Mud, Lakes, Rustics and Other Ladakhi Curiosities

Vicki posing amid the adobe homes in Leh, the capital city of Ladakh.


Typical Ladakhi architecture. This is perhaps my most ambitious photograph from the trip.

Even though there is not rain, snow run-off from the mountains is channeled into agricultural zones. This flowering tree is common in Ladakh; this one is unique because of the white Tibetan scarves, called katta, that are laced into its branches.

Barley, wheat, potatoes and mustard leaf.

Us.

The view from the guesthouse at Thiksey Gonpa. There was a gaggle of pigeons living on the roof, and I would clap my hands and watch them take off, make a majestic loop in the valley, and return to the same spot to roost.

The architecture in Ladakh is such that a building could be a 11th century monastery or a donkey barn. In fact, Vicki once pointed to a stable and asked some villagers if that was their home.

The reason for this is because every structure is built from adobe bricks. I saw some men at work making bricks. They simply dug moist mud out of a modest quarry, dumped it into a mold, and let the sun dry it out. It’s amazing how tenacious mud becomes once dry.

Villagers tending to their crops.

In the first Batman movie (the first one directed by Chris Nolan with Christian Bale), Batman goes to Tibet in search of a Shaolin monastery. He must pluck a purple, thorny flower and bring it to the abbot. This is the purple flower (I think).

An earthwork. I saw a Ladakhi man engage it by following its curves to the center, and then stepping over the axis mundi and walking out the opposite direction. Quite fascinating; I’m sure it has a complex mytho-psychological meaning.

Curiosity.

At ChangLa Pass, something like 17,000 feet, the third highest motorable road in world, en route to Pangong Lake with Vicki. On top of a small snow mound was a Bangalori man, who was playfully taunting his friends below with a snowball. Encouraged by a Canadian chap, I packed a tight snowball and pelted him on the shoulder with it, and he screamed out in Hindi: Please don’t hit me. I will fall. This is the first time I’ve ever touched snow!

These next pictures are variations on a theme, like Monet’s water lilies. The Pangong Lake is 30% in India and 70% in Tibet, so our movements were somewhat restricted around it, although there were many kilometers open to us. One night we strayed a bit too far near the Tibet border (although how close is still contested), and a friendly police officer came and shifted our camp nearer an Indian village.

Turquoise. It looks like the Caribbean, but it’s much colder. I went swimming, but just once.

The lake was once connected to the ocean, back when the Himalayas were swimming underwater (thus proving the account of the Universal Flood put forward in the ancient Babylonian epic, Gilgamesh). The water is salty, but much less so than an ocean because of millennia of snow run-off, which this picture depicts.

Blue.

Sunrise.

Sunset.

Vicki thought this was an amusing picture because I was eating some granola, and granules become lodged in my beard.

Four days at the lake, and Vicki broke the spine on her book, the ode to money Atlas Shrugged. Sure we’ve all read it during that awkward phase freshman year of college, but how many among us have read it twice? Vicki has.

After Ladakh we made a short trip to Jaipur, the capital city of Rajasthan. Vicki wanted to see elephants, camels and monkeys. We saw them all, and pigs, desert steer and donkeys to boot.

The backside of the Jaipur City Fort. One last blog post remains of our trip, mostly depicting the Ladakhi art and iconography we saw inside the monasteries. Besides that, I will include one or two pictures of my current circumstances in Delhi.