by Bruce Kirkby
For more than a thousand years, a close-knit society has endured here in isolation, eking out a scant living from the glacial till, growing crops of barley during the short summer with the aid of glacial meltwater irrigation.
When Tibetan Buddhism entered the valley during the seventh century, it quickly became entrenched as cultural bedrock. Stately monasteries sprang up—built inside caves, atop spires or perched on sheer cliffs as a means of balancing meditative seclusion with proximity to an alms-producing village—and soon a quarter of the male population had entered monastic life.
With time, Tibetan culture came to permeate all aspects of Zanskari society—art, architecture, astrology, medicine, clothing, cuisine and music—and the hidden valley, along with the entire surrounding state of Ladakh, came to be regarded as “Little Tibet,” a de facto appendage of the great Tibetan kingdom.
Only an inconsequential quirk of fate tilted Zanskar’s fortunes away from Tibet and toward the subcontinent. In 1834, as part of an effort to increase pashmina wool production, the maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir dispatched a raiding party that laid claim to the remote kingdom. As a result, more than a century later, Zanskar was spared China’s crushing annexation of Tibet, and the ensuing atrocities of the Cultural Revolution.
Today, the hidden valley stands among the last places on the planet where Tibetan Buddhism remains intact, undiluted and still freely practiced in its original setting.
* * *
Beyond the Shingo La, hours of knee-knocking descent brought us to a flooding creek blocking our way. Muffled thuds emanated from the rapids, the sound of boulders tumbling downstream like bowling balls.
Sonam suggested we wait for the Pony Men, and then ride the horses across, but I recoiled at the suggestion. The thought of our boys perched atop mares, amid such whitewater, was too perilous to consider. So we ranged up and down the banks, searching for a way across, eventually discovering a bridge of avalanche debris. I went first, carrying Bodi on my back, carefully kicking steps into the narrow catwalk of snow while trying not to look at the rapids roaring beneath. Sonam followed, carrying Taj in a piggyback, as sure-footed as a Sherpa. Then Christine, the porters and finally the television crew.
I was relaxing on solid ground when a thud caused me to jump. One of the camera operators had slipped, but instead of falling off the bridge he had landed in a crevasse. Shaken but uninjured, the man crawled to safety.
We followed the creek downward, and with every step, the air grew thicker and the slopes greened. Sedges and wildflowers appeared. Bodi gathered fistfuls of “Dirty-Sock Flowers” (pink bistort) while Taj collected a bouquet of “Forget-Me-Nuts.”
“Look!” Christine shouted, pointing to a herd of prehistoric-looking beasts grazing on the opposite bank. “Yaks!” For their immense size, the shaggy animals moved with astonishing grace.
“How can they see?” Bodi asked. “Their eyes are covered by hair.”
“Please come back Mr. Yak,” Taj shouted as they disappeared over a rise.
A gathering of stone huts stood nearby. This was a doksa,IV Sonam explained, grazing lands for the village of Kargiak, still a two-day walk away.
Counterintuitively, Zanskar’s high alpine meadows are far more biologically productive than the valley bottoms, and every summer, women accompany herds of cow, yak, horse, sheep and goat to these exposed slopes, where they produce butter, cheese and yogurt to see the village through the winter ahead.
Sonam hollered and clapped, but no one appeared. Perhaps they were out gathering yak dung, he suggested. Easy to gather and stack, yak dung provides an invaluable fuel in this treeless land, used for heating homes and cooking meals. These Frisbee-shaped patties dry rapidly in the parched Himalayan air, devoid of mold or fermentation, and every Zanksari household retains claims to well-defined collection zones. Dung, Sonam explained with a laugh, was the only commodity in the remote valley that money could not buy.
Wearily we trudged on, reaching the muddy flats known as Lakong (“Gateway”) as silver light drained from the western sky. A chill wind blew, and the Pony Men hastily unloaded their animals. Kerosene stoves soon screamed. In perfect darkness, we put up our tent.
