Chadar Day 1: Hello Zanskar!

It's Day 2 morning. I'm sitting next to the kitchen tent. The Zanksar river is slowly drifting in front of me. Himalayas encompassing all of us - all of everything. We are at a camp site called Lower Shingri/ Deepyokma? The porters are behind me - there are three fire spots to keep everyone warm. They slept outside. 23 porters for the 9 of us - what privilege?!

Yesterday, we trekked for about three hours. We were dropped off at the sorta end of the road. Then we trekked down to the frozen Zanskar river. It was pretty much a straight forward hike. We saw fresh foot prints of a snow leopard and that got everyone really excited.



Out here, everything distills down to the basics - including happiness. Taking a dump (any kinda dump) and just emptying bowels is a big deal. Everything tastes better - the tea, the noodles, the thukpa. When your hands and toes finally warm up, you feel really, really happy.

My tent mates and the rest of the gang are a lot of fun. Why isn't the city the same? The simplest of the silliest things make us laugh our heads off. The fact that everyone's going through this cold, cold weather, I guess creates a common pain-bond - if you will. Divya - for example - is the Mammut (derived from Mamut, an outdoor stuff brand). So Mammut is a huge creature that talks a lot, has a lot of hair instead of wool and has really white teeth. Oh what fun!

There is enough time to do everything at a pace that agrees with Nature and it feels correct. Why isn't it the same in the city? Ang Dui just walked by and asked me what I was doing. He told me everyone calls him "Senapati" pyar se.

Coming back to stuff here - on the way here, somewhere - there was an isolated house. Two actually. I asked Milan, "Why do they stay here? What makes them stay here?" Milan responded well, "Well, they would say - why not?"

When you look up at the sky - the expanse of the universe - the Ladakhi sky - Oh God that was something. I kept looking and looking trying to find meaning in the nothingness. I saw one constellation after another - looks so brilliant from down here. Bhavna helped me spot Mars and Venus. I swirl my head a 360 degrees and I see the edges of the HImalayas all around this space and then I see the huge, huge, ever expanding universe on top of me. Beautiful. Milan described it as a black chart sprinkled with random white paint - true - a million, billion dots - shining, twinkling brilliantly everywhere.

I slept so-so last night - quite disturbed. It was also very cold. Wonder how many hours I slept. Anyway, who cares. We are doing 6-7 hours of hiking today. Alright, everyone's here for breakfast - am off.