Entries Tagged 'Photo' ↓

When I drew the curtains off our ground-floor room’s windows I saw a sea of white. My first reaction was that I had been struck by the opposite of blindness; though once I put on my glasses it became evident that I was merely looking at what was left from last night’s heavy snowfall. We swaddled ourselves in whatever clothes lay at hand, grabbed our cameras and scrambled out of our room. Having never been exposed to such vast quantities of snow, we were worried that it would all vanish before we had had our fun.

Snow-covered mountainous landscapes evoke images of regal, grand beasts such as snow foxes, polar bears and snow leopards in one’s mind. A confused cow is all we had to be content with.

Everyone at our guest house was busy scraping and shoveling the snow away. In fact, practically every household in Leh had someone on their house’s roof clearing the snow away. It was almost like Sakranti in Gujarat or Independece Day in Delhi minus the kites.

The snowfall had caused the weather to clear up. The harsh Leh sun felt very welcome. Stray dogs had by now overcome their surprise at the sudden change in their landscape and had found themselves warm, dry, sunny patches of road to sleep on.

We had our brunch at a café near our guesthouse while looking at tiny streams of water from the melting snow dripping down the café’s ledge. We spent most of the day wandering purposelessly in the market.

Sidewalks that were shaded, had patches of snow that were now turning into slippery ice. In other places snow and dirt’s unholy matrimony was already begetting mud. By the time we were back (late in the afternoon), the cows had trundled back home and the landscape had drunk all the snow and turned ochre again.

As much as we had enjoyed the snow, we slept with a silent prayer for better weather the next day.

Within minutes of driving from Leh you find yourself alone. Initially you encounter a lot of army bases of varying sizes but soon the only reminder of the army’s presence is the near-perfect road that you are driving on. Shortly we were moving along the Indus river:

A visit to Alchi was the only thing on our itinerary. That gave us a lot of time to enjoy our journey. We drove down to the bank of a river on the way and collected colorful round pebbles. Some of them had been soaking the morning sun and were pleasantly warm to hold in our frigid hands while those that had languished in the shade were hail-cold.

The moment we passed the ruins of the 11th century Basgo monastery we found ourselves stuck in a traffic jam. Traffic jams in the mountains are not as much traffic jams as they are stalemates that can linger from 30 minutes to 3 hours. We almost look forward to them because they allow us to step out of the car, stretch our legs, and even go for a short stroll. This time our car happened to stop at a small village courtyard that had a cluster of apricot trees in full bloom. Between admiring and clicking those delicate flowers we forgot that we were on moments borrowed from our main journey and had to run to our car as the traffic started moving.

We were visiting Alchi on a friend’s recommendation who had mentioned the spectacular Apricot blossoms at the monastery complex. We were about two weeks too late. Most trees there had shed their flowers. But it took hardly any imagination to deduce how beautiful it must have have been.

While looking for our way out of the monastery, we ran into an old monk who insisted that we were going around the monastery in an anti-clockwise direction. He took us under his wing and made us do three clockwise rounds of the monastery.

On emerging out of the monastery, we were eager to walk in a straight line and told our driver to pick us down the road after a few minutes. It was 1 in the afternoon and the local school had just finished. Kids returning from school were enthusiastic about having their pictures taken. The brother in this brother-sister duo posed for me while the sister posed for the wife:

By this time, breakfast was already a distant memory. None of the restaurants we had seen during our visit last year had opened yet. We decided to continue our journey back to Leh and keep our eyes peeled for restaurants on the way. As we got closer to Leh the weather had turned a little ominous. Eerie light illuminated distant mountains. Barely-existent flakes of snow occasionally swirled down from fat grey clouds overhead.

On reaching Leh we bolstered oursleves with hot food and a short nap. In the evening I went to our hotel’s roof-top restaurant for a cup of hot ginger-honey tea. The mountains of the Stok range visible from here, were cloaked in clouds and mist. But what I’ll always remember this evening by, is this picture of a small monastery atop a hill aglow in the dying sunset against a dark, grey sky.

We woke up early, feeling remarkably fresh and rested. Our breakfast on arriving at Leh had been at the guest house owner’s cozy little drawing room. This morning we decided to give those legs a little exercise and ventured out looking for a breakfast place. We settled for a small restaurant called Gesmo that had begun operating just 2 weeks ago. Their menu had practically every major cuisine, and; quite remarkably for a setup their size, they even ran a small bakery that churned out delicious cookies, cakes, rolls and croissants.

