It’s freezing up here. Not that I didn’t expect it. It’s January and it’s Leh, a town 3484 meters – 11,430 feet – up in the Himalayas. Cold is what you get here. But I expected I would find some respite from it in my hotel.
Not so. I don’t mean to be rude about it. My hotel is proud to offer heating in the winter. Not every hotel in Leh can do that.
But this is one of those lost-in-translation sort of things. “Heat” to me is the ability to wander to the thermostat – in a T-shirt and shorts, if I feel like it – and crank up the temp to 74° F on a really chilly day. That is heat.
In my room here at the Lasermo Hotel, I have a space heater. And I’m thankful for it. It’s the only thing that prevents my room from being as cold as it is outside, where temperatures sink to 5° F at night.
But this is not a room where I can push up the heat and lounge around on top of the covers. In fact, it isn’t even a room where I can comfortably disrobe. Ever.
The warmest the room has gotten is 57° F. For those of you who are Celsiusly inclined, that’s roughly 14° C. Chilly, by anyone’s standards. And the bathroom? Unheated, except for the tiny bit of warm air that sneaks in from the bedroom. That means it never makes it much above 43° F (6° C).
As a result, the bathroom is not a place where I linger a lot. It’s not like I have a lot to do in there, anyway. You see, there’s no running water. So warm showers are out. Every morning, though, a guy who looks curiously like Keanu Reeves delivers a bucket of warm water to my room. And you know what? I’m really delighted when it arrives.
I wash with it. And I shave.
But as soon as Keanu leaves, the first thing I do is sink my hands as deep as possible into the bucket. Warmth. Bliss.
For other water-related needs – you know, flushing and things of that sort - there is an empty bucket and a 50-gallon barrel of chilly water. Cold water, actually. Very cold water.
Meals are generally included at the Lasermo. As soon as you arrive in the dining room, Keanu – he works there, too – moves a space heater into place about three feet from where you’re sitting and then fires it up.
Once again, it’s not the sort of enveloping heat that I’m accustomed to at home. This is more like sitting too close to a fireplace, except that there’s no crackle and no lovely wood scent. Also, I never remove my puffy down parka. It simply doesn’t get warm enough. But once again, Keanu has made me a very happy guy.
Ice Hockey
Leh is famed for its monasteries. Since the takeover of Tibet by the Chinese, in fact, it has become the center of Tibetan Buddhism. There are scores of monasteries in the region. And while I did visit several of them, the main reason I went to Leh was for the ice hockey.
Two or three years ago, I heard a story on the Canadian Broadcasting Company about a group of Canadian diplomats who had traveled from New Delhi to participate in an ice hockey tournament in Leh. The diplomats won their game, but were overwhelmed by the lack of oxygen.
I was fascinated. I had never thought of India as a hotbed of ice hockey. And it turns out I was right – it’s not.. But up here in the Ladekh Valley, where Leh is located, they’ve played it for more than 30 years.
My timing was perfect. I arrived in Leh the weekend of the Indian National Ice Hockey Championship. I missed the qualifying matches – I was visiting monasteries – but the two games I did see were inspiring.
It wasn’t because the hockey was so fabulous, though the men’s final was mighty entertaining. No, I was inspired because everything about it was so damned spirited; the players, the crowd, even the halftime show performed by a small army of local figure skaters .
Hockey in the Ladekh Valley lacks the glitz of North American hockey.
There’s no buzzer, just something that sounds like an old-fashioned alarm clock. No Zamboni, either. Instead, they’ve got a few guys with brooms and shovels. And the day of the final, they were very busy guys. It was snowing. Heavily. So much so that you couldn’t see the blue lines. Or any lines, for that matter. There are no sideboards in Ladekhi hockey, either. Just little bumpers at ice level to keep the puck from sliding off the ice.
The women’s championship was significant because it was the country’s first. But the hockey itself? Rudimentary. The women have a long way to go.
The men’s game, on the other hand, was very solid. They know how to skate, they know how to pass, they understand strategy and they have some fine goalkeeping, especially the Army red team.
Tashi Namgail is a short and stocky guy. If you don’t know hockey well, it seems that those would be important qualities for a goalie. You know – if you’re big, you can block the net.
But the fact is, agility and flexibility are even more important. You’ve got to be able to move with incredible speed to reach the puck when someone shoots it your way.
Tashi has all of that.
As the temperature dropped – it was 20° F at game time – and the snow got deeper, he got tougher. It was really a dazzling show he put on, lurching and pouncing, spinning and leaping. His net was impenetrable.
By the time the game was over, it was Army Red 2 and J&K Blue (Jammu & Kashmir, Leh’s state) 0.
One more hockey note. The crowd.
The seating is pretty modest. The fact that there is any seating at all is somewhat surprising. The ice rink is actually the town reservoir, a place that doesn’t normally call for much in the way of seating. The army donated some risers for the occasion.
The lucky people – the connected people – sat in the risers. But most of the crowd of 3,000 or so stood three or four deep around the edges of the reservoir retaining wall. The agile ones climbed trees and perched on limbs.
