Leisure Time in Leh, and an Ascent of Stok Kangri

What remained in Ladakh? Lots, of course, but one of the items still on our list was climbing Stok Kangri, a nice looking peak across the Indus Valley from Leh. Poor weather on the mountain kept us homebound, wandering the city streets, watching cafes and shops close for the winter season. Like a tourist town on the beach in New England, the tourist trade grinds to a halt after September, doors are shuttered, and merchants head back to Kashmir and Goa to spend the intervening months from now until June wheeling and dealing down in the valley or at the beach, perhaps stocking up on new pashminas, Tibetan and Ladakhi curios, trying to stay out of harm’s way. These men barked us down like carnies, standing idly at shop doors: “Hello, friend, come look at a pashmina, carpets also” – in another place they would be calling out from under the big tent “step right up, everyone’s a winner.”

I allowed myself to be taken in by one of these men – Ishaan – and whiled away an hour haggling, while he pulled out dozens of scarves, shawls, stoles, and thangkas. A handsome guy in his early thirties, he used a flourishing vocabulary when it came to wool. Of course, I know nothing about wool, wouldn’t be able to distinguish between something that is hand-made and something mass-produced in a factory in China. The ethics of shopping are difficult; I am inclined to say that one shouldn’t buy anything not absolutely necessary, and in general, this is my life at home. But here, I started down the slippery slope of justifications – you are only here once, or rarely; think of others, get some gifts; it’s not just me, other people are acquisitive, not given to the same penurious lifestyle I have adopted almost as an identity. Ishaan pulled shawls through his ring (“Very fine, so fine, it’s the real thing!”), ran a lit match over the fibers (“Not synthetic sir!!”), talked about his profit margin and how thin it was, how the season was over so he wanted to make a “good price”. Once inside the shop, I knew it was a game, that I would pay too much, and that this was all part of it. I derive little joy in pressing someone in India over five or ten dollars (sometimes fifty cents); there are those who see bargaining as a contact sport, willing to debase themselves and the shopkeeper, to be rude and arrogant, haughty and smug. It is embarrassing to watch, and although adjectives like “slimy”, “meretricious”, “avaricious”, and “glib” roll off the tongue easily when Westerners describe the merchant in a place where prices aren’t fixed, the way that some foreigners comport themselves is hard to watch. Later, I watched a threesome of Indian women from Bombay haggle over a hat; it was all smiles, laughter, and although they drove a hard bargain, everyone saw it as a game. I suppose the idea some Westerners have is that since this person is trying to take advantage of me, they are morally defective, and no longer deserve the basic decency given a store attendant back home, who merely sells something with a marked price. Never mind that the margins on clothes sold in the US and made in China are obscene, that might pay (for example) two hundred dollars for a garment that cost perhaps fifteen dollars to manufacture, that the store clerk is making the minimum wage (the rest goes to brand development, mushrooming advertising budgets, bloated executive salaries, shareholders, various allowances for slack in the supply chain, maybe a small payment to some bruisers somewhere to keep workers in line in China or Bangladesh or the Dominican Repulblic, towards lobbying or bribery for non-enforcement or removal of labor laws in a corrupt country); this you willingly pay, but you don’t want to be taken for a ride by a small-time merchant in Leh. None of this is to say that the merchandise on his or her shelf is produced ethically either: who knows what sort of child labor was used in the manufacture of these things, what the conditions are in the villages where it was made, how whatever laws are on the books were skirted, how much graft or corruption goes into getting the product from the point of production to the point of sale – never mind the treatment of the animals from which the wool comes. Unless you know the person making the things you buy, you are more or less damned, rolling the dice. We trust to laws and various NGOs to keep the process honest, but this is a herculean task, and the volume is enormous. And let us not forget, sweatshops exist right in the heart of San Francisco.

So I bought a few things and made Ishaan’s day. As it was late, he asked us to come back and have tea with him another time. When we walked past the next day, he attempted to make good on his offer – we begged off, saying we were in a hurry. In reality, I couldn’t stomach another cup of cloyingly sweet milk tea, served at every meal, one after the other.