Somehow during our visit to Ladakh last year, we had missed out Shanti Stupa (longish story involving tired lungs and closed food shops during a ‘bandh day’ so we’ll leave that out for now) and thats where we immediately trooped to after breakfast. After walking through lanes surrounded with closed shops and deserted neighborhoods we found ourselves staring at the face of the hill atop which the Shanti Stupa is. You can either take – as wikipedia informs me – “a series of 500 steep steps” or take a road that snakes around the hill and drops you within a few yards of an uphill walk to the Stupa. Gesmo must’ve put somthing in our breakfast, because against our usually sound judgement, we decided to go up the steps.

After what seemed like an eternity, the Shanti Stupa began to loom before our eyes. While the pristine, white stupa impresses you, the surroundings of the stupa leave you spellbound. The snow-covered mountains all around the stupa, the low-hanging clouds playing with sun to create an everchanging patchwork of shade and light far in the valley below, make you wonder if you are standing at the portal of Heaven.

On our way back we chose the easy walk down the road over a shorter but a little more strenous climb down the stairs; though at this stage we would have ideally preferred to turn into a ball and simply tumble down the hill. The afternoon was cold and cloudy and streets as deserted as they had been during our walk to the Stupa.

Hot food and a short nap are the best cures for cold, weary bodies. Though your snug blanket seems like the best place in the world to be in, a sense of guilt at frittering away your time in your room while you could be out gawking at mountains, draws you out again. This time we hit the main market to buy a few knick-knacks and somehow found ourselves chatting with this old man selling all things Apricot.

We purchased a packet of dried Apricots from him and tried bargaining with him in English.

100 Rs
That’s too much – 80 Rs?

Kya? Kitna? Urdu main boliye.
What? How much? Say that in Urdu please

Assi Rupay
Eighty Rs

Assi? Bahut kam hai.
Eighty? That’s too little

Phir Nabbe?
Ninty then?

Chailye Nabbe de dijiye
Alright, ninty will do then!

It then occured to me that what was Hindi to me, was Urdu to him. The two languages are not as far apart as sometimes their scripts and the tensions between India and Pakistan make them out to be. I was reminded of this essay that a friend had forwarded a long time ago. Or perhaps it was this essay shaping my thoughts here.

Also, notice that we suck at this bargaining thingy – not that we wanted to drive a hard bargain with an old man trying to make ends meet.

We had remembered a small café from our last visit that sells ‘proper’ coffee. Coffee in Leh usually comes in two varieties – bad and very bad. The main recipe in both cases involves powdered Nescafé dunked in fat-rich milk saturated with sugar. The best you can do is ask for sugar to be excluded, but they’d still insist on calling it a cappuccino. This little café offers no cappuccinos, lattes or espressos, but it does serve very good (and fresh) French press coffee. With very little looking around we found it again (its name eludes me now, but i’ll try and find out. Update: It’s called ‘Cafeteria’. Doh!) The terrace of the café offers a beautiful, panoramic view of the Leh Palace and the mountains surrounding it. It was still too cold for people to be sipping their French press coffee at the terrace so we settled for the next best thing – the second floor with windows wide enough for me to stick my camera out and take some pictures in the fast fading light.

Within days of returning from our last visit to Ladakh, I had started keeping an eye on the temperatures there. The moment the maximum temperatures in Leh began to touch double digits, we decided to pack our bags for a quick vacation. The tourist season in Ladakh begins with the opening of the roads from Manali to Leh – which usually happens around the 3rd week of May. The weather in April is too cold; and as we discovered, too mercurial, to visit Ladakh. On the other hand, the town is a lot less crowded. And although only a handful of shops are open, it’s easy to find restaurants serving good, multi-cuisine food.

We flew to Leh from Delhi after spending a day there. Now Delhi at this time of the year is nothing short of a blast furnace. While flying from Delhi airport during summers I had seen travelers to Jammu holding thick jackets, pullovers, mittens and mufflers, and shuddered at the thought of having to even touch all the winter wear in the sweltering Delhi heat. This time I wasn’t a distant spectator but an active hoarder of all wintery clothes. Ironically, for someone visiting Leh in non-peak season, we couldn’t get window seats – thanks to a large contingent of tourists on our flight. As we flew closer to Leh, from the furtive glances at the window from my aisle seat I could vaguley make out tall snow covered mountains. When we landed, the temperature outside was 4ºC. The mountains surrounding the runway, the azure sky with patches of drifting clouds and an ineffective but bright sun made for a mesmerizing view. We stood there soaking in the scenery while buses after buses loaded the passengers and took them to the terminal barely a few meters away from the runway. The bus ride is a security measure (the airport is used by the Indian Air Force so you wouldn’t want passengers straggling away) and a convenience (walking uphill to the terminal after landing in the thin, oxygen deficient altitude of 11,000+ ft can take a herculian effort).