The boys were brushing their teeth by flashlight when a group of ragged men stumbled into camp, leading a team of horses. These wranglers were headed home to Manali after a summer spent leading tourist treks. A small girl travelled with them. Dark-eyed and barefoot, she wore a fraying pink sweater and blue skirt. Bodi and Taj approached curiously, but she ducked beneath a low plastic tarp, where the men were huddled around a brass stove. By the time we rose at dawn, she and the wranglers had already vanished into the dark peaks.
* * *
We descended a wide, U-shaped valley. The flooding Kargiak River ricocheted back and forth across the shale flood plains, and we crossed the torrent regularly, atop wobbly bridges of log and flagstone. Dotted along the trail were purple vetch, pink rose and in places, the extremely rare blue Himalayan poppy. Prayer flags rippled from passing headlands, the only sign of habitation in this otherwise barren land.
A magnificent fin of white granite appeared in the distance. This was Gumbarajan, Sonam explained, and he was unsure if anyone had ever reached its summit. I marvelled at the possibility, for elsewhere in the world such a spire would be covered by a web of climbing routes. By noon we were scuttling beneath its sheer face, ears alert for the clatter of rockfall. Soon the tall, triangular cliff floated behind us, like a sail on the blue sea of the sky.
After a lunch of curried potatoes and peas, Sonam dragged the white mare toward Bodi again. This time, Bodi glanced uncertainly at Christine and me.
“It’s up to you, sweetie,” Christine said. “If you want to ride, we’ll stay close. You’ll be safe. I promise.”
Without waiting for an answer, Sonam plucked Bodi from the ground and plopped him atop a blanket of boiled yak wool on the mare’s back. I braced for a tantrum, but Bodi said nothing, his face expressionless. Tiny stirrups hung on frayed nylon rope from a rudimentary pack frame, but Bodi’s hiking boots wouldn’t fit in, which was fine by me, for if he ever tumbled, foot entrapment could pose a grave danger. With no reins for purchase, I stripped the bandana from my head and knotted it to the pack frame, creating a loop for Bodi to hold.
“You OK?” I asked quietly. Bodi nodded without looking. I glanced at Christine. She gave a thumbs-up. Sonam tugged the halter, and the horse clattered forward.
I struggled to stay close behind, arms held aloft in case Bodi lost his balance. But our son appeared to be a natural rider, sitting tall with relaxed hips. When the mare crossed a stream, and water swirled to her belly, Bodi nonchalantly raised his feet. On the far side, he leaned forward and grabbed her mane as the mare clattered up a steep bank. Before long he had let go of my bandana entirely and was staring upward, pinching fingers before his eyes as if plucking clouds from the sky.
* * *
On the sixth morning of our trek, mani walls began to appear, rising in the center of the trail and running for hundreds of meters. Constructed from intricately carved stones, most bore the famous Buddhist exhortation, Om mani padme hum. Every rock represented a long, cold winter spent chiselling, and viewed cumulatively, they were a humbling testament to local devotion.
Om mani padme hum, the ancient mantra of Avalokiteshvara, is commonly translated as “Hail to the jewel in the lotus,” and is meant as a reminder that just as the lotus grows in muddy water, so too can wisdom take seed in an impure mind.
Like all sacred Buddhist objects, mani walls were meant to be passed on the left—keeping a traveller’s right hand, representative of right thoughts and right action, closest to the divine, while creating a clockwise circumambulation, which in Buddhist doctrine is the direction that both the earth and universe revolve. If any of our party accidentally passed a mani wall to the right, as the television crew was prone to do, a porter or Pony Man would invariably notice, even from a great distance, and send them back to correct t
heir miss.
Chortens came next, the iconic Buddhist monuments rising like giant chess pawns along the trailside, two storeys tall or more. Some were freshly whitewashed, others ghosts of their former selves, eroded by wind, rain and time.V
Whitewashed chortens grace the entrance to most Himalayan villages, often holding relics or the remains of esteemed lamas.
The boys took particular interest in the offerings left at the feet of these monuments. When Bodi asked if he could keep a particularly nice coin he’d found, Sonam wagged a finger. Taj popped an aging lump of dough into his mouth, which Christine frantically dug out with a finger. I suspected illness, not impiety, was her concern.
