Sham

Last week marked my second and final visit to the field to conduct my surveys.  Sham Valley sits just west of Hemis National Park.  Not only is it beautiful, it is also one of the places in Ladakh where you are most likely to spot a snow leopard.  Well, FAIL.  Still no sightings though I have seen ample sign.

Jigmet, Gyalson, Angmo, and I headed out of Leh in the open-backed gypsy with all of our gear towards Saspochey.  Traveling in the back of the Gypsy has become one of my favorite ways to travel.  Its typically bumpy, dusty, and – at times – a little frightening but, as you are holding on to the seat as best you can, the fresh air while driving windy roads through the mountains offers strange peace and refreshment.  Our first stop on this trip is a small town about 2 hours from Leh called Saspochey.  Here we stay at a school house and prepare for the nature trek we will take 8 children and 6 teachers on the next day.  

We wake up at 5 to begin the slow – very slow – hike, riddled with tea breaks and photo opportunities, to the towns summer pasture located at 4,550 meters.  The hope is to share some identification skills and wildlife knowledge in a hands-on way with this small crew.  We also hope to see abundant wildlife in the valley – again, FAIL.  Though it was an incredibly beautiful trek, over the 9 hours we saw little other than a few bird species, wildflowers, and one ibex.  Jigmet was not entirely pleased but the rest of us had a great time enjoying a nice sunny day in the mountains.  When we finally returned to the village, we find out one of the local woman saw a snow leopard near the village earlier that day.  Naturally.  Good for her, bad for us. 

The next day we began our real work – Angmo and I surveying the households of 5 different villages and Jigmet and Gyalson collecting motion-triggered cameras from 9 locations.  Both proved to be exhausting work.  Angmo and I ended up surveying 26 households with much more success than in Zanskar…and I did not get sick this time – wahoo!  One of my favorite things about this survey work, though it has not turned out the way it was supposed to, is getting to experience genuine, sweet hospitality.  Each household we approached, whether they were in the middle of doing something, hosting other people, or taking a rest; they stopped, invited us in, and fed us tea and food until I about burst.  Out of the 26 households, nobody was bothered that we were there asking questions or bothered that we interrupted their work.  One of the things I know I will bring back with me to my little house in Durham is this sweet sense of hospitality towards strangers.  It’s not something we see much in the U.S.  Time is too precious it seems and life is too busy to stop and show kindness.  I know this because I’m guilty of it.  But one of my favorite things about the human mind and soul is its profound ability to change.  So here’s to renewed priorities – people.

So as Angmo and I moved between towns, sometimes trekking or driving, we met person after person who had stories, opinions, and suggestions for SLC-IT.  We started each day early and ended late, completely exhausted and counting down the number of households left to go.  As tiring as talking and translating all day was for Angmo, I found that listening to a language I don’t understand and conversations I cannot be an active participant in equally exhausting.  I miss the art of conversation – I fear I may be loosing it.  Though by the end of our surveying, I was able to understand what some people were saying through certain words and body language.  In addition to our own work, we got a chance to share in the Christmas morning like feeling that comes with camera trap work.  I’ve missed that feeling that Paige and I used to get after we collected our 40 camera traps back in my Rocky Mountain Wild days.  All huddled around the computer Jigmet, Gyalson, Angmo and I would see what the last two months produced for the ongoing population assessment that SLC-IT is working on.  They got some great photos of a snow leopard marking its territory through rock scent and some great nighttime shots of a Pallas cat, which apparently is very rarely documented in Ladakh. 

And thus ended my surveying.  As much as I loved being in Sham Valley, there was something nice about coming back to my little room I call home that I may or may not be currently sharing with bed bugs.  So now its back to the office where I will spend the next few weeks entering data into spreadsheets, figuring out how to make sense of it, analyzing it, and then writing up a nice report for SLC-IT to add to the 10 year program evaluation they will be conducting next year.  To say the least, this is the part of the project I am less than thrilled about but luckily I have two visitors –J.B. and Ryan – to look forward to in mid-August!  Then the real fun begins…

oh me oh my

I’ve become lackadaisical about updating this blog; maybe I’m just not cut out for the blogging world.  Jury’s still out. 