At this point, time was getting tight, and the weather abated, changing from overcast and windy to fine and dry, so we decided to climb the mountain. The village of Stok, from which you begin the climb, was easily reached with a taxi. (Taxis in Leh are all called “contract carriages”, a wonderfully archaic term that perfectly encapsulates the subcontinental English dialect, something like the speech of a Victorian butler whose command of the language wasn’t perfect, then ossified for a hundred years and pressed into service in the 21st century). The taxi dropped us off at a shop and we made ready to head up the valley. A teenaged girl came running, all shalwar kameez and jacket, head muffled inside a checkered scarf. “Permit?” she asked, her garbled voice struggling to project through the cloth. “Um…permit?” I asked. She was demanding 2100 rupees (about forty five dollars) for us to walk up a mountain. I balked at this at first, considering a retreat and then a sly walk around the village. In my younger days I would have done this for sure; now, as a lazy relatively monied person, I just grumbled for a while and then paid. Maybe the money went towards maintenance of the mountain? It was hard not to think that I could get a year pass to a national park in the US like Yosemite for less, and that I was likely to find more trash on the side of the trail here than there. We paid up, were issued a permit on a piece of paper where the woman wrote only our first names, and started up the valley.

The day was beautiful, and the valley quickly became a gorge, with boxwoods swaying in a gentle breeze descending from the mountain. Two pack horse trains were descending, driven by a few locals. I thought that the base camp and perhaps a tea tent were being packed up and removed for the winter. This turned out not to be the case: groups were climbing the mountain fully supported, with guides, base camp supplies, cooks, the whole thing. I was stunned to find this on what was a very minor peak. Perhaps it is nice to be pampered a bit up in the hills…As we climbed to base camp, past several intermediate stops, guides and pack drivers looked at us – askance, I thought – expressing on their faces sentiments like: Who are these guys just climbing up the mountain on their own? Don’t they know there is a whole economy predicated on the fact that people climbing mountains engage services, spend money, eat delicious pakoras freshly fried before attempting the summit with nothing on their backs, enjoying it like a walk in the park?

We arrived at the base camp near sunset, in the chill of the mountain’s shadow. A young Austrian, climbing alone with a guide offered us hot tea (the same sickly sweet stuff I was burned out on) and a small plate of vegetable fritters. Very friendly, he was heading to the summit at one in the morning. This is almost a standard practice, these alpine starts, but I have never been one for such things, and anyway, having arrived at base camp at 5:30, I wasn’t going to wake up a few hours later and walk up in darkness. Neither was Martin; we were completely in agreement on this. I ate and fell asleep, after playing cards for a while with Martin, only to be awoken by a cacophony of pots banging, conversation, stoves firing up, zipping and unzipping tents at midnight. This went on for two hours, while I prayed for sleep to return. Finally, the sound of boots and poles scuffling and clattering across the ground swept past my tent, the cooks went back to sleep, and silence settled in. The moon was nearly full, and I fell back asleep to the diffuse light filtering through the fly of my tent.

We woke at seven and started up the mountain after a fairly large breakfast. The climb was steady but easy, with no hazards at all, tiny amounts of snow hiding in hollows. It had snowed the three previous days, but the heat of the day before had evaporated almost all of it (the Austrian said a group had been stuck for three days in base camp and ran out of time, descending under perfect weather the day we arrived…). The glacier was tiny and presented no risk. We met the others coming down from the summit, the Austrian and his guide, and then a couple, one from New Zealand, the other from Argentina; their guide was wearing jeans. At this sight, we abandoned our axes, crampons, and gaiters on the far side of it and wondered why we had cycled a thousand kilometers with this stuff. We ascended a small snow face, only a few inches deep, and then scrambled up scree for an hour or so, until we gained the summit ridge. The ridge was windy, and fairly exposed on the south side, but without much struggle we made the peak and sat in the sun looking out at the Ladakh and Zanskar ranges, topped with snow, spreading out in the distance in all directions. Leh lay below us, an agglomeration of buildings and trees. Martin took a GPS reading, and we descended.

Lunch was quick, but we napped for a short time and left a little late. Saddled with two of everything (we never shared anything, so we had two tents, two stoves, two pots, etc), we walked down at a moderate pace. My boots were new, and not broken in, so I was using my thighs and calves as brakes to save my toes. As it got dark, I was in a good deal of pain, and when we could no longer figure out the trail by headlamps, I suggested we camp. There was almost nowhere to camp, since we were in a rock strewn gorge, but I found a small flat spot with relatively few rocks and slept in the open air in my sleeping bag, the moon rising and shining in my face like a searchlight.

We had stopped twenty minutes from Stok village, which was pleasant in the clear morning, sun filtering through poplars, glinting off of windows, limning yaks’ hairy bodies grazing in green pastures. We quickly picked up a taxi to Choglamsar, at the junction on the road to Leh, and had breakfast among the chaos and dust left by the floods. As we paused to look for a taxi to Leh, a thin man with a vulpine face (complete with a few wiry whiskers poking out from his upper lip) sidled up to me, very close, holding out his hand. I accepted it, but he didn’t make eye contact. He said in a conspiratorial voice “Which country?”

“The US,” I replied.

He made no acknowledgement of what I said, continuing to hold my hand. He looked down the street, nodding slowly. I followed his gaze. There was nothing unusual in the scene, just the normal racket of trucks, buses, taxis, monks in ochre robes and a few men in skullcaps meandering across the street next to cows, dogs, and piles of trash. He had simply exhausted his English vocabulary. I disengaged from his hand, gave a weak ineffective smile, and walked away. He moved off in a different direction. I couldn’t say whether he was satisfied or not by our interaction; he gave no indication, never looked back at me.

I wanted to get out of town, down to the Spiti valley, but one thing led to another, and we were sitting again in a pashmina shop, buying more scarves. Again the flourishes, the lit match, protestations of honesty and decency. We were shown very nice pieces costing upwards of four hundred dollars. Martin asked the man “What about shahtoosh?” At this the man became animated.

“You know the shahtoosh? It is a thing of beauty! All of the pashmina in this shop, it is nothing compared to the shahtoosh. There is nothing in the world like it. Hold your hand to it, it is like a magnet. You can pass three shawls through a ring at the same time. Someone here, he tells you he has shahtoosh, he is lying – I promise you that. He sells it for one thousand dollars, it is not shahtoosh. You are a tourist, you don’t know. I could say to you this is shahtoosh” – here he picked up a very beautiful pashmina – “and you would believe me, you don’t know. But, I am honest. I tell you this thing is not the shahtoosh.”

Martin pressed him further. “Have you ever sold shahtoosh?”

Our host’s eyes narrowed. “I sell two this summer. To Indian army men.”

I was skeptical – was this true or just boasting? He continued. “Shahtoosh, I tell you my price is 750,000 rupees. I sell it maybe one million. But it is a risky thing to sell the shahtoosh. You must be very quiet.”

He didn’t seem very discreet, going on about it to a couple of guys who just walked in his shop an thirty minutes earlier. On the other hand, if he was going to sell shahtoosh – made from the wool of the endangered chiru in northern Tibet and forbidden by international law – an Indian army officer was probably the perfect person for it. The news would go nowhere, a highly placed person was protection for the shopkeeper, and a tidy profit of 200,000 rupees would get him comfortably through the year.

I fell sick the following day, so we delayed our departure – I could see the Taj Mahal slipping away as my schedule became tighter on the other end. We attempted to post some things home, first struggling to find a box, then struggling to mail them – the post office on the Main Bazaar doesn’t ship parcels, and the main office was closing in fifteen minutes. I felt ill, and just went back, defeated, putting off the mail and the twenty hour bus ride for another day.