Bodi had paused to sketch a trio of chortens when a horse came thundering down the trail toward us. Two young boys were perched on top, riding bareback, and they charged straight past without slowing.
Eventually a cluster of whitewashed homesteads appeared ahead. We had reached Kargiak, the first Zanskari village.
The mud-brick structures were set deeply in the earth, which Sonam explained served as protection from intense winter cold. Prayer flags flapped upon flat roofs, and dung dried beside piles of russet fodder.
Fields of barley surrounded the village. The crop was already waist high, with fuzzy green heads that rippled in the wind. Barley is a staple of Himalayan culture, a hardy grain blessed with a short growing season and remarkable drought tolerance. But here—at the very limit of habitable altitude—the grain would never fully mature. Instead, these fields would be cut as the first snows of autumn fell, left to ripen on the ground.
“Jullay, jullay, jullay, jullay!”
A pair of elderly women materialized beside us. Wearing homespun robes and chunky turquoise necklaces, they’d been stooped amid the crop, weeding by hand. Scrambling over a stone wall, the pair showered our party with greetings.
“Jullay, jullay, jullay, jullay!”
Jullay is the luminous greeting of the Zanskari people, meaning by turn hello, goodbye, good morning, good night, please, thank you or whatever else is needed. Similar to the manner in which Nepalis employ namaste, it is a salutation that defies being said without a grin.
“Jullay, jullay,” we echoed back.
The women were enthralled by our boys and reached out to brush soft cheeks with crooked fingers while peppering Sonam with questions. At the mention of Karsha Gompa, the women beamed and touched their hands in prayer. “Good, good, good, good.”
Next they turned their attention to Christine.
“I’m so embarrassed,” Christine moaned as they yanked on her braids. “My hair is a mess.”
Indeed, wild strands escaping from her braids left her looking like a static electricity experiment, but the elders were far more interested in the elastic bands holding her pigtails. By chance, Christine had a spare pair in her pocket, which she handed to the women. Then we all stood together, beaming at one another, unable to share a word.
We could have lingered for hours, but Sonam wanted to establish camp, so we departed, chased down the trail by a cascade of “Jullay, jullay, jullay, jullay!”
Flocks of dark-eyed children tailed us, their cheeks darkened and cracked by sun. Tiny laminated photographs of the Dalai Lama hung from red strings around their necks. The youngsters crowded around as we pitched our tents in a nearby meadow, but when our boys held aloft biscuits and a thermos of milky tea in offering, they melted away into the barley.
* * *
With every passing day, more and more quiet hamlets appeared, where tendrils of smoke spiralled from scattered homesteads, and irrigation canals, crafted by hand and running arrow-straight across slopes above, delivered precious meltwater from distant glaciers. Only the occasional shouts of children, or groans of livestock, broke the tranquility.
Late on the eighth day the valley began to narrow, and we arrived at the mouth of a deep gorge, where the path had been carved into precipitous cliffs. Sonam pressed on without a pause, dragging Bodi behind him atop the white mare, but I didn’t like the look of what was to come.
“Stop!” I shouted. Rushing to catch up, I asked Bodi to dismount, but he was hysterical at the intrusion.
“Why? Why do I have to get down, Dad? Tell me why!”
The chance of a hoof slipping might have been slim, but the result would have been catastrophic. So instead we all inched along the trail together, Bodi grasping my hand, Taj in Christine’s.
In places, cantilevered logs and hand-fitted stones formed airy catwalks. Elsewhere, rock slides had obliterated the path, and we followed Sonam carefully across these loose slopes, placing our boots softly in his prints. Pebbles whistled by from above, disappearing into the chasm with a yawning silence, possibly landing in the silty Kargiak River somewhere far below.
When a train of pack horses appeared on the ledge ahead, we pressed our backs against the rock wall and sucked in our breath.
“Don’t worry,” Sonam yelled back. “You will be safe.”
And indeed, the sure-footed animals marched straight past, swaying loads never grazing us, their hooves balanced on the very edge of oblivion.
That night we camped at the outwash of a gulch. A dusting of icy stars beckoned from above, and the silence reminded me of a desert, or the high Arctic when the winds abate. It seemed even the birds and locusts had abandoned this land.
