See For Yourself

(Written about a week and half ago.)


Alchi, Ladakh














Link to current photos.

Tomorrow we leave for Kashmir. As of today, we've spent three weeks in Ladakh, longer than any single place since we pulled out of our driveway back in December. In the time we've been here , the potato fields that were green when we arrived, have started to flower en masse. This seasonal tick of nature's second hand was the kind of chronology I sought as I sat at my desk at work. In San Francisco, seasons are so subtle that, if you spend most of your time indoors as I did, you can look out a window and guess blindly where you're at on the calendar. This can be shockingly disorienting for anyone with a sense of his mortality. I play a game now where I try to think back over the preceding months and remember where we were on the nights of the full moon. Good memories are made like this.

Ladakh, sitting on the militarily sensitive border with Pakistan, has been closed to all but Ladakhis and the Indian army prior to 1974, the year it was opened to tourism. Politics played as big a part as economics in the change of policy change. Some observers speculate that Ladakh was opened to tourists primarily as a measure to cement the validity of India's claim on a land that, culturally, is very different from the nation that exists in the huge land south of the Himalayas. Ladakh is one of those red-headed stepchildren in the hastily cobbled geography left by the retreating colonialists. For this reason and its mountainous isolation, Ladakh was unique in that it remained relatively untouched by Western industrialization or materialism.

This uniqueness raised some questions which fed into a continuation of a discussion with Shawn from the prior post. He asked if it is ethical to "travel in an area known to be teetering on the edge of famine?" I don't think his description was meant to apply to Ladakh (which currently suffers no shortage of food) but to other places he referred to in the developing world. It's of no matter, though. After I reflected on his question it became clear to me that a person of the US, if he or she is able, has an obligation to travel to countries in the developing world. I think each and every person should get the hell out and see what life is like in places where people live with their hands never far from their proverbial mouths. A person can learn some things about compassion, humility and gratitude that can't help but make them better.

The example of Ladakh is useful because here, you can still see something that is simply too complex to grasp in the Western world: a complete model of the natural resource systems that are needed for humans to live. I say still because even Ladakh is changing quickly and this insight will get more difficult to appreciate if development continues as it currently is.

Before 1974 and for centuries prior, Ladakh was a fully self-sufficient area. People sent trading caravans over the high mountain passes to other areas for a few things like salt but, for the large extent of what they needed to live, Ladakhis produced it themselves. They made their own clothes with wool from their sheep and natural dyes from plants and minerals. They saved some seeds from each year's harvest for future planting. They made houses out of poplar logs, adobe bricks and mud stucco. They cooked over dung fires. They fertilized their fields with human feces collected in composting toilets that was mixed with ash and wood shavings. It was a society with, literally, no waste.

With the introduction of the military and later, tourists; packaged goods, electricity, diesel jeeps and trucks, manufactured clothes, commercially grown food and other products from an industrializing India; the closed-loop system that sustained the Ladakhis throughout their history started to unravel. The results range from the obvious to those that are indiscernible to outsiders but all, to some degree, are destructive. If you walk anywhere in Ladakh, you will see the discarded plastic packaging of snack foods candy, laundry soap and on, and on. The Ladakhis never had a need for sanitation trucks and landfills and the introduction of these goods comes with no direction as to the proper disposal of their wrappings after the consumption of the contents. Ladakh, a network of fragile, high-mountain, desert ecosystems nutured with centuries of irrigation, terracing and careful planting, is becoming a plastic-filled mess.





Roadside Waste Disposal












My point is not to blame the Ladakhis for being litterbugs. I could also talk about the use of pesticides that are banned in the Western world or genetically engineered seeds (those are here as well). I could talk about how large trucks carry subsidized (and non-native) food into Ladakh from the southern plains rendering local agriculture economically unsustainable and the valley air smoggy. The point is, that for most of their history, Ladakhis could see the end result of virtually all of their decisions and actions. They knew exactly where their food came from. They knew if they needed to build another house where all of the materials could be obtained and who would help them build it. For over a thousand years they lived in a large collection of green, reasonably prosperous valleys. Now, after a few decades that is rapidly changing.