The past few weeks have marked a lot of firsts.  I had my first motorbike ride in India and then my first motorbike accident (very small, not even a scratch).  My first attempt at acrobatic yoga – Google it, it’s awesome - and Thai massage.  My first trip to Tso Morirri, which resulted in my first time pushing the broken down truck up a mountain road, my first ride in the back of a cargo truck driven madly by monks, my first taste of salty high alpine Ladakhi lake water, my first time sitting on a beach this summer, and the origins of a mysterious cough I cannot seem to get ride of.  Last week also marked the beginnings of my data entry and report writing – thrilling stuff.  I had my first facial, tried many different traditional Ladakhi foods for the first time, and saw my first herd of Ladakhi Urial.  So many, many firsts as of late.  These new experiences have been refreshing as the weight of the failure and difficulties of this project and organization have, at moments, been grim to bear. 

Oh and one unfortunate second – bed bugs!  While visiting villages in Sham Valley, Angmo and I had some unexpected visitors.  Caitlin – if you’re reading this – THEY’RE BACK and in India!  The middle of the night paranoia has returned, damn.  So far in the last two months I have shared my bed with rats and bed bugs.  Definitely not welcome guests.

Despite multiple set backs, I’m still enjoying my little home here in Ladakh.  I have a feeling I will dearly miss things here once I return.  In the mornings, I have developed a routine of hiking up to a place where you have an amazing view of the peaks and the town of Leh.  Its incredibly peaceful and I enjoy my meditations with Oswald, Kahlil, or St. John of the Cross.  Different spiritual guides for different days.  I have also taken to collecting fallen Tibetan prayer flags on my daily meditative hikes.  Prayer flags are hung everywhere in Ladakh and its beautiful to see them strung about the mountains signifying important Buddhist spiritual places.  While I love seeing them soaring as flags are meant to soar, for whatever reason I find the fallen, broken ones more beautiful.  I suppose I have some proclivity towards fallen, broken things.  But there is something bittersweet – redemptive, maybe? - about collecting fallen prayers.

It’s amazing how time has moved here – already near the end of July!  But so many friends, emotions, and experiences have come and gone.  I can only hope to be a changed woman from all of it.  In fact that’s become a constant prayer in my meditations.  Oh! I love ch-ch-ch-changes, who would ever want to stay exactly the same?  That’s the gift of time, I suppose.  Just like Bowie says ‘turn and face the strange.’

I do believe my thoughts here are more than scattered – I apologize for the current state of my mental environment!

Kirk out.

And we're back!

I arrived about 3 days ago to Leh and am still regrouping from my ~1 ½ weeks in Zanskar.  Zanskar Valley is an amazingly beautiful place situated between the Himalayan and Zanskar mountain ranges.  To say the least the 1 ½ weeks provided an anything but relaxing and expected field excursion.  But as Yvon Chouinard says ‘its not an adventure until something goes wrong.’  So let me regale you with the details of my BIG adventure… 

Zanskar Valley - our road to Padum

The trip began at 4am on a packed tight Ladakhi bus with blasting Ladakhi music (not a huge fan).  The first bus trip lasted 10 hours to Kargil.  The road was bumpy, windy, and - when I dared to look out the window – slightly terrifying; some how though, I managed to sleep through a majority of it.  The second day of the trip lasted 16 hours and began at 2am, which meant that somehow despite the bumpy, dirt roads – I slept, though I do remember hitting my head against the window several times.  The second day took us through some amazing passes, beautiful mountain views, narrow switchbacks, harrowing heights, and finally to Padum.  From Padum, K.C. (SLC-IT field officer and also the prince of Zangla), Monica (a very nice Hungarian woman), Galyson (trekking guide and friend of K.C.), Lobby (quiet Zanskari man and also friend of K.C.’s), and I took an hour long taxi to our semi-final destination, Zangla.  Here, Monica and I stayed with K.C. and his family – wonderful people!  K.C. lives with his wife, mother, father and 3 children; and it was such a gift to stay with them.  Communication was difficult but luckily, I have learned a few Ladakhi words and phrases that bode me well on this trip.  The most important being dik-dik, which means 'enough, enough.'  You use this forcefully in response to don-don, which means 'have, have.'  So as they are trying to force feed you more food by saying 'don-don', you respond stubbornly with 'dik-dik.'  This was a very constant and important interaction throughout the entire trip with about everyone I met.

Phugtal Monastery stupa

After a day of rest, K.C. and I headed out of Zangla with our small backpacks to begin surveying the different villages in Zanskar.  While I loved being in a new place, I struggled with my loss of control in how anything went.  K.C. kept me as informed as he thought I needed to be, which usually meant he would just tell me which taxi to get into and sometimes he would let me know where we were going – not always though.  I felt a bit like a child but I suppose as a usually fiercely independent person, its good to be humbled. 

