gators, etc It will take four days getting back with leisure before the group takes off on the Lingshed Trek on August 4, or it could be done in three days arriving too late for re-packing. I have four people who wanted to go and we could all take off on July 31, right after the team from Ladakh-02 is seen off at 6:00 AM
Two of the would be climbers backed out, since Sam wants to work on getting her boyfriend Jimmy to go on the Lingshed trek or otherwise she does not think she would go. What this means for the rather lengthy two month international elective for which I am allegedly certifying her, I do not know. Matt said he is going to work at the local Leh Hospital in order to generate a report to the DIHG (Dartmouth International Health Group) who had given him the sponsorship to come here. But he has not even seen the hospital yet four days in to this “rotation” allegedly because Ravi has not yet contacted the doctor, Dr. Dawa. But at least Sean was gung ho!
Sean waffled out thirty minutes before we were supposed to go, since he would rather “hang out” in Leh with a larger group—Matt, who is the only one left from our trip, and he is not even supposed to be here but at the local hospital. So, I had to go to tell Tsespol that our climb to the top is now off, since the “window” has closed. This year there was supposed to be a hefty fee attached for this and other mountains climbed by foreigners to the IMF= Indian Mountaineering Federation, but the outfitters had talked them into postponing it to next year, so this will also be the cheapest time to climb. But, a “One Man” climbing team with Sherpas etc, is uneconomic, and now it is too late, as others are coming to me saying, “Oh, we should have gone…”
So, if I am holed up in Hotel Khangri, what should I do with this unexpected block of time? Well, I have a dozen things I should be working on---my thesis proposal, for example. Remember that electricity is a now and again thing, but the first day of the stranding, they were doing some carpentry work and had to have the generator on to support that, so I was ready to roll with my laptop. Alas, the lemon law strikes---the glitches came rather quickly. Besides the ones intrinsic to the machine (a cue flashes that says I am working without any backup since there is insufficient memory ---only 4.5 GIGS open!---and I must immediately save my work; but then the navigation keys do not work and the cursor is frozen and the tool bar is not lit up, so what ever is there on the frozen machine is lost as I turn it off and reboot it to start over) I have a new and special excuse for the thesis proposal. The sic in the A drive “is not formatted”—although it was yesterday—so I cannot access what I have done so far on the thesis, and I am a long way from a library, which is what everyone wants me to do, reduce every original idea to a quote from someone else to show that I have never done or thought anything independently ever before.
So, what else? Well, I sat me down, and began typing my year-end letter, getting almost half way through the year to date. I did this by not leaving the room, skipping lunch, and despite the exotic environment, I will be trekking through it for three straight weeks in a few days, so I will try to make the most of this sown time so I do not cannibalize any thesis time on return home.
MONASTERIES
I only broke long enough to go to a Kashmiri restaurant for dinner last night with Matt and Sean, and when they said they were going to hire one of our taxis and drivers to go visit the monasteries in the morning, I first thought I have already seen two of the three mentioned, but was interested in seeing the third, so I packed along with them. It turns out that the Thicksay Monastery that we had just visited last week is the one that Sean wanted to see, but there is some kind of National conference there today with five flag ranking ministers, so it is sealed off anyway.
SHEY MONASTERY
PALACE AND GOMPA
We went first to Shey Monastery, where all the group but I had toured in 2000, since that is the time when Raghu Rai had posed me on rocks among the sacred fish ponds, and then wandered off to find "the perfect light” which was found after the storm clouds parted in front of a background of the stupas that eventually made its way to the George magazine. So, I climbed to the top of the Shey Palace perch and looked longingly over at the Stok Khangri peak peering back at me. I went in to see the three stories Buddha that is copper gilt with gold, made in 1634 as a commemorative to a ruler here. The story of Shey is the conquest of the local Hindu king by a Moslem ruler, and then the kings exchanged daughter and the Hindu go this kingdom aback as a wedding gift.