We were at the same guesthouse as our last visit. The garden where I’d spent considerable time clicking flowers during our last visit, was nothing but a bare, barren patch. It had been readied and seeded for summers but at the moment nothing grew here. The only exception was a lone, young, apricot tree at the entrance which was decked with delicate, pinkish-white flowers.

The rooftop restaurant at the guesthouse was closed. The loos upstairs hadn’t been assigned a gender yet.

The calendar outside the restaurant kitchen was stuck on October’09 – even time freezes in Ladakh once it starts snowing. In my mind this restaurant’s utility lies more in the views of the Stok range that it offers than the food. The former was still being served fresh. Though again, it was a very different view from our last visit. The range was covered in snow, and menacing clouds obscured the tallest of peaks.

Even people born and brought up in Ladakh take it easy when they return from the plains. Half a day of rest is mandatory while anything between 24-36 hrs is recommended for occasional visitors. Consequences of hurrying things up could be anywhere from headache, nausea, fever to even loss of consciousness. That said, we knew from our trip in August that even after those hours spent resting, you never quite acclimitize. It takes much longer than the 5 nights we were to spend here for the body to fully get used to such high altitudes. We slept through most of our first day.

Temperatures in Leh dip quite sharply after sunset. Not even two layers of heavy blankets would stop us from shivering. Since electricity supply in these parts is not very reliable, the guest house didn’t provide any electrical heating. Though they readily made available this LPG powered, industrial-strength room heater (aptly called Superheat).

And on cue there was a power cut. As we sat huddled in the ruddy glow of this somewhat noisey and very picturesque heater, it was not hard to wonder if we had done the right thing by visiting Leh in April.

p.s. The heater was turned off after a mere 20 minutes of usage. The huge LPG cylinder that powered this contraption scared us a little. And given the general oxygen deficiency we didn’t want something else competing with us in the same room.

…from yet another memorable trip to Ladakh. I am sure the mountains will haunt me in my dreams for days to come.

A big German Shepherd, named after an American electronica musician quite popular in the UK, caused us considerable panic by charging straight towards us. Turns out, it simply wanted to play its own peculiar brand of “fetch” that involves the human subject kicking a piece of stone or wooden stick, which the canine will then promptly fetch and gingerly place at your feet. This was done till one of the parties tired out (invariably us).

The rules were quite like football in the sense that trying to touch the stone or stick with your hands carried a penalty – which in this case was the dog’s undiluted scorn that might have translated into a bite, causing you to lose the appendage that intervened for good.

All said and done, Moby turned out to be an adorable dog – like most dogs are. We might visit the Red Hills again just for a game of fetch with Moby.

I don’t get Mumbai. At its worst, I find it too humid, too hot and too crowded. At its best, I find it intimidating. A few photos from a 2-day stopover last month enroute to Pune.

A part of the city that tenuously (or is it tenaciously?) holds on to its older moniker of Bombay:

There is a very fine line between bold and garish. I am still not sure on which side of this line I should place the Hiranandani township in Powai. Is it brave to replicate elements of European architecture – complete with those tall columns, pediments, balustrades, arches, domes and spires (sometimes merely tacked on to terrace of a multi-storey apartment complex) – or is it pretentious?

The long, hard mountain drives were beginning to tell on us. Our destination the next day was to be Tsomoriri lake, with a short detour to Tsokar lake thrown in. But the very thought of the seven hour drive gave us cold feet (and it wasn’t even winters yet – ok bad joke). We decided that a vacation that would require another vacation to recover from wasn’t worth it at all. So we spent the next two days in Leh – taking leisurly walks to the market, shopping for a souvenir or two, sampling different cuisines, and reading books borrowed from the guest house’s reasonably well-stocked library over a cup of ginger honey tea in the evenings.

Of course, I spent a good deal of time photographing flowers at our guest house’s garden – something I’d been yearning to do since the day we arrived here.

Soon the morning of our departure to Delhi arrived. Our visit to Ladakh had been full of pleasant surprises, but one last surprise awaited us yet – His Highness The Dalai Lama was on the same flight as us! It caused quite a stir amidst the passengers. Everyone wanted a picture of or with him, some others wanted his autographs – a few pulled out a book written by him, while others grabbed whatever surface a pen would leave ink on. The Dalai Lama made sure that everyone got a chance – he walked all the way to the last seat greeting everyone and doing the best he could to give everyone an opportunity to take a photo.

