AUG-B-2
SETTING OUT ON THE LINGSHED TREK: ROAD TRIP
TO TAKEOFF POINT ON FOOT
Aug. 4, 02
Well, the gang’s all here!
I am the Captain of this Panamanian freighter, which has not one single licensed practitioner of any sort, and the single most experienced medical person is a just finished freshman year—and there are four of those. One is a PA student, one an engineer husband/accompanying person, and one is a college entering junior, all of which are the trekkers who will be delivering care to the interior of Kashmir towards Lingshed six days away, with a transient stop in Kargill, accompanied by sixteen horses, or, rather scrawny ponies.
We enforced a “do-nothing” day here in Leh as they acclimatize to altitude and time zone, which has whacked them out as thoroughly as it did our own arrival one team and three weeks back. But, tomorrow we start doing a few things that should shake further cobwebs out. We will drive them up to Kardungla, so that they can say they have been through the highest motorable pass on earth, and see the highest temple on earth, the site of the highest warfare on earth, etc—since anything done here at all gets the altitude superlatives if it involves anything that needs mechanized transport—and this is the world’s top road. I did not go with the last team up there, since I was more interested in getting things started for the trip and knew I would have another go at it this time. I am eager to get this series of email messages out to you, since the “Book “ is complete thus far, but I have not got access to a reliable email and cannot get into my own account on the three times I tried of the half dozen times there was no emailing at all because the phone and/or electricity was out. I would like to get these chapters out so that you can see I have not only arrived and vegetated for the interval here in Leh, but that the new team is being readied shortly and we leave the day after tomorrow to get a long way into the remote interior of Kashmir. I will have no access to electricity, let alone email along the way, so that I will be incognito and will not have a chance to type up any experiences until I am back and possibly on my way back home. So, although I would like to send you some sort of intermediary message, it cannot be carried out from the most intensely militarized zone in the subcontinent, and most likely, right now, anywhere on earth.
I have completed both the Ladakh-02, and all those folk are back to work or other activities nearer home, and have made it through an uneventful interval in which I have at least started a project that would soak up a lot of time and resources for which a block of unexpected windfall time and isolation has been a boon—if electricity and computer reliability have not been. I will see if this can be sent out whenever the happy constellation of a phone and electricity come together, with an email account I may either access or borrow, and then---not, ride off into the sunset, but plod along on foot following the packstock which we will load with our camping supplies and medicines, making us look just like the nomads along the Silk Route, and not very much advanced over them in terms of technology or appearance. The prior travelers also had to worry about highwaymen and bandits but not quite so much about stumbling into a nuclear war.