louiseinlimbo

  After the festival, we had a couple of days driving through the Zanskar Valley, from Leh to Padum and on from there to Kargil.  They were long drives, but very enjoyable ones as the scenery was absolutely stunning – harsh, rocky mountains, snowy peaks, and the occasional glacier.  We did also visit some more monasteries, including the Karsha Monastery where as well as the usual colourful paintings on all the walls, they have this icon in the photo, made partly from mummified human remains!  The hostile relationship with neighbouring Pakistan became more apparent here, from the Kargil War Memorial to the used Pakistani shell decorating our hotel.  & we started to see the army presence along the roads, with armed soldiers stationed every half mile or so.  It didn’t feel dangerous though – or at least not in that sense.  Natural disasters such as rock falls feel like a far greater threat, and it was quite shocking to see some houses near a recent la...

  Per the tour group literature, one of the high points of this trip was the Hemis Tsechu (festival), held annually for the last 300 years or so at Hemis Gompa (the largest Buddhist monastery in Ladakh) to honour the birth of Padmasambhava, the founder of Tibetan Buddhism.   It didn’t figure particularly highly in my reasons for selecting this particular tour, but I have to admit that it was pretty impressive! Over the course of this the second (main) day of the festival, there are some ten different sets of masked performers doing their dances in the central courtyard, accompanied by musicians playing a few different musical instruments, particularly various trumpet/bugle-type things – some of them also masked.  I did buy a guidebook to the festival, which enabled me to label my photos, but really … this is a sample extract describing the first set of mask dancers: “The thirteen black hats’ or evil terminators’ dance represents the Nagpa tradition of Vajrayana practition...

So I moved back up from dorms-in-cheap-hostels mode to the luxury of a group tour, with private ensuite rooms, buffet breakfasts, private vehicles and guides – not to mention the mental relaxation of not needing to think where I would stay, how I would get there, etc. We met for lunch, then were taken to see a few sights of Delhi (the Humayun’s Tomb complex and the Parliament buildings), out to dinner, then an early night before our flight the next morning to the city of Lah – capital of Ladakh.   The first place I’ve ever flown into where we all had to close our window blinds some time prior to landing, so as not to see (and record?) what was going on at the airport, part of which is for the armed forces!   Once in Leh, however, everything felt fine, with no obvious security tensions. Surrounded by mountains and overlooked by a fort built in the 17th century, it is a stunning city.  There are two mosques on the main street of the bazaar, a Sunni one you can see in the ...