LADAKH! (part 1)

For Diwali break, which is kind of the equivalent to Christmas/Holiday break in the Western world, we get ten days off from school to travel wherever we so choose. I wanted to go somewhere amazing, since this is really our only time to go wherever we want, that hasn't been scheduled into our semester. I decided to go to Ladakh because I wanted to see a whole new side of India, and I wanted to do something that wouldn't be easy to do by myself if I ever come back (fingers crossed!). Ladakh is an area of Jammu & Kashmir in northern India, right near the China border that is known throughout the country as being one of the most beautiful places on earth. The Himalayas are sprawled within it and its Buddhist culture gives it a different flavor than the rest of India.

Ladakh stole my heart the minute I stepped off the plane. I was in kind of a worried/anxious/generally upset mood on the plane ride and in the airport because I had managed to convince myself that I had Dengue Fever (any minor ache, pain, cough, or sneeze in India triggers some huge frenzy worrying about malaria or Dengue or some other disease) and was worried about my ability to hike in the Himalayan mountains in my condition. But it all went away when I stepped into the crisp, biting air of this new 16,000 foot altitude I would be living in for the next ten days.
But the initial excitement was soon buried under more worry. I was absolutely freezing, my fingers were tingling like crazy because of the medication we were told to take to help our bodies adjust to the altitude, I was concerned about getting dehydrated because I had already run out of all the bottled water I had stashed away from the plane, and the sharp pain in my side that I had been feeling for a few days was coming on stronger.

For the first twenty-four hours, it is required that all new visitors take rest, even very experienced hikers. We had to walk up stairs very, very slowly, and I found that I was tremendously out of breath after climbing all of four stairs. It was pretty scary, honestly.

The first night we had dinner at a totally barren place that had no electricity in the main room for some reason, and so we ate by candlelight. I don't think food had ever brought me so much joy until then - the warm soup and the hot rice and daal was so good compared to my freezing cold and hungry state. Our hotel did not have heat during the night, so my best friend and I snuggled together under our thousand massive blankets and eventually managed to fall asleep.

We visited many monasteries and it was gorgeous and surreal. We met monks, almost fell off a few cliffs in our car that was driven by our crazy driver Hussein, and ate lots of maggi, which is essentially Ladakh's version of Ramen noodles. A few days into the trip, we went over the highest motorable road in the world, at 18,380 feet!

We went to Pangong Lake, 70% of which is in China and 30% of which is in India. We had lunch at one of the small places nestled at Pangong, which seemed to be owned by a mother and her two small children, one of which was a baby strapped to her back while she ran around cooking food. Her son was the sole waiter, and he couldn't have been more than seven years old. Seeing him wash our dishes with his bare hands in ice cold water was a bit much to grapple with, and peering into the part of the small, makeshift restaurant that they called home to see the two small blankets on the floor and not much else was hard to take in. I had seen a lot of heartbreaking scenes like this back in Pune and at our other destinations, but this one was exacerbated by the fact that it was so, so cold outside. It just made the whole situation sting a little more than usual.

There's a line in my journal that kind of sums this feeling up: "the number of lives you could have been born into on this planet really scares me." 

True. 

The whole experience kind of turned my earned environmentalism on its head. For the first time in my life, I saw firsthand how scary the outdoors can be, and how easy it is to forget that nature can be ruthless and harsh and doesn't really care too much. 

We went to Nubra Valley on the sixth day. It was stunningly beautiful and utterly amazing. The military presence was real and a bit intimidating at times. We met two guys from Slovakia who were professional para-gliders, and spend two months in Nubra Valley every year doing it. They were fascinating and the rest of the group had to pull me away by the end of our conversation. 

We also got to go camel riding in Nubra Valley! This was so, so cool partly because camels are freaking awesome but also because they looked so different from the camels I think of in my head. They were super furry and absolutely massive. With the Himalayan mountains as the back drop, it was really quite a sight: 

And one more because I just can't help myself: