Day 1: Leh

Shanti Stupa

The plan for today was to roam around the city Leh. The first in our itinerary was the Leh Palace. Overlooking the town of Leh, the Leh Palace was built similar to the Potala palace in Lahsa, but in a smaller scale. It is 8 stories in high, though the royal family used only the top floor for living. The rest I think is for storage and other purposes.

Am and me walked through the narrow alleys of the old town of Leh in the direction of the palace. The route was easy to find, as all you have to do is to walk in the direction of the palace. The old town seem to have frozen for decades with mud walled houses and pebble streets and the street dogs (many of them) occupying each and every corner of the alley. The climb to the entrance of the palace was not so steep. Still, I realised the high altitude effects, with breathing heavily in a few hundred meters. Just after one day in Leh, my body is definitely not acclimatised. Not surprising as the minimum number of days required, as per experts, is 3 days.

The palace is undergoing a lot of restoration works. Inside the palace is there is a photographic exhibition of the photos taken from the end of 1800’s. One could see that the region  hasn’t changed much in the last century. Other than that there is not much to see in the palace as most of the mud walled rooms were empty. But the view of the town from the top of the Palace was magnificent.

From the Leh Palace we climbed to the Namgyal peak. Slightly steeper than the climb to the palace, it was a good test to see if the body is ready for the trekking days ahead. As before, I felt tired and breathed frequently as before. I made a couple of stops in between. The peak includes the fort of Tashi Namgyal which overlooks the Leh palace and the temple of Maitreya (future Buddha). It is also the place where the king offered the bodies of the defeated Mongols to the deities. The peak offered a breath taking view of the city of Leh.

From the Namgyal peak we climbed down to the city to have our lunch. Our next plan was to go to the office of the Womens Alliance of Ladakh. According to my guide book there is a small film show about the culture of Ladakh at 3 pm every day. When we reached there we realised that the film is no longer shown there. We didn’t know about it before as the travel guide is already 8 years old. At 3 pm they had a meeting of the Womens Alliance planned. So they invited us to take part in the meeting in order to get an overall view of the work done by the group. It was quite interesting. About 20 Ladakhi women were there in the meeting. They explained about the origin of the alliance and the work done by the group. The group goes from villages to villages educating the villagers about the importance of sustaining the Ladakhi culture, being self sufficient, prevention against diseases like TB, HIV etc, efforts to ban plastics in the region etc. It was quite an impressive effort with the alliance started with 70 people and having grown to about 5000 people.

Our initial plan was to go to the Shanti Stupa in the evening and watch the sunset from there. We cancelled the plan as the day was mostly cloudy. While we were coming back from the Womens Alliance the weather became partly sunny again. So we decided to carry on with the plan to go to the Shanti Stupa. With 554 steps to climb, it was not an easy task. In fact climbing the steps in the thin air was really difficult. Once on the top I was quite glad that I decided to visit the Stupa. It had a peaceful atmosphere with the Tibetan chants through loudspeaker in the background and also offered spectacular views of Leh from above. After taking a tea from the café at the Stupa we climbed down to the town for the dinner. Afterwards we went back to the homestay to end a somewhat tiring day.