tibetans

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.

Before leaving Dharmsala, Martin had one last chore to do, which was to go to the post office and mail home two huge stones (geodes) that he bought off the street near our hotel. What possessed him to go and buy stones in India the day he was to leave on a bicycle ride, I don't know, but he did it. They were nice enough stones, but they weighed about 20kg (thats 45 pounds). And I experienced the Indian postal system years ago, and unless things had changed dramatically, I knew this would be at least a two hour ordeal.

McCleod Ganj. I never really thought of coming here, but it's fairly convenient to the mountains of Ladakh in northern India, and there is an airport of sorts nearby. I had no interest in hassling with Delhi, so better to just hide in the hermetically sealed environment of Indira Gandhi Internatinoal Airport and catch out on the next flight full of monks.

I got to Dahongliutan in the late afternoon. I figured my best shot was a truck ride back down to the desert, since the bus from Ali would likely be full. I went back into the Uighur restaurant, and asked if I could have laghman.

"Sure..." No one was moving very quickly. It occured to me that perhaps it was Ramadan.

"Has Ramadan started?"

"Yes."

"Ah, well then, hold the laghman - I'll break the fast with you tonight."

Janne and I left Kashgar on August 27th, leaving me with about three weeks on my visa. (An aside here: Hong Kong agencies can issue six month visas to just about anyone, but since the beginning of 2007, US passport holders can no longer get six month visas. Again, I carry the cross...) Our plan had been to cycle from Tashkurgan east towards Mazar, but Steve had just been in the area with horses and camels, and had run into major washouts along this road, ending near the settlement of Pilu with an uncrossable river that had eaten the entire road along its bank.

In the interests of saving time, Martin and I took a bus from Xining to Maduo, a Tibetan town on the plateau at 4300m elevation. The day began smoothly: a relatively orderly line in front of the ticket counter and about $10 each later, we were equipped with a printed ticket (the days of a hand-scrawled ticket are gone), paid a bit for the bicycles, and we were off. The bus was the typical work-horse vehicle made for short runs, seating about 40 with a luggage rack on top, with a net cast over the contents to keep them from rolling off.

(I wrote this as an email to several people, in a free-ranging style, which, as is usual for me, didn't follow the rules of punctuation, capitalization, or good sense. It turned out to be rather long, so I am posting it here, to be edited, refined, deleted, whatever, at a later date...)