The plan today is to go to Zanskar valley, if the roads are open i.e. If not go up to the point where the roads are open, about 30 km afar, and come back. Rambo would have been ashamed of his descendants though, both of us are not well, and we are in a worse disposition than yesterday. After a brief discussion, in which we involve our driver, who also doubled as our guide and mentor, we throw down our arms and agree to visit a doctor. It is a momentous decision for us; both of us at various times in our lives have been confronted with the issue of (false) pride or hubris. And we have mostly held our head very high, refusing worldly virtues like humility and understanding.
We go to the Leh market and the driver takes us to his favorite doctor. The whole Leh Diaspora is present there, and we represent the tourist demographic. We are the only representatives of our group. We sit in a Q for some time and then face the doctor. He is seen a lot of them like us before. He gives us some medicines and asks us to take a rest today. We ask him, can we be back on road tomorrow, expecting him to say a categorical No, he says why not. At that point, he had more jest about our lives than we do. We thank him and the driver then takes us to his favorite restaurant where we have our lunch. There are posters of Chinese atrocities in Lhasa and around Tibet there. It brings us back to the moment where I had planned this trip. There was this interview that Prannoy Roy doing with the Dalai Lama, on the backdrop of violent protests in Tibet, and I thought I should go to Dharamshala and see for myself everything myself, firsthand. I called up SS in Mumbai and told him the plan, and he said Why not.
And when we had exhausted all our plans to reach Dharamshala, direct flight from Delhi was 7k per head in those times, too much for us. The other options were flight up to Amritsar and then a cab or shatabdi up to Chandigarh and then a cab. It was getting complicated and expensive. Then SS just threw the idea of why not Leh and I asked him get me the flight fare and he got them for me. Delhi- Leh per head was around 2.5 k I think. I said freeze it. All of this was happening over yahoo chat.
We ordered a local delicacy, but in veg, and it killed the taste altogether, we then ordered some sane stuff like noodles and packed the local delicacy and handed it over to the folks back at the NGO. We took a long nap in the afternoon and generally killed our time by going to the workshop and checking out an electric motor used for grinding wheat, which had conked off.
We also met with everybody at the NGO and discussed how it is run. At the lowest rug, there are no salaries, salaries start only from the Project head level. For the guys at lower level, all their needs are taken care of, education for kids, boarding, entertainment etc. They showed us a few snaps of a vacation cum educational trip they had taken last year where all major NGO’s had gathered to exchange ideas. After the conference they had gone to visit the cities. They said cities are Huge. They love the cities; we love the villages they live in.
There is a lake, we wanted to visit the other day, Pangong Lake. But it requires a license by the army to go there, and 5 copies of it to be deposited on check posts. We contemplated for some time on whether we would be well tomorrow to go there, which I guess is 150 km away. What the heck the license was just 80 bucks we anyways took it. It was a typical sarkari office, and it took some time and no greasing to get the license. At this point we were not sure if we would go to pangong or zanskar so we took a license for both these places.
Tomorrow we will risk everything for a glimpse of the lake.
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