One of the commonest drinks in Ladakh is gur-gur cha, a salty butter tea obtained by adding these two ingredients to tea while it is being boiled. My introduction to this lovely drink was due to a policeman on crowd control duty at the festival in Hemis monastery the previous year. I had not completely recovered from AMS, an this kind policeman made me sit down and poured a cupful of the tea from his flask into a paper cup which he handed me. I don’t know whether it was the sitting or the tea which perked me up, but I became a fan of gur-gur cha. It is best with khambir, but I was not unhappy to have it at the beginning of a meal.
But traditionally tea was a luxury which came here only with the trading caravans which took this southerly silk-route from China into Kazhakstan. More common was the mildly alcoholic chhang, brewed from tsampa, the barley flour which you find in every Ladakhi kitchen. In a traditional kitchen that I peeped into, there were large earthenware jars filled with brewing mash. The alcohol levels are not high, and the mildly sour taste is a nice appetizer.
This post is scheduled to appear while I travel. I’ll reply to your comments and look at your posts when I have network coverage.
Desserts are not common in the hills, so I was surprised to find this dish with a peculiar name at a Ladakhi restaurant last year in a wonderful Ladakhi restaurant in Leh. I came across these steamed dried apricots again this year. It’s easily put together in a Ladakhi kitchen. Dried apricot is common, and so is a steamer. So it is possible that it was an older addition to Ladakhi food (unlike apricot jam, which was spread in the 20th century CE after sugar and pectins became easily available). Later in the week, The Family had got a cold, and a Ladakhi lady recommended dried apricot soaked overnight in water as a home remedy. This confirmed my guess that phating could be an older entrant to the Ladakhi recipe books.
Doubt is not a pleasant condition but certainty is absurd.
Voltaire
The featured photo shows the strange landscape that surrounded us near Pangong Tso, at a height of 4300 meters above sea level. But the loop of road in the photo was a sign that showed us that we were not in an undiscovered land. Our only discoveries happened when we lost our way by following a GPS map too closely. And such discoveries were never a true venture into the unknown. There was always a local inhabitant who would set us back on track. When we look back and read the founding mythologies of Western colonialism we see the same signs: Vasco da Gama had the help of a Gujarati pilot in his voyage of “discovery”, Willem Janszoon was trying to follow the coast of Irian (now known as New Guinea) when he reached Australia by mistake, Christopher Colombus followed the flight paths of Pacific Golden Plovers to Guanahani (now called San Salvador) which he mistook for India.
Premature certainty is the enemy of truth
Ermias Joseph Asghedom
In the 21st century we finally know that all new lands were already discovered by our non-human Hominid forebears as they walked across the world. But it is still a little disappointment when you come to a lake at an altitude of 4300 meters and find a line of electric scooters parked there. Still, it is better than a landscape without tourists across which empty packet of biscuits and crisps blows in the wind. Much better to come to this empty land and see a tent pitched by a transhumanist sheep-herder, even though the tent is made of factory produced fabric. (We saw them in the pastures near Muglib village in Ladakh, our first encounter with them after Kashmir). These photos are signs that industrial economy reaches everywhere on earth. And in the few places which are still out of reach of this economy, industrial pollution still manages to reach.
Prediction is difficult, especially about the future.
Of uncertain origin, attributed to Neils Bohr, Yogi Berra, and others
Then again, there are the clear signs which create uncertainty. In Ladakh our hopes of finding an ancient untouched land were always dashed. In the marketplace in Leh, a schoolboy engrossed in his phone with a large take-away cup of a fizzy drink next to him told us that maybe the traditional ware displayed in shops around him were made by people immersed in modernity. On a dusty street in Kargil, The Family took a portrait of three old men sitting by the road, as old men across the world do, but maybe they were not people out of time at all. Next to them a food cart sold momos, chowmein, and samosa, just like food carts in Allahabad or Bengaluru. Wherever we go there are signs of the flat earth of modern times.
Doubt everything. Find your own light.
Gautama Buddha
A long morning’s drive over Wari La ended at this little restaurant in Agham village, one in a cluster of four. We’d seen very few cars on the road, but many cars and motorbikes were parked here. Bikers seem to love stickers which give their details: they had left signs of their passing on the window of this kitchen (the second photo above is a closer look at the same window). I wonder whether this is better than building small stone cairns at the side of the road. Perhaps it is. Again here industrial food-like substances put in an appearance, warning us that the humble rajma chawal may be the safest food to eat.
