Ladakh Vacation - Day 3 - Basgo, Lamarayu, Uley

On the third day of our visit, we drove along the Indus river - a river we had only vague memories of having read about in our history and geography books in school. Occasionally, the river would vanish behind a hill or a mountain but it was never quite out of reach.

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Our first stop was the Maitreya Temple of Basgo. Repair/construction/renovation work was on at this site and except for a few walls and rudimentary structures, it is is hard to tell the old from the reconstituted.

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We then drove towards the Lamayaru monastery. The terrain got considerably difficult; the roads unpaved and narrower. We kept encountering heavy machinery - excavators, ground movers and such - toiling on patches of broken road in perhaps the world’s harshest terrain. Often we’d encounter heaps of boulders strewn about a narrow road and an excavator working on them. All you can do then is wait patiently for the excavator operator to execute some tricky maneuver from his playbook that would allow you to pass.

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On our return from the monastery, we stopped at a small shack for lunch, which was a packet of Maggi cooked with chopped vegetables and served in a soup-like consistency. A stream - probably a tributary of Indus - roared past us.

Our stop for the night was at a place called Uley. The accommodation consisted of semi-permanent tents in a valley surrounded by mountains. The Indus gushed a few meters below. There were a few houses nearby, but hardly a human soul in sight. The barren mountains, a few scattered trees enjoying their brief summer and the river below reminded me a lot of the place where the protagonists of the movie The Planet of Apes found themselves when they landed on a desolate planet after hundreds of years in space.

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Except that we found quite a few trees that had apples growing - we were told later not for commercial purposes - and hence free of pesticides and fertilizers. They weren’t the sweetest apples I’ve had, but they had the most apple-y aroma I’ve ever experienced.

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The camps are designed in a way that they collect all the warmth they can during the day and gradually let go of it during the nights. Which means that they are unbearably warm till the sun has well and truly set. A siesta was thus completely ruled out. We sat in the gazebo that the owners of the camp had so thoughtfully built. I was fascinated by its roof, made of layers of wooden bars.

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It was a clear night and the moon was in one of those distant phases from full where it doesn’t meddle with your pupils’ dilation. What looked like a passing cloud turned out to be the Backbone Of The Night - The Milky Way. It’s the sort of view that makes you feel inconsequential. It is hard not to feel light because a realization quickly sinks in - no matter how big your problems, they don’t matter in the grand scheme of things - and the overall of scheme of things is very grand indeed!


Date
September 13, 2009