Nice, law abiding citizens that we are, we had checked in our cameras’ batteries into our check-in baggage. No one at the airport had seemed to know what the correct policy was – the airline staff and the security staff had had contradicting views so it had seemed best to not carry the batteries on board. But given the number of functional cameras we saw being fished out, it would probably have been alright had we taken them with us.

The wife had taken the window seat this time. But it was impossible to not crane my neck and peer through her window for one last look at the beautiful Himalayas.

We were woken up early by the sound of strong winds howling outside. By the time we stepped out of our tent, things had calmed down but the sky was no longer the clear, blue Ladakh sky we were so used to seeing by now. Instead, it was a turbid, pale-grey.

On our way to the famous sand dunes near Diskit monastery, we came across a few domesticated horses grazing in a marshy field. Their clear reflections in water made it look like they were engaged in some form of auto-cannibalism.

Anywhere else and the sand dunes would be almost impressive, but being surrounded by close cousins of the Himalayas means that even their expanse doesn’t impress, let alone their height. The much-talked-about two-humped Bactrian camel is another let-down. All you’ll find is half-a-dozen gaudily decorated specimens of their species being used for taking people on joy rides. Given how the poor things looked, I doubt there is any joy to be had; not for the camels at any rate.

Diskit, like a lot of other monasteries in Ladakh, is a cluster of squat white structures streaked with maroon, constructed on a hill. The structures look like they grew out of the mountains naturally, like mushrooms growing under a tree.

On a hill opposite the monastery, a statue of ‘Gyalwa Chamba’ or the Future Buddha was being constructed. This is the first time I was seeing a statue of buddha depicting him sitting on a chair and not on the ground with his legs crossed. The statue was all concrete and scaffolding right now but I made a mental note to visit it again upon completion.

As we headed back to Leh, we realized how drastically the weather had changed within a day. The sky was a sullen grey all the way till Khardungla and we experienced what must’ve been the first snow of the season. It wasn’t much, but just about enough to allow me to be technically correct when I say I saw snowfall.

Leh was its usual welcoming self. Bright, sunny and even a tad warm during the day. The weather just a few kilometers ago had shown us how temporary the summer here was. On our way back, we were stuck in a small traffic jam on a mountain road and had stepped out of the car. We ran into a soldier of the Indian Army who was headed to his base somewhere near Siachin. “Fancy living here in winters” he had mentioned half-mocking, half-challenging as we parted. I should very much like to find out one day what it is like.

Our drive to Pangong lake had been a rushed one – partly due to the time constraints but largely because our driver was a impatient man in his early 30s who had been driving trucks in the region since he was 16 and wanted to be over and done with it as fast as the terrain would permit. As luck would have it, H. H. The Dalai Lama was due to deliver a sermon in Leh on the day of our journey. Our driver suddenly discovered that he had a spiritual side too, and decided to take a day off to nurture it there. We thus found ourselves being driven to Nubra Valley by a mild-mannered, amiable man in his late 40s.

Within 90 minutes of starting from Leh, we had left the Stok range far behind and were headed for Khardungla Top. As we moved higher, the roads that we had left behind began to look like they were mere lines carelessly traced by a child in sand. Looking at these photos three weeks later, even I find it hard to believe that these were huge mountains with roads built on them. Only the presence of the Stok range in the background manages to convey some sense of scale.

As you get closer to Khardungla you begin to see a few mountains with snow at their summit. And then, after turning behind a mountain, the pass itself makes itself visible. The scene at the pass is almost festive – with colorful player flags, a hubbub of tourists and the ritual photo-taking alongside the yellow board proclaiming Khardungla to be the world’s highest motor-able road.

The down-hill drive from here gets progressively easier and sceneic – with deep blue skies, the Karakoram range in front, an occasional patch of green and road signs that; given their picturesque settings, seem to convey succinct, Zen-like wisdom.

We were again staying at a camp-site and although the tents here were fancier, they were as unbearably warm during the day as the tents at Uley had been. Fortunately, the place was a veritable Eden (with apricots filling in for apples).

In the evening, we went for a short drive to Panamik to see the hot-water springs. Given the landscape so far, my imagination had run wild and I had a picture of grand endless planes sourrounded by mountains with pools of hot, bubbling springs spewing steam and jets of hot water. The reality is often much duller and Panamik was no exception. An odd geyser or two inside a concrete enclosure is hardly what I had in mind.

We were at our camp just before sunset – things had cooled down fast and the very tent that was an inferno in the afternoon was now a snug inviting thing. The sort of setting where sleep comes effortlessly.