The only certainty is that nothing is certain
Pliny the Elder
The stories that we tell about how far we have travelled are also full of uncertainty. We saw two signs at the Chang La, both put up by the same organization, which gave two different heights of the top of the pass. The higher altitude (5360 meters) is borne out by modern GPS measurements. That really makes it the world’s 10th highest pass, and one meter (!) higher than Khardung La. This contradicts all the tourist information that you get about Ladakh (if you are interested then you can read more about this controversy in the Wikipedia article on Khardung La). But is a one meter difference in altitude credible? Although enthusiasts will tell you that a modern phone has this sensitivity (once you take into account Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity), I keep my mind open and only use the two or three most significant digits of these signs.
Water bread (chhu=water + tagi=bread) is an appropriate name for this soup, often served in a large bowl as the main course in a meal. I’d tried it at the Alchi Kitchen the previous year, and was happy to come across it again in a smaller sized bowl. It has boat shaped shaped pasta (made by pinching together the opposite sides of a circle of dough). The boat retains liquid, making for a different taste with other noodle soups. I’ve only had the vegetable soup, although there is a meaty variety. There is a good reason why a lot of Ladakhi food is soupy. In this cold desert you lose moisture without realizing it early enough, and (historically) it may not have been possible to always find water to drink.
A tasty new soup that I tried this year in Ladakh was made of tsampa (flour made from roasted barley) and a pea-sized black bean whose name I did not catch. Slow cooking had produced a depth of flavour which no shortcut matches. Our host told us that this was the base soup in which thukpas can be made; depending on the type of noodles used, it becomes a thenthuk or a pakthuk (the eggy variety of noodle which is found in the Tibetan gyathuk did not seem to be available in Ladakh). Tsampa is one of the basic ingredients that one finds in Ladakhi kitchens, and must have entered quite long ago, given the number of recipes that contain it.
We stayed in an interesting neighbourhood in Leh. It was a fifteen minutes’ walk to the main market, so not terribly crowded. But some shops straggled down to the road we were on. The road had several hotels, and a couple of cafes. But the rest of the houses belonged to residents. Interestingly, several of the houses were about to be demolished. When I asked about them, the owner of our hotel said that several people here want to rebuild and create a hotel on their property. Tourism is booming in Leh, and everyone wants a piece of the pie.
In spite of all this, the neighbourhood still retains quite a bit of its charm. The lanes around us had old houses, and several of them had traditional mud stupas on their grounds. I’d read somewhere that the punishment for crimes once was that the guilty had to build a stupa by their own hands (building something holy was enough to rehabilitate them). This didn’t feel like a criminal neighbourhood though. It seems that stupas were also built in the memory of family members who died. That made more sense!
I took some photos. The old houses were mostly built of sun-dried mud blocks. In this place the annual rainfall is so small that unfired clay is a good building material. It is cool in summer, warm in winter, cheap, and light. Start with a sturdy wooden framework, fill it with these blocks, add wooden doors and windows, and you are done. The woodwork was pretty. I liked this house with three memorial stupas facing the road from an upper floor.
The new houses are not all concrete monstrosities. The hotel we were in replaced the mud blocks by dressed stone, so that it could be built higher. The beautifully carved wooden frames for doors and windows were retained. The blocky shape of the old style buildings would have seemed very oppressive in a tall structure. Instead there were terraces at various levels. The net effect was quite pleasant, and it still retained a feel of the old neighbourhood. I thought that was clever. Perhaps the renewal will not be all bad. But in a decade I suppose the town center will be much more crowded than it is now.
Steaming is not exactly a common technique when it comes to raising a yeasty bread. So when we decided to sample a Tibetan kitchen in Leh, I was happy to go with tingmo (or Tenga momo). I discovered later that recipes were easy to find on the net (here, there, and everywhere), and it was the lead item in a Tibetan cookbook that was gathering dusty bytes in my e-reader. What do you have with it? There were many choices, but we went with the mutton shapta. Shapta (or Sha btra) has a thick sauce that goes well with the fluffy tingmo. Our server later told us that it can be had for breakfast with butter and honey. I can imagine that! Some Tibetan food is easily available in the plains, but traveling to the mountains helps you to find the breadth of this culinary culture.