Hemis lies in a Cliffside eerie overlooking the Indus River amid huge Mani Walls along the Hemis-Karu Road that connects the two gompas. It is probably the most colorful and neatest natural setting of any of the Gompas I have seen. It is the site of a big religious festival in October when they unroll the sacred Thangka not seen except every seven years, nest time up in 2004. I had to unkink the little panoramic camera which has spoiled the last two rolls of film put in it, so I reversed it and put it in the faithful backup XD-11 as I walked about admiring the murals and colorful sandstone cliff backdrop of Hemis. We stopped to get the perspective on the very large Mani Walls that are out in front of to cliffs in which it is tucked. This is a good visit and I recommend it!
SHEY
When we returned through Shey we stopped at the fishponds, where the ordinary carp in the ponds are supposed to be holy. In a vegetarian population, they are probably under no great risk in any event unless someone has a hankering for rosebushes, but we stopped to see the ponds, and through them, well, holy cows were doing unholy things in the holy fish’s waters.
I came back to the Hotel Khangri to see if I could type a bit more while the electricity was on and the glitches could be tolerated by frequent pauses to save and reboot. I have been here often and seen a poster advertising a video named “Ancient Futures” by a woman named Helena Nordberg-Hodges, who is based in Devon England, but has worked 18 years in Ladakh. The front half of the video is about the nearly ideal society of the 130,000 Ladakhis in the highest coldest driest human habitation on earth. They laughed and sang as they harvested cooperatively with never any money changing hands, they had a communal interconnection and social rituals from birth to marriage to death. They farmed organically and never needed anything from the outside world.
Then came the roads, and the diesel belching lorries, and plastic bags, and pollution, and a money economy, and advertisements, Bollywood movies and gosh—even TV, and you can’t keep them home on the farm after they’ve seen MTV!
Now I may be an advocate of sustainable development and an anti-consumer also, but the role of the depressing video was to show that all development called progress in Ladakh was the ruin of them since ecologic disaster came on to the West so slowly they did not notice it, but it all happened here in the70’s and 80’s (in other words, during the period of Helena’s observations) and she wants it all reversed. The biggest enemies of Ladakh are globalization, subsidized industrial production, and –would you believe—education! Even the language of education is at fault, since anything other than Ladakhi (written in a religious Buddhist script which is anathema to the Moslems also living here) might connect them to the outside world, and transistors, and tourists with money.
I appreciate the light touch, but the heavy evangelism (“Small is Beautiful; Big is Subsidized” is one of her books) mainly praised inefficiency. The reason that the American food that comes over the road is cheaper and better than the local Ladakhi produced food is that US farmers are more productive; the reason there are people even chatting away about these things is that they went to school and learned the English language in which these subjects could be discussed. And, before anyone praises local primitive culture as idealized and the “natural state of affairs” before economic industrialism reared its greedy head, let me tell you about some wonderfully natural things: rabies, botulism, tetanus, leprosy, TB, infant mortality, filthy hygiene, and poverty.
All around the evangelists were true believers in vegetable dyed muumuus and sandals with blonde hair creeping out from under Ladakhi caps. And just where do these folk go during the eight months of winter here when all the road passes are closed and people are clamoring for having run out of those filthy subsidized products brought in cheaply over those subsidized roads by diesels belching fossil fuel smoke?
My contribution to the natural environment recently is still driving sparingly an old but efficient Bronco and trying to keep consumerist developers from clearcutting Derwood. And I will think the “Deep Green” folk that are every bit as susceptible to this hard sell as they are to the advertisements for Coke and the hottest latest CD’s, without which they refuse to ride in a Jeep over the most magnificent mountain range all along the Roof of the World!
End of my own soapbox after a two-hour dismal harangue about the polluted paradise that once was Ladakh, where people now have jobs!
Tomorrow, the sleepy group for Lingshed-02 pops out of the plane and I will tell them to do nothing for the next 36 hours, as I had done in accommodating the changes in time and altitude. I will then try to type a bit more and maybe get to an Internet Café –another of those pesky imports from the outside world—to send off this message along with the others from this interval that I am trying not to waste, even if I am not staring down at the Hotel Khangri from the top of its namesake Stok Khangri!