JUL-B-5
THE DAY FOLLOWING ARRIVAL AT LEI BEGINS WITH A 10 K RUN OVER THE CITY OF LEI AND PASSING THE HALAL SLAUGHTER, AS WE START THE EXERTION PHASE OF OUR TRIP,
AND I GIVE A LECTURE AT LEI HOSPITAL,
FOLLOWED
BY THE LADAKHI CULTURAL DANCE
July 20, 2002
I had cautioned the group not to undertake any strenuous activity for the first day, because both jet lag and the altitude would do them in if they tried to satisfy their curiosity about being in a new place. The group seemed to adhere to this advice rather well, by the necessity, not the virtue, of simple exhaustion. I, among them, had a rather dull day with a number of things I thought of trying to do while being in Lei, but mostly I sat and stared, with a missed night twice over being a good reason for being out of phase with my pituitary/adrenal axis. Global travel can easily outpace physiology coming this far half way around the globe to say nothing more about pushing us up to two miles high. But, this is enough—a 24-hour pause before trying to get back on an activity schedule that now ignores these changes in latitudes and altitudes and clocks. So, I rallied a couple of the runners and walkers, and led them out at 6:00 AM
My pulse oximetry before the run after the acclimatization day was 89% O2 saturation at a pulse of 79. The idea I had was to come back directly from the run and see what would happen to these numbers, which were 93% and 105 respectively immediately after the 10K run, so that it seems that I am progressing on schedule, particularly as respects the slowing pulse at rest (down to 64 five minute later compared to a sea level rest pulse during the regular running season of about 52).
I had led three runners and had to keep running back to pick up two walkers, to keep them through the maze of the streets, particularly when we had to duck around under awninged side lanes to stay with our right hand side toward extensive Mani walls, chortens and prayer flags. I got up the “kazigs” of the dry side of the outskirts of town where the big lorries and buses pick up passengers while belching their black diesel exhaust to begin their early morning runs. I wanted to get above the Halal market (outside town, since butchering is not an activity that takes place inside the city limits) and there I arrived in time to see the last sheep trotting eagerly past their fallen colleagues who were bleeding out into the trenches cut for this purpose from their slit throats. Many were already hanging up and being skinned for their fleeces and hand carts with iron wheels were waiting in a rank order to carry the quartered and gutted carcasses with choice parts of the offal—the everted stomach rumens off to the Lei stalls where the just slaughtered sheep are hung up even before losing their body heat or supple muscle tonelessness.
I did not seem to attract any attention this time, even when running with two women with naked knees. I even was able to shoot a couple of non-flash pictures in the dawn light, with a rather busy market today because opf the day after the Moslem holy day when there would have been no activity here. I attracted even less attention as I ran on ahead of the group up the further long incline toward the 8 and the 10 km turnaround points, the latter being the designated target for the day. An entire desert hillside was studded with the squatting figures of men, each on their haunches with their pants pulled to their knees and their bony butts stuck out behind them spaced out at intervals of about fifteen meters. As many as a hundred men were all in this contemplative position along what I had called “latrine hill”. There is no facility, and they do not seem to need to worry since it is desert, and small brown desiccated piles are everywhere dotting the sandy hill, without so much as a blade of grass to be seen through out the vista. I was already out of film, but I thought that I already have quite a few pictures of the Halal butchery here at Lei, and tomorrow, I may save a few shots for this more interesting human-interest landscape.
I made it to the turnaround, and passed the walkers still coming up. I had to run back to direct them through the maze of the return route as more and more people were emerging to pick up choice sites on the curbs on which to spread their small bunches of produce harvested fresh from the Indus-irrigated plots in the Lei valley in such stark contrast with the alpine desert all around us, in almost brilliant green—like the Nile gardens in the middle of the Libyan Desert.
I came back on the run, and should have immediately tried to plug in the shaver, or the laptop, but I was so reassured to see the lights on that I assumed I could shower and some up after breakfast to do these few chores with the blessings of power and plumbing. Guess again! The electrical is conserved here through the simple technique of turning it off during periods of peak demand, lest people get used to it. So, there went my plans to send you the messages thus far typed up by email this morning—in fact today. Power never did resume until late at night, and then only for a few hours when I was down eating. I started to think that it might be a problem that would have a negative impact on a slide show based in the projection of clinical slides of conditions that would be hard to describe and easy to see from exotic locations far away.