One of the few dates that I found about the history of Leh is that the Leh Palace was constructed in three years during the reign of Sengge, of the Namgyal dynasty. So the palace must have been built between 1616 and 1642 CE, and definitely predates the beginning of the construction of the Potala palace of Lhasa. The architects who built it were clearly already accomplished. The level floors of the palace built on a slope, the inward tilt of the massive outer walls for stability, and the use of mixed materials, dressed stone, dried clay blocks, and several different kinds of wood, speak of previous experiments and practice. The palace was in continuous use till it was sacked and destroyed during the Dogra invasion of 1834. The restoration started in this century and has been proceeding fitfully.
The palace dominates the modern city of Leh, visible from most of the center. It seems to straddle a large part of a peak behind the town. I was glad to see an exhibition on the restoration project inside the palace, in particular the architectural drawings which showed the structure as a whole. Without this you are lost: the palace has nine floors (you enter at the third level) and each floor has multiple rooms. A look at these drawings gave me an overall feel of the structure. I decided to climb up to the terrace on the seventh floor and then walk back down. This was the second visit for The Family (she’s been here once when I was still battling altitude sickness) so she decided to be more relaxed.
You have to park your car a little distance away. The walk to the palace is lined with cheerful women knitting scarves, socks and ear muffs which they sell to tourists, even in the height of summer. I find that women are much more natural when The Family takes their photos. I would never have got these friendly smiles and eyes meeting the camera. Each person in this cheerful bunch had an umbrella. There’s no rain here, but the sun is pretty fierce. These are really parasols.
The main entrance in impressive with its four huge columns and the carved heads of lions decorating the lintel over the ceremonial door. This is the singe-sgo (Lion gate, singhadwar in Sanskrit-derived languages). I realized at this point that the king who ordered this palace to be built was also named lion. Maybe this was an appropriate name for a king who took on the Mughal empire; although he could not win Kashmir from them, he did protect the frontier.
On the fourth floor I looked out of a window at a great view of the town of Leh. I’m sure the window is a restoration, but it is done by local craftsmen who follow traditional practice. I wonder about the glass though; I am aware of traditional paper to cover windows. Did 17th century Ladakh make glass. The silk route would certainly have brought many craftsmen here for two and a half millennia, so I’ll reserve my judgement. I climbed half a floor to an internal terrace outside the memorial to the Namgyals. Photography was forbidden inside the memorial, but I was happy to take a photo of the very decorative door outside that led to the fifth floor. From there, I passed further terraces with clearer view of the modern city.
There are terraces and courtyards at every level. The dressed stone was really impressive, with the sharp edges still intact. The ceremonial courtyard where the Namgyals had state banquets was warm and protected from winds by surrounding walls. Further up the view was better but the wind was pretty strong. I listened to the clear and calm sound of azaan reaching up there from the wood and plaster mosque which I’d seen in the market below.
The result of the sacking of the palace and its long abandonment is that the murals which once decorated the walls are not in good shape. There are parts of many of these artworks still visible, and work to preserve them is on. The conservation of the palace and the old city below it has barely begun. It attracts many students of architecture who spend a semester surveying and documenting these buildings. I would have been completely unaware of this effort if Niece Mbili had not done a semester project here. But being sensitized to it now, I could see people at work. New papers are being written by engineers on the techniques used in Leh. Historians have been reasearching Ladakh a little more than they used to before. Perhaps in a couple of decades the palace will be restored to something closer to how it might have looked in the centuries when it was in use.
We’d spent our days in Leh looking for a good place which serves Ladakhi food. The usual social networks for tourists directed us to a popular place which served ddishes known in cities, some Tibetan, others not. The town was full of cafes and bakeries, and generic Indian food. We asked the dependable Mr. Kanlon, and he had an immediate answer: Namza. So we went there for our last lunch in Leh.
From outside it looked like a regular house. But when we passed the front door it opened into a kitchen garden, an urban farm if you wish. A wood and glass cabin was the dining area, perhaps eight tables, bright and cheerful in the afternoon light. The menu spoke of fresh ingredients from the local market and from the garden. We looked out: potato, tomato, beans, pak choy, were in evidence. One of the wait staff pointed out local herbs.
