In the immortal words of Ferris Bueller, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”
I used this exhortation to begin my email that rallied potential fellow adventurers to join me on a trip which had always been on my personal “bucket list.” While the movie of that name with Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman was hardly an Oscar winner, the concept that we have to take advantage of the time we have left on this world has been dominating my thoughts as of late, and I suspected others were in the same predicament.
Ladakh and Zanskar, two small Buddhist kingdoms which are now part of northwestern India, were the goal of the adventure. My friends and I had all just turned or would shortly turn sixty, so the time to do a rigorous trek was now, not ten years from now. Additionally, with each passing day, traditional Ladakh gives ground to the inexorable advance and cacophony of modernity. To see it as the remote untouched Shangri-la of my dreams meant going soon.
Here is a small gallery of my images from our incredible journey.
Erected in 1970 to commemorate the visit of the 14th Dalai Lama to Thikse Gompa, this Buddha statue–the Maitreya Buddha–took four years to build and is two stories high.
When we awoke at our campsite near the village of Zangla, it was cold and drizzly. But before too long, a magnificent rainbow announced the arrival of perfect hiking weather.
The monks at Likir Gompa twist the robes they use to keep warm while meditating into distinctive cones when they are not using them.
This Bodhissatva is riding a deer, which reminds us that Buddha’s first sermon took place in a deer park.
A monk sets out candles in Likir Monastery.
As on many gompas, the roof of the Thongde gompa was topped with a trident on a pole with long tufts of thread blowing from it in the wind. Apparently the trident has a multitude of meanings for Tibetan Buddhist. I also noticed the trident was very similar to those I saw in Mongolia.
Although the town of Kargil is politically very much in India and geographically still in Ladakh, ethnically it’s in Muslim Baltistan.
A shopkeeper in the Muslim town of Kargil.
Some feel this Gelukpa sect gompa, Thikse Monastery, is the most beautiful in Ladakh.
Although founded in the 11th century, the present day buildings of Likir Monastery were built in the 19th after the original ones were destroyed by fire. Today it is home to about 120 monks and an additional 35 young students attend its school.
Rangdum is a Gelukpa (yellow hat) gompa. It has only 24 resident monks, but also houses a small school.
Trekking what the Zanskaris call the Jumlam. This literally means the middle way. It is not a Buddhist reference but rather an indication that we were taking the difficult but direct short-cut across the Zanskar Mountains rather than the easier but longer routes that go around the mountains either to the south or north.
This is the last of three crossings of the Khurna River along the Jumlum Trail. The adventurer in the middle, Peter Volin, lost a shoe in the process. One of the pony men, on watching the shoe sail away, turned and said sagely: ‘Pakistan.’ The shoe was now well on its way over across the border into Pakistan.