The young people have little interest in working the farmlands. They are drawn to the 'glamour' and wages of the tourist trade. From what I could see, a good portion of that precious and very limited farmland is being given over to the building of an astonishing number of new guesthouses for tourists. I wonder, if the need should ever arise, they'll pull down the houses to grow food. I've seen the same changes around any number of cities in the Midwest or the central valley of California. Useful farmland, for all practical purposes, permanently entombed under huge subdivisions courtesy of shortsighted planning commissions and Pulte or KB Homes.

A place like Ladakh is a microcosm of our natural world and what makes it a destination worth visiting is that, here, you can see the results of what happens when a person makes a decision about consuming something. If you use certain things, there will be costs and waste. If you want to eat, you wait for the seasons to work their magic on the fields and, if you're lucky, you grow what you need. Most importantly, you can see and have an innate understanding that those resources that sustain life are not infinite.

At home, in the States, you don't see the costs. The plastic we use goes into a landfill but it doesn't go away. You use that same plastic or pump some gas into your car but, unless you're getting uncensored news from inside Iraq, you don't see the human suffering caused by securing the petroleum needed to make the plastic or gas. While that nice farmland outside Ann Arbor is being paved for another subdivision of McMansions, in places like Nevada or Idaho, you have massive industrial farms that exist because land there is cheap and agribusiness uses subsidized water to farm in earth that is nothing more than a sponge for natural gas derived fertilizers and oil derived pesticides.

But we've always been able to look away from those "costs" is we dont' like what we see. The garbage goes into the ground. If you don't like living in Saginaw or Stockton, you move. Costco and Sam's Club don't run out of lettuce or Tide or strawberries so why worry about how they get to the store. Detroit keeps making huge gas hogs so they must know something about the oil supplies, right? Politicians, news commentators and even some 'scientists' tell us we have nothing to worry about with respect to the environment or oil supplies. What to believe....?

I keep hearing that technology will keep coming up with solutions to resource issues. Well, here I am in Ladakh, an area in the nascent stage of being "developed" in the Western style and the resultant problems of material consumption look just as bad if not worse than every other place that had to go through "development". It's two thousand and freaking six and we still can't even deal with potato chip bags and clean water! If ever there were a time to bring some of that technology to bear, it is now and here. Yet, apart from a few, small, underfunded, non-governmental organizations working to stem the tide of consumption and waste, it's business as usual in Ladakh...which, I can assure you, will lose what makes it unique if this continues. And, if a small place like Ladakh with a long history of sustainable self-management can't continue to live within its resources, how in the hell will the rest of the world?

Helena Norberg-Hodge, a linguist who has lived and studied among the Ladakhis since the area opened, says that "In the West, our arms have grown so long that we don't know what our hands are doing." Visiting a place like Ladakh or Sudan or Guatemala or most any other "undeveloped" country helps to remind and illustrate for us that, for every comfort, there are costs. The question is, how long can those costs be sustained? "...it has been calculated that if all the worldÂ’s people had an American standard of living, two more planets the size of Earth would be needed to support them." That's tough to get your head around but, if you spend some time in a place like Ladakh, you can extend the logic out from what you see....and maybe it makes sense.

None of the above is new info to a lot of people. I am one more person sounding the "sky is falling" alarm. I would love to go to my grave a "Chicken Little". I will not bet that direction, though. Perhaps one more voice bouncing around the echo chamber of human consciousness will help more people to see, despite what Dick Cheney or Bill O'Reilly say, we are headed for trouble and we'd better look for ways to change. Places like Ladakh have shown us some of those ways and if you have any interest, you can come see for yourself.

Is This Kind of Travel Worth It?

