I think of myself as fairly hard to impress after decades of traveling around the Himalayas, but every day in Ladakh I heard myself gasping, audibly, as I saw gompas more impressive to me than even the dzong fortress-monasteries of Bhutan, and more stunning in their location than even the Potala Palace in Lhasa (whose construction most of them predate). Often, jouncing across pebbled roads, past the “War Hero Filling Station” and yet another sign advising, “Better Mr. Late than Late Mr.,” sweet Ladakhi folk-songs playing on the system and my driver communicating with nothing but open, infectious smiles, I felt that the traveler’s life knew few more sustaining and uplifting pleasures.
“Life is boring in Leh,” a fast-talking campsite-owner in a remote village assured me. “But in America, I think, busy, busy, busy, 24/7. So much tension. Stress, stress, stress. So American people come here for peace, contentment. Weather is hot and cold, everything is boring, but life is good here.”
What he might have been saying was that foreigners come to Ladakh in search of simplicity and silence, a chance to step out of the accelerating moment, and what we bring to Ladakh is complexity and noise, the press of the modern millisecond. It may seem that the 43,000 tourists who visited the area in 2006 represent less than the number of fans who crowd into a single game at Shea Stadium. But in an area that is only five times as populous–75 Ladakhs can fit, population-wise into Mumbai alone–the influx is akin to 60 million foreigners arriving in a year in the U.S. We hurry to Ladakh in search of the fairy-tale quiet of what feels like a candlelit medieval walled city where the airport is named after a high lama and the newspaper on offer in my hotel (in June 2007) was dated November 8, 1999. But to the Ladakhis, of course, we are the modern century, bringing the seductions of a high-tech, long-distant world.
I went one day to see the Tse-Chu festival in Hemis, one of the great events of the Ladakhi calendar, and when I arrived I was impressed to see stalls set up everywhere around the great monastery, selling turquoise jewelry, Buddha statues, thangkas and CDs. It was only when a Ladakhi pointed it out to me that I realized that the only real consumers of such stuff were tourists (the few locals in evidence were clustered around two home-made roulette wheels). Inside, around the temple’s courtyard, where masked lamas enacted an esoteric series of dances commemorating Padmasambhava, the great 8th century “second Buddha” who brought Tantric Buddhism to Tibet, at least 90% of the visitors turned out to be foreigners, who could probably follow almost nothing.
“It used to be that all us young boys would go to Tse-Chu and make a big party,” said Tsewang Dorje, the very winning and urbane young proprietor of Yak Travels, back in Leh. “Now it’s only for the tourists.” Indeed, many of Ladakh’s festivals, traditionally held in the winter, have been moved to the summer so thay can grab foreign crowds (even though in summer most Ladakhis, working in the fields, are unable to take time off to attend).
Almost as soon as the first Westerners arrived, not surprisingly, they began thinking about how they could protect the region from other foreigners and keep intact the impressively sustainable, seemingly content traditional world they had discovered in Ladakh (where Buddhism came from India eight centuries before it made it to Tibet). One of the first Europeans to live in Leh, Helena Norberg-Hodge, who arrived in 1975 and quickly became fluent in the language, set up an Ecology Centre, and later a Women’s Alliance and many other organizations that try to preserve what is ever more unique in Ladakh before it is too late. When I walked out to the quiet, elegant compound that her Women’s Alliance maintains, just outside Leh, last summer, I found its workers busy constructing what would be the first restaurant in Ladakh to serve only Ladakhi food (a difficult task, it was admitted, because these days local ingredients cost more than imported ones).
Thanks to the efforts of people like Norberg-Hodge, Ladakh has become almost a showcase and a launching pad for the ever more popular principles of “ecotourism” and cultural responsibility. Signs saying “Say No to Polythene” fly from the lamp-posts of Leh, and plastic bags are all but prohibited in town. As soon as you arrive at the airport you are greeted by signs instructing you in the commandments of “Mindful” tourism and pamplets telling you to “avoid buying products from multinational corporations, which are eroding cultural diversity.” Discussions are held every day at the Women’s Alliance about Norberg-Hodge’s ideas and development in Ladakh is often spoken about as Mao Zedong’s People’s Liberation Army might be in Tibet–as a mindless juggernaut aimed at destroying a long-indigenous culture.
