Exotic Leh

Thursday, Aug. 16, 2007--Leh (Continued)

I met a young man who manages a coffee house. He showed me the best cybercafe in town--faster than the others but still expensive. He asked me to come to the coffee house afterwards. When I got there, he came to my table and asked me about being a teacher. Two customers overheard him and joined our conversation. They are two young people (a man and a woman) who are teachers. They were appointed to teaching positions in very small villages outside of Leh last year and are here in town for classes and for taking examinations for correspondence courses. It was interesting talking to them about their work. The woman has only 3 students, all boys from the same family. They are the only school-age children in her village. Mobile phones don't work there, there is no Internet there, etc. The man has 10 students in the village where he is the teacher. I was most fascinated by the woman. She is so unlike most Indian women. She was socializing with a man in public who is not her fiance. She was wearing jeans and a t-shirt. She spoke English (EXCELLENT ENGLISH) with an American accent. And she is very intelligent. She said she would like to become a university professor. She definitely would have no problem doing so. In fact, a U.S. university would be smart to grab her and offer her scholarships to work on her master's and doctoral degrees in education. We visited for 2 1/2 hours at the cyber cafe and then went walking through town.

This town is alive with interesting people. First, there are all the tourists who come from all over the world (including some from India). But there is a special event taking place here this week. The Dalai Lama is here giving lectures for several days, so there are Buddhist monks in their traditional clothing and tribes people who have come into town to hear him lecture wearing their traditional tribal clothing. The town is buzzing with activity.

I ate pizza cooked in a wood-fired oven for dinner. I got one with cheese, tomato sauce, and chile peppers. It was delicious. I drank a hot ginger-lemon-honey tea with it.

Friday, Aug. 17, 2007--Leh

I had lots of dreams last night. I take my mefloquine as an anti-malarial medication each Saturday, and I have noticed that the last two nights before the next dosage are the ones when I seem to have the most vivid dreams (a side effect of the medication). I was dreaming about teaching and other topics that were not pleasant ways to pass the night.

The coffee shop manager had told me yesterday that he works only after 14:00 each day and asked if I would like him to pick me up and take me to a stupta above the city this morning. Of course, I agreed. He came at 9:15, and we walked down narrow lanes and up a roadway to the stupta (a round pointed construction that looks a little like the top of a soft ice cream cone). There was a fantastic view of the valley and of the city from there. We took lots of photos. There was a woman there practicing her yoga. A few other tourists were there, but most tourists come up via a long, steep set of stairs and are exhausted. It was nicer taking the longer, slower ascent via the roadway; we never were very tired from it.

I ate a vegetarian thali plate for lunch, a version of ordering the luncheon special in India. Two tourists came after the tables were full, so I asked them to join me. They were young men who have just finished degrees in France and are traveling for a month or so here in northern India. We talked a long time about various topics including education, the Internet, etc. I washed my luncheon down with a sweet lemon water.

I relaxed reading at my room in the afternoon, then I went to the bus company office to ask about buses to take me from here to Manali next week. I wanted to go either on Tuesday or Wednesday, but the buses will run only on Monday and Friday. Well, waiting for Friday would keep me here too long, so I decided to buy a ticket to depart on Monday. It's a two-day trip. I dread it for the fact it will be tiring. But the scenery should be wonderful. We will go on the second-highest roadway passage in the world. We have to stop for the night and sleep in tents. We'll get to Manali sometime Tuesday afternoon if there are no delays with road problems. Meals will be provided as a part of the trip.

I went to the coffee house after that and had a cold mocha frappacino. It was delicious. I sat and read from my novel which I finally finished in the evening. It was Corsair: The Adventures of Hector Lynch by Tim Severin which I gave 3 stars out of 4. It's a book I picked up at my guest house that someone had left behind. It is about a young man taken by pirates in the late 1600s. I found the story interesting, but there were too many coincidences in it.

On the way home, I stopped at another restaurant to try their pizza. For some reason I was craving more. I had the same kind as the night before. But this one, mainly the crust, was not as good. I still enjoyed it, though. A young Indian man sat at a table near me while I was waiting for my food. He glanced at me a couple of times, so I asked if he was traveling alone, too. He was, so we sat together. In fact, it was his first day being alone, and he has never traveled alone before. He was having trouble adjusting to it. He has been in America for 8 years working on two master's degrees. He now has a job with United Airlines that will begin on Oct. 1, so he came home to India to see his family and travel some. He was a nice man, and it made the evening nicer having him at the table while I was eating.