Day 8: Leh - Lamayuru

Sometimes decision-making is so difficult. The night before I'd spent 1.5 hrs on my email and there were so many pending things to do. As I shopped around in the Tibetan market for Suz, a hand tapped my shoulder - it was Abhi with Joe again. They had decided not to go to Pongsong Tso (a dramatic lake that runs mostly into China) and they decided to head back to Delhi that day via the Leh-Manali route. It was very tempting to just go with them. The previous day I'd almost forgotten what it was to ride alone - it's funny, you ride with such ease when you ride with others because you always tend to feel, hey someone's around. It was also fun to be around them. More than anything I had a strong urge to just get back to work - I was missing my work terribly and just wanted to be back in my work environment and get back to my activities - after all I'd already met my goal of Khardung La. They told me, you decide and let us know - we'll be around here Fort road for another 40 min.

Hmm...running through these thoughts I wandered around a t-shirt shop and then a German bakery (there are many in Leh). I got myself a chocolate croissant, sat on the streets and ate and wondered what to do. Then I asked myself a single question - which is the more difficult option? The answer was easy - it was Kargil-Srinagar-Delhi because it presented the unknowns again. I finished up my croissant, started the Bull, went to the gas station and headed in the direction of Kargil without thinking twice.

Just outside Leh, I met a BRO worker Mr. Rao from Kerala - who asked me what "the average" of the Bullet was - around 30 I said and he asked me, "Tell me, is there any profit with that?" It irritated me but I smiled and responded, "It's all loss - everything is a loss." He walked away.

That evening I reached the Lamayuru monastery and this was yet another place that touched me deeply and the images keep coming back. I stayed in a guesthouse called Thangolim or something like that right on the highway - pretty pricey for the location. Renzig who ran the guesthouse stayed with his wife and kid. He seemed to have two other children who were away. He used to work in a government office but later started the guesthouse - that night they made an awesome tasting Thukpa - tasted more like vegetable stew with flat noodles - they seemed pretty well-off and satisfied to me. Anyways, I trekked up to the 10th century monastery - the gompa is the oldest known gompa in Ladakh. I'd learnt that the prayer happened around 5PM and I wanted to definitely make it to the top by then. But when I reached the gompa I saw 10 year old monks playing on a make-shift slide and see-sawing on a wooden pole. One of the kids was lighting lamps while listening to what seemed local-pop music on his radio. They opened the inside of the monastery for me. One 14 year-old who seemed to know the ways of the world better - dominated on the other younger monks and instructed me to stand here, stand there and he'd take my pics - I obeyed - amused. Inside Ladakh's oldest monastery I saw religious scriptures and leaf pamphlets lying around. I touched them and couldn't believe I was holding in my hand something that was easily a thousand years old and I was holding it so easily. It was odd.

I trekked back to the guest house and along the way I met three kids (one of them was called Something Namgyal). They couldn't speak Hindi but we tried to chat. They explained to me that they studied in the local government school - some 10 kids went to the school (could be wrong info). Two of the kids studied in 6th grade and they struggled to name the subjects - Social Studies, Maths, Science, Buddhi, Ladakhi, Urdu, English...so we played a game in maths and science - of 7x table, 5x table and where the earth was, where the moon was and so on. The kids were very sharp - you could tell but what they knew for a 6th grader was dramatically poor. I kept thinking - what choice do they have? Their lives are spent in trekking up to the monastery, fetching water, working with their families, helping with agriculture, going to school when time allows, playing and bathing whenever possible. Somewhere at the back of our minds we keep thinking that if we work hard, study hard, we'll make it, we'll be successful and we'll have the 'good' life. But is this true? So much of those children's lives are dependent completely on where they were born and that's it.

During dinner I met a friendly French couple and a reticent Belgian couple that trekked all the way from Leh. I saw the Belgians the next day again Kargil asking for directions - their faces red with the Ladakhi sun.