I’d forgotten what real hockey was like. No luxury boxes. No beer vendors. These people came to see hockey. Not pre-game hoopla. Not fights. In fact, they’d be appalled if a brawl broke out. They were here for the love of the game. It was exhilarating to be part of it.
I don’t know if I'll ever go back to the NHL.
Monasteries
I must be the only Baby Boomer who didn’t dabble with Buddhism or Tibetan culture when I was in college. So when I set off with Paldan and Lobzang (guide and driver, respectively) for our first monastery visits, I didn’t know what to expect.
I mean, I’d seen plenty of pictures of them - great hulking buildings clinging to mountainsides. But inside? I had no idea if we were visiting places where there were hundreds of monks wandering around or if they were more like museums. Or . . . well, I just didn’t know.
I visited three monasteries in and around Leh. There were similarities; weather-beaten buildings, lots of prayer wheels, colorful, but faded interiors, towering buddhas. What was most striking, though, was how few monks were on hand. One, maybe two at each place. It was eerie, as if we were wandering around enormous ghost towns.
My favorite was at Lamayuru. It’s not that I came to understand Buddhism any better while I was there. But Lamayuru is much farther away – 126 km (78 mi.) - than the others. It took us nearly three hours to get there. But distance was a good thing in this case. At some monasteries, there was a sense that we were just the umpteenth load of wealthy foreigners to pull up that day. Not at Lamayuru. Here, the interest seemed mutual.
Also, the longer driving time meant that we had to mix it up with the mountains in a very different way. In Leh, you’re at the bottom of a valley, forever looking up at the peaks.
To get to Lamayuru, you’ve really got to negotiate some of those mountains. For the first 70 km or so, the road is pretty decent. Two lanes, no potholes. The Ladakh Valley is a major military site – the Chinese and Pakistani borders are not far away, remember – so its roads are babied.
Then we got off the main highway. Two lanes became one-and-a-half. Sealed pavement became gravel. And instead of being down in a valley, we were driving on a teeny road that had been carved out of the mountainside.
Precarious, exhilarating and more than a little frightening.
Normally, when you arrive at a monastery, you are met by one of the monks. Here, though, we were met by a novice. A tiny novice with bright red cheeks named Tundup Yeshe. Tundup doesn't remember how old he is. His best friend is 11, and he thinks they may be about the same age.
I must admit that there is part of me that thinks an 11-year-old novice is incredibly odd. But Tundup quickly proved that he’s as much a kid as he is a religious figure. He just couldn’t get enough of my digital camera. He had to see the photos as soon as I took them. And he was totally rapt when Paldan, a very well-studied Buddhist, stepped into the role of teacher.
I worry about all these monasteries, though. They are so underpopulated and the buildings are in such tough shape. It's hard to imagine how they'll survive. Perhaps they'll end up just one more impressive set of ruins on the sides of these equally impressive mountains.
Butter Tea
Paldan mentioned butter tea a couple of days ago.
Basically, it’s a concoction of tea and butter. Salted butter.
“People from the outside usually don’t like it,” he said. “They think it tastes like soup.”
But good guide that he is, Paldan made sure I had a chance to try it. My last day in Leh, he and his mother whipped up a batch that he brought to town in a thermos.
Paldan poured me a cup and I sipped.
He was right. It’s salty. And a little fatty. To my taste buds, it had nothing at all to do with tea.
Paldan didn’t say a word, but he knew.
I was polite and had two cups. He was polite and just smiled.
What a good guide he is; informed, intelligent, enthusiastic, encouraging. And best of all, he let me indulge myself and explore. Even when I insisted on having butter tea.
Space Heaters
Tundup Dorjey, the man who arranged my outings in Leh, recommended that I turn off the space heater at night. He didn’t say why, but there was no way I was going to shut off my only source of heat at night.
As I lay in bed that first night, though, I started thinking of all those stories you hear every winter about people who suffocate because of malfunctioning space heaters in poorly ventilated rooms.
I turned on the light. Well, I tried to turn on the light. This is when I discovered that the Lasermo shuts off the electricity at 10:30 every night. So I got out my tiny flashlight. It’s one of those little thumbnail-sized things that you squeeze. But it was enough for me to scout around the room to see how well ventilated it was.
There was a little grate in the ceiling that led to somewhere. And every time the wind gusted, the curtains blew a bit. So I figured that if the cold air could come in, then it seemed logical that anything bad from the space heater could get out, right?
But I smelled something. I didn’t think it was propane. Wait, does propane smell or not? Don’t they add something to propane so you can smell it when it’s leaking? I know they do with the gas you use at home. So . . . well, I couldn’t figure out what the hell to do. I was up and down for hours.
At a certain point it dawned on me that the smell was diesel fumes. Much of the city had lost power earlier in the evening. Turns out it’s a regular occurrence. So regular that most businesses have generators. Diesel generators. That’s what I had been smelling.
Posted by David Lyman on February 22, 2005 at 09:26 AM | Permalink
Your account of Leh gives us a sense of how large we live in the West especially our profligate use of energy.
What a wonderful place. Namaste.
Posted by: artie | Mar 2, 2005 2:01:03 PM
