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.