Leh, Ladakh

Current Photos of North India

The previous post begs a question. If it's so 'grueling' out here in India (or anywhere in the developing world) is the adventure worth the discomfort? Are the deprivations you might suffer here, but can say goodbye to when you return home, akin to going on a fast from eating just so you enjoy food that much more because you're starving? Not at all. Oddly enough, pain is supposed to be one of the most difficult memories to conjure in our heads. Even a few days after a bus ride like the one I mention below you can laugh easily at the distress.

No, being out here you have a good chance of living a day worth telling a story about. At home, while working (unless you're in an exceptional situation), one day, week or month can bleed into another with no more to talk about than having seen an good movie or the final, climactic episode of American Idol. (No disrepect, those kinds of things are only so inspiring to me.) Since we've been on the road, at least once a week or so we have some kind of epic day. We see or experience something I never would have expected to see.

In Shimla, a city I mentioned in an earlier post, we were sitting under a little gazebo overlooking the main part of town. A cloudburst turned into a hailstorm. This grew into the most serious hailstorm I'd ever seen. What made it extra special was the fact that all the roofs in Shimla are made of corrugated metal and the buildings are very tightly packed. The sound of that hail grew to such a crescendo that I could not hear myself yell at the top of my lungs. It actually scared the heck out of me but, as soon as it stopped, everyone under the gazebo laughed and cheered and high-fived because they knew they just saw and heard something rare and powerful.

In Rishikesh we had to trek across a bridge four times a day going to and from yoga. Every time we crossed, we had to contend with religious pilgrims, holy men, scooters, cows and aggressive monkeys who'd try to steal any bag that looked like it might have food in it. This, while traversing an eighty-year old cable suspension "foot bridge" a hundred feet above the River Ganges. That commute bore little resemblance to my daily walk from the parking garage to my office in SF.

Wallace Stegner, a writer who emigrated from the pastoral East of the US to the wide-open and vast West, said that a key difference between the two regions was the scale. A person raised in the East had no vocabulary or relative comparisons for the spaces and mountains, colors and textures of the West. To understand its majesty he once said, "You have to get over the color green. You have to quit associating beauty with gardens or lawns; you have to get used to an inhuman scale; you have to understand geological time."

In many ways, for a person raised in a small Mid-western farm town then anchored in the beautiful but admittedly provincial boutique city that is San Francisco, inching my way through the Hindu heartlands or the Buddhist valleys of the Himalayas presents a similar disjunction in my ability to frame my experiences.

When you walk a longer distance, as Tami and I did a few days ago between the small villages of Hunder and Disket in the Nubra Valley, you know how miles feel. You can walk for hours and you don't pass a mountain by, you just change your perspective on it. We did the outbound trip in a bus, but only when we walked did I realize that you could actually see each town's monastery from the other's. On the bus, things happen and scenery passes too quickly to make such connections. This is part of what I think Stegner meant by scale differences. My experience has little to compare to the vast silence of a huge, still Himalayan valley. A thousand years ago and more, kingdoms , with their own complete histories, rooted themselves in these valleys. The remains and people are still here for anyone curious enough to see.


Disket Monastery From a Distance




Part of Disket Monastery and the Nubra Valley









My words, at best, communicate a few, token details about what it's like to travel in the developing world. All five senses are assaulted or triggered in new ways in a place like India. At the time I wrote this, we were resting in late afternoon heat on sand dunes surrounded by mountains whose peaks have held snow for all human memory. Until I traveled there, I may never have known that a place of that particular beauty and majesty existed.

A friend in San Francisco, Shawn, sent a note that got me thinking about the worth of this kind of travel. Shawn is one of the sharpest people I know and lives a very full life back home so, when he poses a question, I take it to heart. In a recent e-mail he wondered to us and to himself:

"Yes, I really do think about you every day...about what you’re doing, what it means to you, to the people you meet, to us spectators. I imagine it’s something how Burn Night [edit. at BurningMan] used to be, with everybody wondering What Does It All Mean (if anything). What I do know is this: I can’t end my life NOT having had an adventure like that. This damn western cocoon is a little too comfortable."

