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Showing posts from July, 2018

Ladakh Diaries Part 2 - The Road to Dah

The Phyang festival is interesting. The courtyard behind the temple is the venue for the costumed dancers to weave their magic on a crowd of about 150 gawking foreigners and Indians alike. We have our fill in about an hour and half, and so decide to head out to our next destination - the Aryan village of Dah, about 150 kms from Phyang, 100 of which is on the Leh-Kargil route. We cross and traverse along several small and mid-sized stre ams for about 20-30 kilometers before those streams hit the mighty, muddy Zanskar. For the next 100+ kilometers till we reach our destination, we are never more than a few yards to the left of, and sometimes several hundred feet above this river. The Zanskar is for a very long distance mellow, as it weaves it’s way through the mountain passes, steadily building on its might, as more small streams join this river. Suddenly the river narrows as it finds itself squeezed into a gorge, turning into an awesome rapid, showing its fury on the scarcely-both

Ladakh Diaries Part 1 - Out of Leh

Ladakh Diaries - Out of Leh Ladakh brings out something else in me - I want to say spiritual, but not being one, it would sound hollow. But it does soothe me, and brings some kind of inner calm. Today was Phyang, a small agrarian village about 20 kilometers northwest of Leh. It’s claim to small town fame is the Phyang Monastery perched on top of a mountain, and its Renpoche who has been supporting innovative and sustainable practices. It’s more recent claim to other fame are  its ice stupas, invented by Sonam Wangchuk, the man who inspired the Rajkumar Hirani film “Three Idiots”.  We went looking for remnants of the ice stupas, and I believe I found it. Ice stupas were SW’s idea of using gravity and pipes to take glacial melt and eject it 20-30 meters up into a cold, minus 20 degree air sometime in November, and see it freeze as it hits the air. Each “ice stupa” holds about 120,000 liters of water in ice form till the beginning of spring when glaciers have not yet melted. Th