LADAKH! (part 2)

On the second night in Nubra Valley, we were doing a homestay with a Ladakhi family. We arrived freezing down to our bones and just moving from the slightly warm position my friend and I had finagled ourselves into on the way to keep warm was extraordinarily difficult.

A school for boys at the Hemis Monastery in Ladakh 

It's interesting, because I go to school in one of the coldest places in America; I should be able to handle a place that's considered cold in India. But the stark contrast between Ladakh and Appleton, WI is that there is virtually no heat in Ladakh. None. A few places will have a little heat, but at most it only warms up a few degrees Celsius, and it's only on a few hours a day, even in the nicer hotels. That adds a whole new factor to the equation.

Anyway, we went inside and in our dramatic (well, kind of) and overtired and overemotional state from hiking all day, we decided to sleep in a two-person bed with all three of us, and snuck into another room and took five more blankets we saw stacked there. We were genuinely terrified of the coldness at this point. And we decided to pile nine blankets on top of us. We spent forty-five minutes laughing harder than we ever have, arranging the blankets so that every inch of each of our shivering bodies would be adequately covered. Still, we wondered, seriously, how we were going to make it through the night. Like, we really wondered. It was that cold.

In the "city" of Leh in Ladakh!

When dinner was ready at 9pm, we stumbled into the dining room area and proceeded to eat another one of the best meals of our lives. Egg curry, rice and daal, chapati and aloo gobi - so, SO good.

After dinner, we went outside and I looked up to see one of the most breathtaking images I've ever laid my eyes on - the night sky above the Himalayas. It's something very hard to describe - the beauty of all those millions of stars shining down on you. We laid down on the barren earth and took it all in with all its glory.

The next morning we woke up to find that we had, indeed, survived through the night. We woke to the sound of om being chanted repeatedly on the hillside near the house. Not wanting to interrupt the precious moment of gratitude and awe, we quietly rolled out of bed, wrapped ourselves up in the cocoon of our humongous new yak wool scarves we had bought in Leh for about three hundred rupees each (that's about four dollars), and made our way outside into the cold air for breakfast of Ladakhi bread and butter.

The next day we did our biggest hike of the trip: to Rumbakh, a tiny Himalayan village in the middle of nowhere that is only accessible by hiking. I was pretty worried because I knew I was dehydrated, and I was worried that a big hike would be too much in the freezing cold and in this crazy altitude.

It was hard, for sure. I had trouble breathing at some points and felt light-headed and dizzy a few times. But when that happened, I would simply look around me at the stunning beauty of the mountains I was surrounded by, and trudge on a bit longer.

When we finally arrived, I was exhausted. We got to our homestay house and I realized how incredibly cool this all was - staying in a small Himalayan mountain village that has no road access and a population of, like, thirty people. That's pretty amazing.

Rumbakh - the Himalayan mountain village we did a homestay in 

A weird thing was that the woman we were staying with - Gobi - had a television set. I didn't understand this, but I was pretty used to being floored by most of what I saw at this point in the trip. As she made dinner by setting cow dung patties on fire in her small cast-iron stove with a flat rock on top of it to make the chapati on - we snuggled together under the huge blankets in her kitchen. It felt so good to be a little warm again that I almost started crying of happiness.

Our guide Kruttika came in to make sure we were okay in our homestay house. She sat for a few minutes and talked with us, and I asked if this woman, Gobi, who couldn't speak any English or even Hindi, the Indian national language, had ever been outside of Rumbakh. Kruttika wasn't sure, but she did say that this woman, and the other people of this village and others like it, had practically no form of identification or any kind of "official" existence (whatever that means). That blew my mind; we, with our crazy lives that are so over documented in the U.S., cannot begin to fathom what that would really be like.

Gobi fiddled with the remote for a few minutes, assuming that we would want to watch TV. She came to the only channel in English, and left it on that. You won't believe what it was - of all things, Cupcake Wars. We nearly died of laughter. Here we were, in the Himalayan mountains, so far off the grid and so far from civilization that the woman we were living with had quite possibly never left her village in her entire life, and we were watching Cupcake Wars on TLC. Gobi watched as the foreign people on the screen ran around frantically spewing florescent pink frosting on top of piles and piles of cupcakes, arranged in the shape of a pirate ship. The look on her face was one of awe; her eyes were glued to the screen in a way I had never seen two eyes do before. The stark contrast between that life and this life was almost too much to take in so quickly with no prior warning. It was a crazy scenario, but I'll never forget it as long as I live. 

The next day we hiked back to Leh early in the morning. We spent our last night in a hotel in Leh. Saying goodbye was hard, but I did miss Pune at that point was also excited to get back. 

A woman in Rumbakh getting water from the communal well 

We flew from Ladakh to Delhi, then I took a 24-hour train ride from Delhi to Pune with the guide and one other member of our trip, which I did to save money on another flight, but also because I love trains and was interested to see what one would be like in India. 

It was fascinating. I witnessed with my own eyes people bribing the ticket collectors to let them on the train even though they didn't have tickets. Whole families, after getting passed this stage, would sleep near the bathrooms or in hallways with a single blanket over their heads and bodies. It was insanity. Getting to see such a vast area of India was really cool, too. We went through Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, and much of Maharashtra to get all the way to Pune.