* * *
Two days later, Christine and I were reading bedtime stories to the boys when Sonam appeared at the tent door with unexpected news: tomorrow would be our last day on the trail.
Karsha Gompa still lay four days of walking away, but a footbridge had recently been constructed downstream, leading to a new jeep track on the far side. While Christine and I would have happily trekked the entire way to the monastery, to Sonam, the idea of walking when a road was available seemed ridiculous.
So the next morning he set off before sunrise to seek drivers. After a lazy breakfast, we followed, taking our time, savouring the final moments of our trek, lingering on riverside beaches while our boys wrote their names in the sand.
We crossed the swaying footbridge shortly after lunch, and on the far side, scrambled up loose slopes to find Sonam waiting alongside a convoy of jeeps. After unloading their animals, the Pony Men prepared to leave. They would follow the same path back to their homes in Manali. When I handed the men a modest tip, eighteen-year-old Ramesh Singh held the bills to his heart and Tsewang Yetok flashed his golden tooth.
Then our family crammed into a dented jeep and bounced away.
* * *
After an hour, the canyon walls parted like curtains, and the central plains of Zanskar spread before us, an extraordinary expanse hidden amongst the world’s highest peaks. These rocky flats—surrounding the confluence of the Tsarap and Stod Rivers—were dotted with villages, fields of barley and swaying poplar, but my eyes sought Karsha Gompa.
And there it was, in the distance! A tangle of whitewashed temples and dormitories clinging to cliffs the color of rusting iron. After months of gazing at Internet photographs, I recognized the monastery instantly.
“Look, look,” I shouted, pointing through the windshield.
Sitting in the front seat, Christine shook her head in silence. When she turned, tears streaked her dusty cheeks. Beside me, Bodi and Taj were busily dividing the crumbs of a biscuit package, and didn’t even glance up.
* * *
We stayed that night in a half-finished concrete guest house on the outskirts of Padum, Zanskar’s administrative center. I slept fitfully, as excited as a child on Christmas Eve.
Wes and the crew departed at dawn to scout the monastery. I desperately wanted to accompany them, for I was nervous about first impressions. During the trek, the crew occasionally ran roughshod over locals, directing them to “stand here” and “say this.” But Wes bristled at the suggestion his team might be disrespectful. So I acquiesced. What else could I do? As I watched jeeps carrying the camera team bounce away, I wondered what reception they might rec
eive.
Sonam repeatedly assured me Lama Wangyal was anticipating our family’s arrival, but something in the way he averted his eyes felt unsettling, and recently I’d begun to wonder if Lama Wangyal actually knew we were coming at all.
I. Border Roads Organisation is a goliath Indian military contractor, tasked with blasting a route through these peaks.
II. La means “high mountain pass” in Tibetan, so to say “Shingo La pass” is redundant, but I have included it here, and elsewhere in the text, for clarity.
III. For centuries, butter traders, monks and lay people wishing to access the amenities of Leh tiptoed over the frozen rapids of the Chadar during the depths of winter, but it was a perilous journey.
IV. Doksa translates literally to “nomad land” from the Tibetan drokpa (nomad) and sa (land).
V. Used to protect buildings across the Himalaya, whitewash is created by baking limestone that villagers mine from surrounding peaks. When mixed with water, the resulting slurry cures to calcite and forms a thick, weather-resistant coating.
5 ONCE IN A FULL MOON
Our jeep bounced along mud lanes lined with mud-brick homes and shaded by poplar, finally pulling to a stop in Karsha’s village square, beside a gin-clear creek. Through gaps in foliage, I peered up toward the wondrous, otherworldly tangle of whitewashed buildings plastered to steep cliffs above. Our boys gazed up too, uncharacteristically silent.
It was only ten o’clock, but already the high-altitude sun burnt like an ember on my neck as I dragged duffels from the jeep. Nearby, a plump, ruddy-cheeked man sold tomatoes and dried apricots from the trunk of a dented Fiat. Two elderly women in robes sat motionless in the shade of a prayer wheel. Beyond, a dirt path led upward.