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| 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.
