Home Stay Trek

We are back in Leh from our short home stay trek. We had a wonderful time and this country is beautiful and the villages and people interesting. We were told that this was called the baby trek. At the risk of being labeled a wimp .. BS. Everyday was relatively short walking maybe 4 or 5 hours max. But everyday there was a pass to cross and then there were the unnamed gorges that seemed to drop forever and then we had to climb right back out. Once we crossed a pass and our guide Stinzing said look there is the village we are going to we just have to walk there and oh yeah that looked great until we encountered two of those hidden gorges that actually look impossible at first look but end up just kind of difficult especially when we thought we just walked flat to the village.

The heat really got to us the next to last day. It was so hot that it was draining by the end of the walk. It seems like it may be cooling down this week at least we are hoping it will. Then I will get to whine about the cold when we get to real altitude on the next trek.

The first village we stayed in was Likkir and we stayed with the Norboos .. Actually a small guest house. What a nice couple. He is an artist and has decorated his house and hard with art work. She is a traditional Ladakhis lady who looks impossibly old and at the same time beautiful. They were very happy people - he smiling and friendly and helping her when he could. She was humming and singing and always welcoming with the Jullay , Jullay greeting. She cooked some skew for us that was delicious, First time we had ever had it. Our guide and driver were very happy. She was a very good cook.

The next village was the most remote and traditional. Our room was on the roof looking over the other village roves with the stacks of animal feed set up for the winter and apricots drying on top or that , the mattress was stuffed with grass or hay or more likely the chaff from the barley they were growing. These mattresses were just on the floor. The necessary room was a square concrete floored room with a rectangle hole in the floor and the room was filled with several inches of dirt and a shovel. The shovel did double duty. It was used to jam the door closed while one was using the facility and after use for what ever ,, you can figure that out. There was no running water in the house. The kitchen was full of traditional copper and bronze cooking pots that were very old and were not used for cooking anymore just for display.

It was harvest time and this village worked together to get in the harvest. We took many photos of the huge amount of work going on out in front of us in the terraced fields. It was like watching a bee hive. Most home stays we're not accepting guests because of the work that needed to be done for harvest. The village was like a bee hive with everyone working hard at their tasks.

The next village had more ripe apricots, apples, and nuts. The quality of the village houses increased and we were back to less rustic rooms and facilities.

For the past two days here in Leh the internet or the power has been mostly down and if it was up we were roaming around town without the iPad so I will try to get this post out this morning before we start for Nubra Valley. We will have another traveling companion who is a professional level photographer and also a ranger in the Escalante National Monument in Utah. He is documenting the lives of the many road workers who are brought in from Nepal and parts of India and are living some pretty hard lives away from home.

We will try to get some photos added when we are back in Ley in three or four days before we leave on the 10 to 12 day Makkah Valley trek.

Hope all is well at home.

Darryl and Susan ... Aka Bud and Curley. Ha!

Julley!