The only thing more discombobulating than arriving in a foreign country after twenty hours of travel is arriving to a city at 11,500 feet above sea level. We got off the plane in Leh, India under a blinding, cloudless sky; around us, the high desert mountains rose like incomprehensible sand dunes. In the airport, safety announcements warned against overexerting oneself after traveling by air to such high altitude; at our hotel, the owners and staff hustled us into a sunny table and brought us breakfast, tea, and sent us upstairs to our room, warning us to rest.
And so Sam and I spent our first thirty-six hours in Leh gasping for air; gripping doorways and walking carefully, unsure whether it was sleep deprivation or oxygen deprivation or the surreality of waking up in Athens and going to sleep in the Himalayas that made our vision swim.
By the third day here, the altitude served as a lesson in focusing on one thing at a time – we could walk up a hill (slowly) (with pauses) (give us a break, it’s the fucking Himalayas) but not talk at the same time; we could digest food, but not walk at the same time; we could have a conversation, but not look things up on the Internet or eat at the same time.
We spent days walking in widening circles around the town and up and down the surrounding hills. Leh, in its valley, is relatively green this time of year; the surrounding mountains are strikingly barren. One day, we were driven for hours into the countryside, stopping at rivers and high vistas and crumbling, intricate monasteries. The road wound around the flanks of mountains; had clearly been carved as efficiently as possible into their sides, so at some points the cliff was a mere pebbles’ distance from the car and at others, the mountain itself overhung the road precariously; enough space had been sliced away that the cars and busses could drive, but nothing extra. (Traffic is of course its own subject to consider: the barely contained chaos of each one-lane road, shared by pedestrians, dogs, cows, two directions of motorbikes and cars and buses, and the occasional donkey is something I might have imagined, but could not possibly have understood until I experienced it). (Still, really, I can’t claim to understand it.)
Leh is a place that refuses to let itself be pinned down; that stands in proud contradiction. There is, on some mornings, the smell of burning trash; on others, of clear mountain air. The winding alleys and precariously stacked buildings that make up the old town here are filled with an overwhelming amalgamation of shops selling pashmina and jewelry, butcher shops (which on some days look like abandoned space, and on others are peopled with men deftly slicing hanging sides of mutton, slick organs stacked haphazardly on stone windowsills), general stores with everything from knockoff Barbies to bottled water to lightbulbs. There is a whole block of small gray storefronts, inside of each of which is a charred underground oven and in the windowsills of which sit stacks of round bread. But if you climb up out of the city even a little bit, it is suddenly empty: calm, pristine, all of Leh stretched out in its valley, the snowcapped giants across. There, we heard the flapping of a thousand prayer flags, tied across the top of the mountain; we heard the echoing call to prayer bouncing from mosque to mosque in the city below. On our day trip out of the city, we met a group of dentists from Delhi who were so excited that we were from the United States that they invited us out to dinner with them; we also saw laborers and their families sleeping soundly on the pebbled highway shoulders. In the streets of the city, everyone stares, though some shout Jullay! and grin and others grimace and leer; I have not figured out how to predict which will happen. In the main bazaar, trendy coffeeshops co-mingle with women selling vegetables, neatly laid out on blankets in the street.
It seems like our responsibility to keep our heads above water: drowning in sensation is not an honorable way to witness.
Leh refuses to let us draw conclusions. It is not a neat place to write about, to photograph. It will not be summarized. It is all we can do to catch our breath.
