Ladakh - The Landscape

As I looked through the plane window, I saw before me something I had never seen before. Every shade of brown, with bits of green and white, stretched out before me as far as the eye could see. It was as if someone had taken a piece of wrinkled cloth and spread it, without smoothening it out. I could almost imagine how centuries of earthquakes, volcanoes and plates shifting had formed this magnificent landscape.

Driving through the mountains and valleys, I stared at what I saw before me. It was beautiful. There wasn’t much there. In fact, there was nothing. Everywhere else we associate beauty with something natural or artificial or at least with living organisms (trees, birds, animals). But this was something rare. It was the beauty of nothing. Earth in its most raw form, shaped by the different forces of nature. Just rocks, dirt, gravel, sand. Nothing else. At one point, we got out of the car and looked all around us, mountains, everywhere. Not just mountains, but there was no horizon! Strangely enough, I didn’t feel small standing there, nor insignificant. It felt awesome, in the true sense of the word, the sense that isn’t used often nowadays. AWESOME. And soon, I was going to be a part of it. Soon, I was going to land on the highest civilian airport in the world, in Leh, Ladakh.

In certain areas of the mountains, we saw evidence of another element: Water. This evidence was most apparent climbing down a mountain. At the top there would be snow. And then as we entered small crevices in between two peaks, we would see a network of veins, spread across the skin of the mountains. Even the smallest of these would have bits of green lining it, moss or grass, the first signs of life. The major arteries of the area would have proper meadows, with goats grazing and yaks lounging in the sun.

Aside: An anomaly to my evolutionary view of climbing down a mountain is these gorgeous purple flowers. On the side of the mountain, surrounded by rocks, there are these bushes, each with bright purple flowers. My first question when I saw these: Where did you come from? Upon further inspection, there would be a SMALL water source nearby. True to my biologist roots, I marveled at the adaptations made by this plant:

Coming further down the mountain, near the Shyok river (in Nubra Valley or Valley of Flowers), we found fruit trees. Trees loaded with apricots and apples, easy to pick and eat. This was when we camped in a tent for a night. Living in the campsite, which had dining hall and a building for shower/bathrooms, I didn’t get a sense of encroaching on nature. It felt as if we were being allowed to live there by nature. In a sense, it was true. This was one of the few places nearby where human beings (particularly tourists) would be able to live – for at least couple months out of the year.

In fact, I got the same feeling after going to villages in the area (and now we’ve

reached the bottom of the valleys). There was never a sense of man conquering nature. Not even of man and nature living in harmony. But it was nature allowing man to access its most remote parts and make them habitable. Houses were built into the side of the mountains, wherever the ground was stable enough. Food was grown wherever the ground

was flat, irrespective of size or shape. And the roads were the best part. The roads were carved into the mountains, going for long periods of time in one direction, only to curve towards the opposite direction, as we slowly inched up the peaks. Nature made its decision loud and clear: I don’t care if the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. We go by my rules here.

Next up: Ladakh – The People