I went to Shangri-La Expeditions and learned there that Tsespol had got my message that I was coming and immediately assumed that he could make arrangements for me to go out to Tso Morari with him (they have had almost no clients since the US travel advisory) and I had sent an email to him to tell him not to bother, that I was only interested in talking with him when I was her about the interval between Ladakh-02 and the Lingshed trip which might allow four to five days which previously he had suggested would be the time it would take for an acclimatized person to climb to the summit of Stok Kangri and return with equipment for the technical climb I could rent from him.
The other personnel that were at the shop were delighted to see me and told me that Tsespol had gone early in the morning to the Leh Airport, despite my telling him not to (Ravi and he are rival outfitters who do not appreciate each other) and had hoped to see me there and take over arrangements. I was interested in one item they had on the street in front of their shop. An intact Ibex skull with good curving horns had been seen on one of their expeditions and brought back after drying out for what looks like a couple of years in the sun. I posed with this “trophy” since George Service has been trying to get me to sign up for Kyrgistan immediately upon my return to the US in September to hunt trophy ibex from the camps set up to accommodate Marco Polo sheep hunters (the heavy rollers going for what may be the world’s most expensive trophy. I may already have my “trophy portrait” now of me holding up the ibex skull and horns!
Right exactly in my nadir of my jet lag, at 2:00 PM (twelve hours after I was wide awake in my Hotel Kangri) I was booked to give the lecture to the group of physicians on the staff of Lei’s only Hospital, with my own team in drowsy attendance also. I was taken on a tour of the hospital where three of my team will remain for two weeks after the Ladakh trek, as I have done in the past to send those students who needed a one month rotation for clinical credit for an elective to Lei Hospital for two weeks after the trek was over. They sowed off the echocardiogram machine they have, since the expenses involved in evacuating patients were so high they have been given a few extra bits of equipment here. Most everyone here is suffering from some form of respiratory illness because of the high altitude, dust in the air, crowding conditions, with lack of fuel, silicotuberculosis, and smoking, leading to a baseline of Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease with acute episodes on top of that. They point out the have a special ward for high altitude pulmonary edema, which they treat with bed rest and diuretics. Dr. Norboo Terseng, the medical superintendent, proudly pointed out that the army (here represented as the ITBP (Indo Tibetan Border Patrol) has a pressure unit for treating the same disease, with no different results.
I the went to the lecture room where a white sheet on the wall was my projection screen and an ancient slide projector was hooked to a generator, with a horizontal slide tray no on knew how to use. They could only put in one third of the slides, and it took four tries to get them oriented in the right direction, and by that time they were scrambled. I began my lecture with no introduction by anyone, and looked around to see nods of understanding and a few noncomprehending stares, quite a few coming from my own group. It is no doubt because they were looking back at me from wherever their zombioid state of jet lag had carried them, twelve hours after their peak pituitary adrenal axis said their wakefulness should have been highest in their circadian rhythm. So, it would be like the lecture I had once given on videotape when I was abroad, caught by the class note taker with a tape recorder plugged in in front of the video—without a human interaction in between.
The dance troop had assembled with all their costumes for the series of dances, which I could probably narrate by now, since I have been this route a dozen times, always ending with the audience joining the dancers. Earlier in the day we had sorted the medicines for the clinics, and we were going to explain the drill of the itineraries later, when I looked around and realized that each of our team had faded away in their nearly drugged condition as sleepy as they are on their feet. I was left talking with Dr. Dawa and his wife, he who is both the medical district officer director who keeps finding new and more remote places for me to conduct clinics through out Ladakh (and had arranged the Lingshed extension of this month’s trips) and also the parents of Jimmy, Sammy’s intended. To get more “Indianized” she has had her nose jewel inserted and henna tattoos on both hands and feet, the envy of the other women who want to know where they can get theirs done. But, my team has gone to bed to finish sleeping, which they began during my lecture and continued during the Ladakhi cultural dance and dinner, and we will all be awake and listening for the chorus of dogs, and muezzins from minarets long before the birds join in just before dawn.