To some, inevitably, there is a whiff of colonialism in the very idea of foreigners trying to protect Ladakhis from themselves (and seeking to discourage Ladakhis from the very exposure to other cultures that those same foreigners are enjoying by coming to Ladakh). Perusing all the literature, one can believe that the most concerned of Westerners are sometimes bringing activism, even anger to a region whose traditional Buddhism says that all problems (and all solutions) can be found within. Yet still it seems better to have too much sensitivity than too little, and the hard-working people who support Norberg-Hodge have helped bring solar heaters and micro-hydraulic power plants and low-cost greenhouses to Ladakh. “We are not trying to tell the Ladakhis what they should do,” says Nicolas Louchet, a young French volunteer who was spending the summer working for the Ecology Centre with his Polish wife Ania. “We only want to question, `What means progress, what means development?’ “
Besides, almost everyone I talked to, foreigner and local, told me that the interest of Ladakhis in their own heritage, in Buddhism, in traditional medicine, has in fact increased in the past few years, perhaps as Ladakhis have seen how attractive their culture is to foreigners. Perhaps, too, as they have seen how lucrative such traditions are. A hundred years ago, the British solder-explorer Frances Younghusband found Ladakhis “typical travelling merchant[s] of Central Asia…intelligent, shrewd, full of information” and to this day you can see how this resourceful and seasoned culture of traders has adjusted to the latest travelers from afar, as to all their predecessors (the very name of Ladakh was once “Mang Yul,” or “country of many people”). Among the more than 150 travel agencies that now fill Leh’s three or four main streets, you will notice an “eco” or “spiritual” or “Tibet” in almost every name.
“You will never see a homeless Ladakhi,” a British anthropologist who had been working in the region on and off for ten years told me. “Relative to the rest of India, they’re very well-off.” As soon as the tourist season ends, indeed, many Ladakhis go to work for the Indian army at the Siachen Glacier, the longest glacier in the world outside of the polar regions, the military remaining tourism’s only rival as a good source of revenue.
Sometimes, in fact, surrounded as I was by the conundrums of development in a long undeveloped place, I thought of my nomad driver, Phunchok Angchok, who showed up uncomplainingly every morning at dawn to take us on hazardous roads to faroff monasteries. Until four years ago, he had never left his nomad settlement, following the seasons and (as now) unable to read or write. Since he had come to town and begun working with a travel agency, though, he had been able to send his 17 year-old son, like many of the teenagers in Ladakh, to private school in Delhi, where he was learning English, economics and all the skills of the modern world.
One day the son joined us on our travels–dressed in Nike shirt and baseball cap, and fluent in English–and I noticed how it was he, conversant with the outside world, who made sure I circumambulated every temple in the right direction, and he who threw himself down on the ground in full prostrations before every Buddha and he who insisted that we eat only in temple-sponsored restaurants. He was spending much of his summer vacation visiting the nomad camp of his ancestors.
For me, in any case, Ladakh seemed a beautifully unfallen place, still quiet and uncrowded next to the blue-glass shopping malls of modern Lhasa, the thousands of foreigners who have turned Nepal into a sprawling global village, even the chic new hotels that are now coming to long-protected Bhutan. There was something engaging about the “He and She” Shops scattered around the market, the prayer wheels in the main road that cars drive around to get blessings for their journey, the sign outside Pizza de Hut that said, “Thanks for the visit. God Bless You. Take Care. Bye-Bye.” Even to get to the main sight in Leh, the ruined nine-story palace that stands on a hill above the town, you have to walk through a warren of medieval lanes and follow “WAY 2 PALACE” signs chalked up on oil drums and telephone poles.
When you walk through Leh these days, you may well get pushed off the road by honking cars with “Desire” or “Liebst Du Ich” written on their windscreens. But wander just ten minutes out of town and you find yourself in shady rustic lanes where people with ancient faces are working in the fields or walking to the temple as if they’ve never heard of America. A group of musicians sits on the ground among the poplars, serenading a traditional archery competition in which a team of elegant men in black take on a team in white, the daily scores written up on a blackboard and ceremonial dances punctuating the action.
When recently the central government in Srinagar (Ladakh is still governed from Moslem Kashmir, far away) decreed that something be done about the packs of wild dogs who run around Ladakh, an unsentimental foreign researcher told me, the citizens of Leh hurried out and put tags on any dogs they saw, so they would be taken as pets and not hauled away or killed. When I opened The Magpie, Ladakh’s weekly English-language newspaper, it was to read an article about a brave villager who had risked his life to try to save two calves and a lamb from a marauding snow leopard. And when finally I got to the end of the five-hour drive over the highest motorable pass in the world, it was to learn that the gompa in Hunder was closed. “During this time the head monk is not here,” a local explained. “This season so many insects die, so they are making prayers for them in all the houses.”
I remembered how, just a year before, I had asked the Dalai Lama’s senior private secretary where, in all his more than forty years of working with his leader, had most touched him. He had been to the White House and the Vatican, had accompanied the Dalai Lama to Mongolia, Jerusalem, South Africa and Lapland. He had traveled more than almost anyone I knew.
A faraway look came into his eyes and he remembered a moment in Ladakh. “Just looking out across the valley, the silence, the river in the distance, the temples,” he began, and for a moment I was with him on the hilltop. For him, perhaps, this all brought back a home and a past he had lost as a boy in Tibet, and might never see again. But for all of us, really, Ladakh seems to speak to something lost and ancestral within that, in going there, we can begin at last to retrieve.