The North Country

Hello, there. It's been a while.
To give you a quick summary of the exciting events that have occurred since my last post (a month ago?).......we took the LSATs, traveled to Ladakh in the north, fired our cleaning lady, hired a new cook (this one old enough to have a 7 year old son, which means she must be at least.....19? That's old enough to cook), ran over a monkey, and celebrated Diwali, in that order.

But let me start from the beginning.

A few weeks ago, we set off for Leh, the principal town in the Ladakh region of Jammu and Kashmir, the northernmost state of India that sticks out like a bun on the top of India's head, wedged between Pakistan and China. Ladakh was, before being annexed by the British in the mid-1800s, an independent kingdom ruled by a Tibetan Buddhist king. Now it is a minority region within a minority state (for those of you who didn't get the foreign affairs memo, Kashmir is a Muslim majority region that belongs to India but is the center of a bloody dispute between India and Pakistan that has raged for decades and continues to suffer from violence and instability as it is frequently infiltrated by Pakistani militants. No, Mom, Leh is not in Kashmir) which is a distinctive designation even in a country as patchworked as India.

Landing in the Leh airport after the short, brilliantly scenic ride from Delhi is like landing in an alternate India---one that is possibly located on the moon. The airport, a small hangar located on the Air Force base there, is empty, cold, and quiet---three sensations that immediately tip you off that you are not in regular India. The town is a collection of traditional flat-roofed mud brick buildings sprinkled in a flat(ish) valley of poplar trees along the banks of the Indus river. Immediately beyond the floodplains all signs of life immediately cease and there is nothing but desert and giant metalic peaks jutting into deep blue sky.
What is so fascinating about Ladakh is that it is really not"regular" India. Ladakhis are ethnically related to their northern neighbors, the Tibetans, rather than to the Aryan stock that comprises the rest of the country, and thus look Tibetan rather than Indian. Ladakhi, the local language, is written in the same script as Tibetan and shares linguistic roots, and Ladakhis are predominantly Buddhist rather than Hindu or Muslim. And, lest you think those reasons were enough to make these people different, for the six or so months every year that it snows, Ladakh is completely cut off from the outside world, allowing local culture to continue to flourish without the dilution of globalization. Old men and women still dress in heavy woolen robes with little slippers and carry bundles on their backs over the mountains and families in remote villages outside of Leh slurp bowls of boiled Ladakhi noodles in their tiny houses decorated with pictures of the current Dalai Lama and the Tibetan city of Lhasa, while prayer flags flutter in the breeze overhead, sending prayers to the gods. In downtown Leh, the signs of seasonal tourism are visible in the embroidered t-shirts that say, curiously, "yak yak yak Ladakh" and the couple of internet cafes that get intermittent reception, but there are no beggars and the furry donkeys that wander the streets outnumber the shopkeepers. *

But what most endeared me to the Ladakhis was their perpetually rosy cheeks and layers of clothing---cold weather people everywhere are cut from the same (insulated) cloth. I have hot tea and sweaters in my blood and so do they. Just as you will never encounter a rural Mainer swathed in a flourescent polyester sari encrusted with rhinestones going for a stroll through the mountains (though this is extremely fortunate on account of the physical construction of most rural Mainers rather than most saris), Ladakhis are much more inclined towards practical outfits of black and green with the occasional sassy red belt, and towards quietness and reservation rather than the boisterous clamour that characterizes most of the country. Passing stout little farmers trudging home along the road at sunset with their donkeys and sheep in tow, bound for warm huts in small villages, I imagined I could sense a little of the familiar Puritan work ethic of Northern New England. And for once I finally felt like I had a leg up on the Indian tourists that disembarked from the plane with us, clad in the aforementioned attire and who instantly began to look as miserably uncomfortable with the temperature as I do on any given afternoon in Delhi.

Anyway, I don't want you to think I've lost my edge and am not going to poke fun at a few things in Ladakh. Part of me almost doesn't want to, I had such a heavenly time wearing six layers and complaining that my toes were going numb and staring at the mountains through a blistering altitude headache, but I'm going to anyway.

Because we were only in Leh for five days, not enough to resign ourselves to joining a trek to trudge over some ridiculous pass, wear the same underwear for a week and eat ramen noodles in the sub-zero temperatures in the mountains (all things I did legitimately want to do), we decided on a series of day excursions around Leh.

