סושיBaba

The minute we left our plane in Indira Gandhi Airport we understood what we didn’t miss anything outside North India: The heat wave, together with unexpected pre-monsoon moist was really unbearable.
On the other hand, the shopping was much better…. The Main Bazaar street, one of the prototype of hangout places for backpackers is packed with really cheap (and sometimes even good quality) shops and ‘emporiums’ selling many many different kinds of Indian merchandise, mostly clothing, pillow cases, bed covers, incense, musical instruments, bags but also very good looking antique furniture.
We didn’t do alot except for shopping, and arranging our bags for Sarit’s departure. We tried to visit the Bahai Lotus Temple, taking an autoriksha there just to discover it was ‘closed on Monday’ like most of Delhi sites…
Some rain signaled the arrival of the monsoon to this area, making the ugly main bazaar also very muddy… I took a sight-seeing tour, just to discover that sight-seeing is not so exciting, and the very nice New Delhi picnic area around the India Gate, every sunset.
To summarize, for us Delhi was mainly the end of our trip together and also a good shopping place… Sarit got on the plane, leaving for her new job that starts on Sunday, and leaving me behind, for a couple of weeks, to get another small glimpse of the Himalaya before I come back home.
Hey! You still have a chance to leave a comment and greet Sarit before she starts her new job!

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The flight from Leh to Delhi took us over the endless Himalaya mountain range and I said my goodbyes (for now) to the mountains that have accompanied our travels for over three months.

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Our last few days in Ladakh were spent in the Nubra Valley - the northern-most point in India foreign tourists are allowed to go. Since the buses were fully booked, we again had to hitch a ride - this time in style, as part of an Indian army supply convoy (we were in the commander’s truck). With turbo-power, we drove on the highest motorable road in the world as we crossed over a pass at an altitude of 5,603m! The highest we have ever been! Apparently the Indian army likes to take many “tea breaks”, and so we switched vehicles and hitched a ride with a hydrologist who was on his way to drill new wells at the base of a glacier. We then transferred to the truck carrying the drill and finally arrived at our destination of Panamik. This small village lies along a wide river bed (mostly dry with meandering streams of water). From the hills above flow hot springs which are collected in mikva-like hot tubs where we enjoyed a bath at night.
After a nice, relaxing day and a half there, we took a bus to the village of Hunder which lies next to large sand dunes and where we went for a ride on two-humped camels.

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Since our time in Ladakh was limited, we set out on a two day trek between villages in the Indus River Valley. Our first stop was the village of Likkir where we stayed at the Norbu guesthouse. We enjoyed sipping tea and looking at the views. The owner is also a painter and the whole house is decorated with intricate paintings. We also met Erez, Alona, Keren and Lilach, another Israeli family travelling with two children (ages 6 and 2.5) in India for a whole year. Kol HaKavod! We visited the monastery in Likkir which houses a 28 foot high statue of Buddha.
The next day we hiked through desert terrain, very reminiscent of the Negev, to the next village of Yangtang. All of the villages are set in river valleys and are oases of green fields in the middle of the desert. They water their fields with the snow-melt, and their growing season lasts only 4 months out of the year.
The last day we set out down-river to visit the Rizong Monastery where we were graciously invited to “Tibetan Tea” in the humble quarters of one of the monks. We didn’t know it was Tibetan tea, and when we took our first sip we were a bit shocked: Tibetan tea is essentialy melted butter, salt and hot water. Mmmmmmmmm. He also offered us flour to add to our tea, we politely replied “no thanks”.
We then head out to the road to catch a bus back to Leh. However no buses passed, so instead we hitched a ride on a truck that drove at a maximum speed of 20 km/hr. That at least gave us the opportunity to take a few more snowy-desert landscape pictures!

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After the long drive, we arrived in the main city of Ladakh - Leh. Being in the rain shadow of the Himalayas, Ladakh is a high altitude desert, and Leh lies at an altitude of 3,500 meters. The Ladakhi population consists mostly of Tibetan Buddhists, although there is also a minority Muslim community. The temperature changes drastically between the shade and in the sun. One morning the sun was shining and we stepped outside. Immediately we were hot and so removed our sweatshirts, took out the bottle of sunscreen and put in on. Not a minute later a cloud drifted to cover the sun, the temperature dropped by ten degrees and we put our sweatshirts back on over our sunscreen covered bodies (and two minutes later took them off again).
Leh is a very attractive town with many tradition Ladakhi-style houses, each surrounded by their own fields for growing wheat and vegetables. The fields provide a green oasis on a brown and white desert backdrop. Our time in Leh was spent visiting stuppas and monastaries that are perched on the top of small hills and provide great panoramic views of the area.
We also caught the annual “Hemis Festival” which celebrates the birthday of the man who introduced Buddhism to Tibet. The festival is held in a monastary in the village of Hemis during which monks dress in costume and adorn masks to dance and act out stories and legends. The festival could have been very nice if it weren’t for the hundreds of middle-aged Western tourists each carrying their own professional-sized camera with telefoto lens bombarding any innocent local who happened to be wearing traditional clothing. These tourists formed mobs of photographers and ruined the experience for us a bit. But we still managed to appreciate the festival and were able to snap a few shots from afar (without shoving our camera lens in the faces of the Ladakhi’s).
(Udi:) Another very interesting thing we did in Leh was to visit the local ‘Women’s Alliance and seeing a movie called “Ancient Futures” based on a book with the same name. The author came to Ladakh once it was opened to tourists in 1974 and almost every year since then. She witnessed in her own eyes the change that modern culture did to the traditional oasis of Ladakh, and the book talks about this change and about our own lives in the modern world, which were already changed many years ago. Highly recommended!