We turned to the menu. After ten days of looking at the wildflowers of Ladakh, I was beginning to wonder how much of it found its way into the kitchen. Often a lot of local plants go into food, but they are not considered to be suitable for guests. As a result, many of these interesting tastes drop out of restaurant menus. So I was happy to see that a nettle soup appeared on the menu. The soups all sounded very interesting, but I settled for the nettles because I wasn’t likely to taste this ingredient elsewhere. I’d not seen much in the way of meat in the local food, so it was interesting to see that they made sausages in house. That was clearly something else to try.
The Family had ordered khambir (the Ladakhi yeasty naan) with an yogurt dip which arrived at the table rather quickly. I shared a bit of it, but I held back, because I suspected that I’d over-ordered. The nettle soup had bits of soft chhurpi (the yak-milk cheese of these heights) and slivers of chicken in the broth. The sausages were redolent of herbs. All I needed after that was a dessert, but Ladakh does not really do desserts. There were stewed apricots on offer, and I took it (that’s the featured photo). It was perfect, just plain local apricot freshly stewed without additives.
Home of clouds, the Himalayas have a very appropriate name. The mountains jut up into the sky above the weather, stopping even that huge global circulation which we ground-huggers see as the Indian Ocean monsoon. And what are the Himalayas but the immense, long drawn out collision of two continental plates. As the Indian plate sped northeast across the world, wheeling westwards, a ten million year collision raised these mountains and prised the Tibetan highland into the air from the mass of the Asian plate. About then, elsewhere, a plume of magma rose from the earth’s core and created the enormous African rift valley, setting into motion the changes that started a branch of apes to begin walking across the world. Now, a tube of aluminium filled with those same apes followed a high arc across the home of clouds.
Sitting in that crowded tube, I Iooked out over the shoulder of The Family at the monsoon cloudscape that passed below us. Abruptly I realized that some of the white was not the fluffiness of clouds. A closer look told me that we had left the lowlands behind and reached the high Himalayas. Below us was a rugged, folded landscape, where streams and earthquakes had carved valleys and raised peaks. This late in July the snow line lies above 5.5 Kms. So the peaks we saw were at least 6 Kms high. This is where weather stops.
In the next ten minutes we passed over heights that I would certainly never have reached on foot: a land of eternal snow. Few animals come this high. Among all the world’s migratory birds, only bar headed geese (Anser indicus) fly over these mountains. Coincidentally, we were flying parallel to one of their migration routes, the one they follow as they move between their wintering grounds north of Mumbai, and their summer breeding grounds in Ladakh’s Tso Moriri, west of Leh.
The landscape below us was amazing. Multiple glaciers flowed away from a huge snowfield. I wondered what it would be like to stand on one of those promontories below us and look down on the icefalls that I could see. The air inside the plane suddenly felt hot and stale as I imagined the bitter cold wind below, blowing loose snow over the ice fields. Sadly I was seeing these views as the last of the snow melts from these mountains. Even ten years ago, I would not have seen so much exposed brown below me.
And then we had crossed from one tectonic plate to another. Below us was another climatic zone, one where the monsoon did not reach. Wisps of cumulus floated over the bare brown land. From this height I could see many lakes dotted over the land, large and small. With the extremely low precipitation that this high desert gets, the lakes must be all fed by snow melt. As the earth heats up and the last snow melts, I wonder what will be the fate of the ecologies that depend on these lakes: the bar headed geese, the black necked cranes, snow pigeons, snow leopards, snow foxes, blue sheep, the cold-adapted vegetation of these lakes, and the many insects which live only here. Distance from the ground lets you think these thoughts.
Before I expected it, we begin our descent. Voices come over the PA giving the usual safety instructions. As we approach the ground I see the play of light and shadow over the bare desert which will be our home for the next one and a half weeks. I’m excited. I look at The Family, and she says, “Finally. I’ve been waiting to come here for years.” Below us we see a green valley, probably a sign of humans: the water from a stream used to grow the crops and trees that we like to have around us. We carry with us memories of ancestral landscapes and we try to reproduce them wherever we settle.
Before I have to put away my phone, I see us approach the town of Leh. Like every overgrown human settlement, this spills out from the valley where it was born, into its surroundings. Humans metastasize. That magma plume below the Afar depression which shattered the African continental plate 40 million years ago set into motion large changes on the surface of the planet.
Don't hold your breath 