In many ways, his words summarize the main part of my motivation for taking this journey. There are plenty of people in the Western world working their careers, having families and following the path of life that's been laid out for a long, long time. Again, I mean no disrespect to those on that path. I wouldn't be here is someone didn't choose to have me as part of their family. (Thanks, mom!) But, because I've been lucky enough to travel before, I am acutely aware that this is a vast and hugely varied planet. To not explore some of it and try to connect with those who live differently than I seems like a crippling limitation of what it means to live.

We are incredibly lucky to have been born in the US. The opportunities we can pursue might as well be magic to a majority of people in this world. By coming to a place like this and keeping an open heart, that magic becomes palpable to me in a way that simply is not possible at home.

No question, being out here is worth it.

Less Angst, More Work....and Adventure

Leh, Ladakh

So, a friend sent a note saying he noticed less angst in my posts from India than those from Europe and the States. Well, that comes down to a couple simple things: 1) Cost and 2) Difficulty of Travel. As for the cost issue, Tami and I were spending somewhere around $110-$120 a day or so in Europe. You might think that's cheap, and, it is. You'd have a hard time getting by for less money for two people. You could, but you'd see no sights, drink no Rioja and self-cater every meal in your room. We actually did plenty of self-catering but that was more out of choice than necessity. As vegitarians, we are better able to make food we like than most restaurants.

No matter how cheaply we were getting by in Euroland, our savings still dropped precipitously. That's not the case here in India. Costs for the two of us per day are somewhere just under $25. We could easily scrimp down further but....that's not why we came. Too much scrimping = angst. Bad.

Difference #2 comes from the quality of the days you spend; not the overall quality but certain components. As we walked the streets of Madrid, Granada, Barcelona or Paris; the the other tourists out seeing the sights were almost exclusivly either retirees or student-aged. For all the fun we had there, touring Europe felt a little too safe and easy. It's never far from my thoughts that Tami and I are in our prime earning years. Being on the road for an extended period as we are comes with a steep opportunity cost. If we're going to forego gainful employment (and being with friends and family) we want some serious memories out of the deal.

Unless you have a host to show you life beneath the typical tourist existence, Europe can feel pre-packaged and infused with a sense of denouement. Everyone knows what you're supposed to see when you go to a European city. You visit the museums and cathedrals. You stroll the famous parks. You search out the best, fresh almond croissants or sample the tapas and wine. All that said, as excellent as the Euro-nooks and crannies we found were, we sought something more intense.

To get to where we are now, a person needs to be willing to sacrafice a fair amount of comfort. From San Francisco, to get to the Nubra Valley where we were a couple days ago, would take at least four days, and that's assuming no problems with connecting flights, jeep rides, etc. It wouldn't matter how much money you could throw at the problem. It would take that long.

If you came overland, as we did, it would take you over a week, best-case, easily two. Anyone willing to come this far must have a pretty compelling interest in the area and probably plans to stay for a while. It doesn't cost only time either. The final three full days through the mountains in a rickety bus take you over the three highest motorable passes in the world (and several lower ones). The highest, is over 18,000 feet. Altitude sickness is almost impossible for a human to avoid unless you live in mountains like this. The outsides of the buses under the windows all carry the scythe-shape splatters of peoples' nausea. It might not be a necessity but it helps a hell of a lot if you're fit. Everyone is sore and exhausted at the end of a trip like that. The payoff comes in the form of some superlative scenery. I've spent a lot of time in mountains and still rode in awe for hours as the peaks and glaciers moved past. (One caveat to the above: Leh has an airport with direct flights from New Delhi. In the past week the package tour people have arrived en masse. Leh and its immediate environs have been overrun.)

Another advantage of traveling here vs. the West is that you're not marketed to nearly as much. A great deal of what you see here comes as a surprise. You can see mountains or waterfalls or monasteries that are breathtaking but, because they are so far off the beaten track and so plentiful, they don't get much or any hype. You have a feeling of discovery and the farther you get off the main routes, the greater and more inspiring that sense.

All this is to say that, once you're in a place like this, you know you're nowhere near Kansas anymore.