The first was a visit to the Shanti Stupah, a Buddhist prayer monument perched on a hill above Leh that was constructed by the Japanese in the mid 1980s. It is not exactly as historical as some of it's 11th century neighbors, but it is shiny, white, and very clean, and has a cafeteria where you can get Nescafe and the ramen noodles you are missing by not trekking---all good things.
It also had the most horrifying bathroom in India. I wish to qualify this statement with the background information that I have had the honor of previously using the facilities in some truly unusual places in my life---an absolutely pitch black outhouse in Costa Rica where I nearly fell down the hole, a cabin on the side of a sheer mountain face in Peru during gale force winds, a rock on the side of the road in the desert as the Indian Army was passing in a convoy, but this still wins. I won't elaborate too gruesomely lest your stomachs turn and you become unable to continue, but nearly every person who had ever used this particular place must have been confused about what exactly one ought to do when confronted with an outhouse.
In this respect, Ladakh certainly was India. By way of a brief analogy, every time I have ever been to an ATM in India, there is a small waste paper basket in the cubicle beside the machine where you receive your cash, where you are meant to deposit your receipt. For reasons I cannot fathom, the waste paper basket is always invariably completely empty and every single person has thrown their receipt on the floor, so that there are hundreds of scrunched up balls everywhere. Ladakhi bathroom 1, Dana 0.

The next day we drove to Pangong Lake, a psychadelically blue strip straddling the India and Tibet border. I don't know why I thought, in a valley surrounded by 21,000 foot peaks that the drive to the lake would be dull, but I did. It was not.
The guide service we were using had provided us with a 4WD Toyota Qualis and a driver named Sherab, who said he was 23 and from a village near Leh. Sherab, I might add, had certainly experienced the influences of globalization and was wearing acid washed bell bottom jeans, a t-shirt and whose hairstyle was a chin-length bob, the proper maintenance of which required stopping at every instance of water (streams, rivers, mud puddles) to be wetted and slicked back--call it nature's extremely-short term hairgel. Sherab had also brought along a musical selection for the 8 hour round-trip drive that included Ladakhi pop music (which sounds like Incan flutes and could pass for ethnic elevator music) and a CD of someone who sounded like Chris Rock doing standup comedy about the state of black men and how rotten the Bush administration was. So, winding up a one lane road with no guard rails at 16, 000 feet and rounding blind corners at speeds that were beginning to make me internally promise a range of things including born-again Christianity if we survived, we were treated to long rifts about 'the motherfuckah who fucked up eeeeeverythang' while Sherab grinned wildly and ran his fingers through his hair in the rearview mirror.
Then, as if things hadn't quite become surreal enough, we rounded a corner, came down into a valley, and across a clump of tourists standing in a mushy field pointing at something. It turned out to be a marmot, the squooshy mustard-colored-rodent-like creature that dwells at about 12,000 feet, who had come out of his hole and was wandering around standing up on people's legs and begging for ritz crackers. There are pictures to prove it. I have no idea if this marmot was friendly, rabid, or insane, but he nearly sat on BJ's lap--though he quickly abandoned us and went back in his hole after he realized we had not brought baked goods.

The rest of the trip was much less exciting. We made it to Pangong Lake, where Sherab had a chance to slick back his hair using lake water rather than a roadside puddle, and I had the chance to use another toilet perched on a mountainside, and then we returned over the same terrifying roads back to Leh, the journey only punctuated when we would occasionally swerve to avoid a rock in the road and nearly plunge us over the side to our deaths and then Sherab would laugh and say something in broken English about how we had nearly crashed.

The rest of the trip went as such: We visited a monastery where I slipped down the stairs and nearly snapped off my tailbone, went for a hike with a guide who trotted ahead of us as we (I) wheezed desperately in the thin air and sat down every five feet vowing never to move again, and then spent the rest of the time reading a German Marie Claire on the roof of the guesthouse peacefully getting a sunburn severe enough to qualify as a facial peel. But it was all wonderful, really.

And now I fear this post has become too long and you will have to wait for the next installment to hear about the death of the monkey and how Diwali in Delhi is not unlike living in Baghdad during an airstrike.
Until then, love, kisses, and best wishes for a clean bathroom in your future.



*Granted, this is a country that by and large remains woefully untouched by the improvements of globalization in ways that are largely detrimental and carrying a bag of potatoes on your back seems less quaint when contextualized with the fact that a majority of people in Mumbai still shit in the open and most villages do not have paved roads or access to health care, but give me my moment in the sun. Ladakh is lovely and feels still very much like a mountain kingdom in the sky, okay?