This amazing little place tucked away in the far northeast corner of India is brilliant. Yes, I was struck twice by dodgy food and combined one with AMS having me suck oxygen in hospital for 6 hours. But this didn't make the place any less magical. We had decided to go here to avoid the humid and wet weather further south which was the right thing to do. Beautiful bright blue skies framed amazing peaks in the distance and in the dry valleys Tibetans have for centuries cleverly re-directed glacial melt water to carve out a green oasis fit to live in.
This has been mixed up with Muslim culture and Hinduism to create a brilliant cross-section of Indian mountain life. Evenings were spent on roof top restaurants, looking out over Leh palace with prayer flags suspended left-right & centre whilst listening to the amazing (but sometimes slightly croaky) call-to-prayer. Just beautiful! We spent days soaking it all in with visits to Stupas (Buddist sacred site) perched high above the main town, monastries, Tibetan markets, meditation sessions and also went to a brilliant cinema showing a film about the clash between the traditional way of life with the influx of modern technologies.
Leh proudly advertises itself as Eco and although it's true that they have a very sustainable water irrigation system in use it is striking how badly integrated modern stuff like electricity and waste facilities are. The film, Learning from Ladakh, slightly idealised the old way of life, but made you think about how easy simple things like shared solar power and heating could be integrated (Leh has 300 sun days/year) as well as installing water filter systems avoiding the use of so much plastic that they just don't seem able to deal with.
Later on, whilst on a massaging roller coaster of a trip away from Leh over the mountains, we ended up in a really interesting conversation with a man from Delhi who put Buddism in a slightly new light. I have it down as the kind, cuddly and caring religion but he pointed out that in India (as with most countries) shared infrastructure facilities are financed through the government and administered through the local council. The problem in Leh is that people spend more money financing the Tibetan monasteries than they do paying taxes, meaning that the religios institution is relatively wealthy whilst there is little money for the local council to look after the community as a whole. So the result is that in Eco-Leh, there is no reliable electricity which means that most evenings were spent walking around town breathing in fumes from individual generators whilst reading signs to stop the use of polythene and to conserve water...
Ruth and I keep thinking back to our visit to Imlil in the Moroccan Atlas mountains where they seem to have collectively come together much more successfully to integrate simple modern technologies whilst still maintaining their traditional way of life. Leh could probably learn a fair bit from there...
We also met some great people, from the basker wearing guest house boy who looked after us so well, to Sam, Rohit and Harry who paddled with us down the brown and beautiful Zanskar river carving a canyon through the dusty mountains whilst Alex, our Nepalese rafting guide talked constantly about how brilliant Nepal is (Sam was convinced he was employed by the Nepalese tourist board!). The rafting was wild, and pretty cold as we all thought the river looked pretty tame from above and didn't bother with the wet suits - no surprise we all got drenched and arrived at the bottom with teeth chattering but still with big smiles. We celebrated the day with a good dinner together and they all competed in telling us about how brilliant other places are in India, we've been given some great advice and we hope to see them again when visiting the south.