The plan for our Zanskar trip was to survey 8 villages and 140 households – fat chance.  I kept telling SLC-IT it would be impossible in a weeks time to do that but they seemed convinced that because I was with K.C. we would accomplish it all.  Well, we didn’t, oh well.  One of our first obstacles to overcome in Zanskar was the fact that I am a foreigner and everyone in Zanskar (and Leh too) thinks all white people are insanely rich.  So K.C. and I had a hard time finding a taxi that would take us to our first village cheaply– they wanted us to rent a jeep for Rs. 3,000 instead of Rs.50 for a taxi.  Well, finally, K.C. succeeded in convincing a taxi to take us.  All we had to do was hike about 30 minutes down the road and they would pick us up.  Once on our way, our plan was to stay in Anmu that night, a village with two households.  To get there we took a 3 hour taxi to the end of the seemingly never ending winding road, where we hiked about 45 minutes with a monk and another man to Anmu.  We stayed the night in Anmu and pre-tested the survey, which ended up being a disaster.  Throughout my trip to Zanskar and interacting with some of the villagers, I learned quite a bit about SLC-IT and their programs.  Turns out, it was very different from what I had previously understood.  I won’t go into details but to say the least it caused me to have a mini-15 minute breakdown and completely scrap the survey I had spent so much time over the last 4 months working on.  Luckily, I have always had a pretty resilient attitude – something I probably owe my parents too – and I was able to get over the normal feelings of failure that come with projects falling through. 

In everything in my life, I have always wanted to hold things loosely enough for them to have room to change.  My expectations, hopes, and visions for how life should go, rarely match up with reality.  Sometimes there is disappointment but, more often than not, I have learned to let the questions I am asking change and my ideas to shape shift.  This instance was no different than many things in my life, so I let my project change into what would benefit SLC-IT and allow for the villagers to express what was necessary.  I also kept a nice little reminder verse in my head: Genesis 4:7’…sin is crouching at your door.  It’s desire is for you, but you may rule over it.’  The permission and choice implied helped as I pulled myself back up by my bootstraps and warded off feelings of frustration, inadequacy, and failure.

You probably can't see the trail but this was our path.

So from Anmu, we hiked 2 hours to Chas to find that everyone was tending their fields.  So while we waited for our interviewees, we hiked to an incredible monastery called the Phugtal Monastery, which was built thousands of years ago on the face of mountain in caves.  It took two hours to hike to and there were times when I was a bit scared of how high we were, how steep the sides of the trail were, and how easy it would seem to just fall off to impending doom.  Luckily, I made it and the moments of terror were worth it.  On the way, we saw fresh snow leopard sign in the form of tracks, scat, and rock scent with hair.  I have not seen a snow leopard yet but I’m getting close, so I am hopeful that before I leave Ladakh this summer I will have had a glimpse.  We’ll see. 

Phugtal Monastery

After interviews in Chas, we hiked the 2 hours back to Anmu – had breakfast – did a few interviews and then headed to Icher, which would entail a 3 hour hike where K.C. almost got knocked out by a falling rock - disaster averted.  When we arrived in Icher, a beautiful town with about 40 or so households, we rested for a bit before starting any interviews.  During our rest, however, the universe had different plans for us – unfortunately.  When I awoke, I had wrenching pains in my stomach and a high fever.  The best we can figure out is that I got food poisoning from our breakfast in Anmu (I ate veg, everyone else ate non-veg breakfast...).  So for the next few days, I was completely incapacitated.  The next day we headed out early from Icher to Padum (not in our original itinerary…) where I met a doctor in a field and was prescribed 4 different pills - who knows what they were, I took them anyways.  Needless to say, we didn’t get much more surveying in and we had to skip 4 of the intended villages.  I’ve never had food poisoning before and I hope to never have it again, I was a pretty miserable little mess. 

With my past experience with field work, I should have known better to expect everything to go smoothly but I suppose I cant shake my idealist self.  So, after a few more days with very little surveying and a lot of rest, K.C. and I headed back to Leh – on what felt like the most miserably long jeep trip ever.  Instead of taking two days to travel from Padum to Leh, we opted for a 4am – 1am trip packed tight with other Ladakis (one of which had car sickness the WHOLE trip…).  But it was nice to return to my little makeshift home in Leh after such an eventful field excursion. I still am struggling with eating now, as every meal seems to look exactly the same as the meal that made me sick – rice, dahl, and vegetable, ugh!  And I’m still in the process of figuring out exactly what my project for SLC-IT will look like over the next month and a half.  Struggles.