The following day dawned bright and sunny, and I was hopeful; the sickness had passed, I felt energized, ready to move. We packed, sorted out our things, made ready for parcels to be sent home with curios and extra things we realized we would no longer need (among them, the idle ice axes, crampons, and gaiters that had never seen service through 1000 kilometers of cycling…). We went in search of the post office, and found that no shops were open at 11am. The city was quiet. My mind jumped to another imposition of a state-wide curfew, but there were no soldiers on the street beyond the usual handful threading their way past a handful of bazaar denizens. A merchant peered out from underneath a steel shutter; I asked him why everything was closed.

“Congress party,” was the reply.

“Congress party?”

He said, “Yes, there is a speech today, everything is closed until two-three o’clock.”

I raised an eyebrow, incredulous. “The town is closed down because there is a political rally?”

“Yes, some so-and-so is speeching about how many jobs he gives, what health care, what he fixes, schools, and such.”

A stump speech, and the town shuts down. I asked the man if he was going. He smiled vaguely and shrugged. “Is it required, or by choice?”

He dithered a bit, then said it was required. “All shops are closed, I won’t open.” Peer pressure appeared to be at work. I had seen in the paper that the Ladakh Union Territory Front (LUTF) had just recently shifted allegiance from the Congress Party (the ruling party, and that of the Gandhi dynasty) to the Bharat Janatiya Party (BJP), which had been the ruling party in the late nineties and early part of the last decade. Part of the LUTF platform was to demand union territory status for Ladakh, hiving it off from Jammu and Kashmir, freeing it from a Muslim-dominated government and allowing for a federal territory that had an easy Buddhist majority. Perhaps they also hoped that the AFSPA and other repressive laws active in Kashmir would no longer apply to Ladakh. I won’t pretend to understand the intricacies of Indian local politics, but the move made strange bedfellows – the BJP was a Hindu nationalist party, implicated through the Shiv Sena wing of their organization and their platform of Hindutva in several incidents of communal violence in the mid-to-late nineties, culminating in the bloodletting in Bombay between Muslims and Hindus leaving more than 2000 dead. They surely had no great love for Buddhists. On the other hand, tactically, the BJP would be happy to see the dismantling of Kashmir, to shrink the power (and electoral significance) of the Muslim-dominated J&K government nationally. Congress must be feeling pressure to ensure Ladakh stays within the fold of its moderate (neo-liberal, national security state), massively corrupt, and almost totally ineffectual government. Later in the day we photographed a metal box, beaten up, soiled with mud and slime, disregarded and forgotten between a telephone pole and a garbage can; the letters “Complaints for Corruption”, hand painted in black, were just visible through the scratched and chipped paint. This was where the citizens of Leh were to take their grievances, a small receptacle that hadn’t been touched in years by anything but the mangy street dogs curled up around it, plaintive or angry or sincere scraps of paper moldering at the bottom, dropped into a lightless void. No, don’t worry, you can be sure there isn’t a single complaint the festering in that box – they are instead in the heads of nearly every Indian, they who have to suffer the indignity of corruption from the highest level to the most petty, day in and day out.

Stymied by a political rally, we went to Thiksey monastery instead, a large, well-kept monastery on an outcrop overlooking the Indus valley to the southeast of Leh. The view from the outcrop was marvelous, clear to the top of Stok Kangri and the other peaks in the Ladakh range, as well as two other major monasteries in the valley (also on prominences), Spituk and Shey. We wandered the monastery for a couple of hours; one of the temples contained a 30-foot high representation of the Future Buddha, Maitreya – the chief lama of the monastery is himself a living reincarnation of this Buddha. The sleepy eyes framed by drooping ears looked out over the valley, the soles of the upturned feet and the hands in a mudra were strewn with money and kata scarves.

We returned, and met a friend of Martin’s for dinner, another cyclist and journalist from Denmark. The conversation was good, we ate well, and returned to the hotel at the unseemly hour of midnight. The door to our building was locked. We looked around for other entrances, couldn’t find any, and debated banging on the door and waking up the whole family. A bathroom window was open on the second floor, so I scaled the wall, holding onto pipes, shimmying my way up ten feet, and then worming my way through the small window. The play worked, I went down and let Martin in, and we laughed our way to sleep.

