Ladakh: Travelling in memory through time and space ~ by Lesley Downer

When does history begin? When does the present slide through a looking glass and emerge as ‘history’? Is yesterday ‘history’? When I was in Kathmandu back in the last century (1971, to be precise), I felt as if I had travelled through time as well as space. I was in the Middle Ages. 

Here is a story of a visit to Ladakh which felt like a journey through time. 

Ladakh's surreal landscape 1981 painted by me 

Ladakh 1981 

In 1981 I travelled through Kashmir and across Zoji la, a Himalayan pass 11,575 feet (3528 metres) high, to Ladakh, on the back of a motorbike. The road was only wide enough for one vehicle so cars, trucks and buses went one way in the morning and vehicles going the other way had to wait till afternoon. 

But that didn’t apply to motorbikes. We’d pull off the road when a line of vehicles approached and wait till they’d passed, then continue on our way. 

The journey can be done in two days but we took our time, clambering up cliffs to explore remote monasteries and camping in fields beside the rivers. Once we woke to find water rising around us and had to pack up fast; we’d forgotten that the fields are irrigated at night. 

Ladakh 2013

We were riding through an otherworldly landscape of dark mauve mountains, pale turquoise rocks and grey green scree, between orange and lilac and pink and dark maroon sand dunes and rocks and hills and mountains. 

At one point I scrambled up a pink hill to have a look at the view from the top. All around were more pink hills, as far as the eye could see. There was no landmark, no village, no little house, nothing to indicate where I had come from or where my friend Chris and his motorbike were, no indication of north or south or east or west. I was completely disoriented. 

I found Chris and the motorbike again and we carried on through more maroon and mauve hills. Eventually we started to see rivers fringed with bright green barley fields and groves of apricot trees.

We passed through little towns of white-washed houses with bundles of hay on the roof and lines of prayer flags fluttering in the breeze. There were stupas - ‘chortens’ in Ladakhi and Tibetan - on the outcrops, white-washed or carved out of the wine-coloured rock, some as big as houses, others small, stretching in long rows. 

The palace at Leh 1981

Leh 

Finally we got to Leh, a small frontier town of Ladakhi and Tibetan people, where the women wore long dusty black dresses and long pigtails and tall stove pipe hats and everyone wore huge beaming welcoming smiles. Wherever you went you saw the palace, a smaller version of the Potala in Lhasa, rising high above the town, deserted and crumbling, virtually a ruin. 

I settled into an inn run by John Page, an Englishman who was installing solar heating in Ladakhi homes. Leh is 11,562 feet (3524 metres) above sea level and dry with very strong sunshine and very cold winters, so solar heating made perfect sense. John’s girlfriend was Helena Norberg-Hodge, the only westerner who could speak Ladakhi, a dialect of Tibetan. 

Besides me there was a young British couple staying there called Zee and Theresa. Ladakhi food was unappetizing, mainly dry tsampa (barley meal) with a little bit of curry. So we took over the cooking, using a primus stove and charcoal burner, and used our ingenuity to turn out all sorts of delights. 

News of our cooking spread around and every night an unpredictable but large number of Ladakhi intellectuals - monks, poets, professors, students - would show up at meal time. We’d sit around talking, with Helena interpreting where necessary, into the night. 

The palace at Leh
with prayer flags 2013

In the daytime I’d walk out of town, climb the pink hillside and sit on a rock, watching the women scything the barley fields far below with the sound of their whistling drifting up through the thin clear air. It was magical. 

Walking through Leh’s alleys I drew and painted pictures. 

Thiksey 

I also hitchhiked out to see some of Ladakh’s beautiful white-painted monasteries, which crown virtually every hill. Thiksey’s temples, sub-temples, libraries, monks’ quarters and stupas rambled across an entire hill like a medieval castle. They were dilapidated but I could see that the lower buildings were white-washed and the higher ones were brick red or yellow ochre. 

Little house in Leh 1981

At the time I spoke a little Tibetan and was (and still am) fascinated by Tibetan Buddhism. I could recognise many of the sages and Buddhas and benevolent and fierce deities portrayed in the wall paintings and thangkas. So while other tourists strolled in, took a quick look round and strolled on, I would chat to the monks. 

Then they would invite me round the back for butter tea. Butter tea is the national drink. It’s an acquired taste; it’s helpful to imagine that you’re drinking soup. The key thing was to be as enthusiastic as possible, to drink with gusto and to be even more enthusiastic when offered another cup. 

So while other tourists ‘did’ several temples in a day, I ended up spending all day in just one. 

In the end I spent two months there. I ended up going back by bus, which was a lot more frightening than going by motorbike. 

Little house in Leh 2013

Back to the Future 2013 

I went again in 2013, over an even higher pass, Taglang la, 17,480 feet (5328 metres), the second highest motorable pass in the world. (Mount Everest is 29,031 feet (8848 metres). 

Ladakh had changed but not as much as I’d feared. There were roads, traffic, hotels, restaurants and rows of shops offering thangkas, Tibetan jewellery and Pashmina shawls as well as markets where Tibetan refugees sold handicrafts. 

The palace was still there, brooding over the city, now cleaned up and restored. There were steps and a footpath up the rocks, even a motor road. And the food had miraculously improved. 

I was happy to be back and looked for the places I had painted in 1981 and took photographs. 

All paintings and photos are mine. 

Lesley Downer is a Japanophile and inveterate traveller. She had two books out in 2024: The Shortest History of Japan (Old Street Publications) and her first ‘real’ book, On the Narrow Road to the Deep North, reissued by Eland. She is now working on a history of Tokyo and plotting ways to get back to both Japan and India. 

For more see www.lesleydowner.com