The next day, we each posted a parcel. We went to the main post office, which is almost completely out of town down a wide charmless road towards the airport. I stood where a line would be, if anyone there honored the "be in que" scrawled in marker on the plexiglass window. Eventually the clerk took pity on me, I showed him what I wanted to send home, and he told Martin and I to come around. There were lots of "sirs" - more, in fact, than I have heard in the rest of my life combined. He said it reflexively to everything, prefacing and ending each sentence with sir, and peppering the rest of the sentence with it as well. I started to use the word frequently also, since it felt like a bit of a power imbalance, me being "sir", he being "you".

"I am sorry sir, the axe cannot go."

I looked suitably crushed. "Why?"

"Because someone can take it out and hit someone with it." He demonstrated how a person might swing an ice axe in either anger or calculated malevolence.

"You're not serious," I said.

"Yes, sir, I am sorry sir, but this is regulation."

I wanted to say that Martin's axe was going inside a parcel without complaint, but that would be sabotaging his good luck, so I just removed the axe. This had the ancillary effect of making the package much tidier and smaller. Of course, I also needed a box. He suggested the flat rate parcel box, 2500Rs inclusive of shipping. I said OK.

The box was brought out by two men, who began struggling to cram the items inside it. They weren't going to fit. The clerk shrugged and said "I think it will not work...Perhaps you can carry something additional with yourself, sir."

I proposed that I buy a second box, and put the contents in two boxes, and then combine them in a pillow sack, which is where parcels go anyway in India.

"Sorry, sir, you cannot. The box is a flat rate, 2500Rs."

I groaned demonstratively, trying to inject levity into my own mood more than for anything else. "You mean that two pieces of cardboard cost 5000 rupees?"

"Yes, sir, that is what I am telling you." He smiled.

"That's ridiculous, sir," I said.

"I agree sir, but it is a rule, we have standards sir. I am so sorry, sir."

I gave up, and went in search of a box at a shop nearby. Across the street, stepping over a dog that had been smeared into the pavement, I found Wangal Engineers, "Specializing in Reviving AC and DC Motors". I poked my face into the cool dark room. "Can I get a box?"

A man proffered several, all too small, and finally found one that would work, but was mangled, crushed, and torn. “I'll try to revive this box,” I said to the clerk. He smiled politely, vacantly - he spoke no English. I searched the work bench for tape, and repaired the box. I offered a small cadeau; it was politely refused.

I returned to the post office, and Martin was gone. I sat, wondering what had happened; there was no answer from the clerk - he was busy with other customers. I sat in a chair and watched the postmaster sign papers for twenty minutes, literally hundreds of signatures scrawled over and over again, scowling through wire rimmed glasses. Every few minutes, a sign would emerge from between his lips. A female clerk sucked loudly at tea.

Martin returned bearing several square yards of cream colored cloth, the kind that is required to wrap around parcels in India. He was frustrated. "They require you to sew the damn pillow sack around the box, but they dont have the fabric here."

"At least this guy here is willing to sew it shut." I indicated a serene man with a mustache.

He pulled a massive needle out of a drawer and began closing up our parcels. After fifteen minutes this was finally done. A form was printed on an ancient dot-matrix printer, triplicate with carbon paper carefully inserted by our clerk in between the sheets. These were the customs forms. We filled them out, weighed our parcels, paid up and left, emerging two hours later into the sun. I thanked the clerk. "It's been fun," I said.

He smiled back, acknowledging the ridiculous process we had just gone through. "Well, sir, you see, we have these standards, we must keep to them...Really, it is for your own benefit and security." He went on for some time, extolling the virtues of sewn parcels. He cocked his head to the side, and said, "I think at least that you enjoyed yourself."

Martin puffed out his cheeks and then exhaled.

"Incredible India!" he said, mocking the tourism slogan.

"Well," I said, "it really is incredible. I don't think the adjective is wrong, maybe just the sense of it given in the brochures. I find it incredible that it took us two hours to send a parcel, I find it incredible that I had to go in search of a box at a shop full of electrical motor parts, it is incredible that you had to go find cloth at a yardage store half a mile away in order to finish the process."