The valley of death

Weather can change very quickly in the mountains. We had driven down the valley of the river Shyok in a happy sunlit mood. As we started back after lunch in Turtuk, clouds had blown in from the west and the light had turned sombre. The name of the river means death in languages that derive from old Tibetan, and in this dim light it was not hard to make that connection.

The road was smooth most of the way, and The Family nodded off after the heavy meal. Yasin, our guide and driver, was intent on the drive. We’d rolled the windows down and he’d switched off the music so that we could listen to the water and the weather. I was in my groove right now, having put away my favourite camera to utilize the wider angle shots of the landscape that my phone gives. I realize that I could tell the story of the drive back in many ways: as a road trip, as a journey using the metaphor of the Bardo Thodrol (the Antarbhava Nivarna, known in the west as the Book of the Dead), or even as a photo gallery interspersed with technical comments by the photographer.

But the telling that appeals to me are the questions that rose in my mind as I looked out, and the answers that I found later. This land raised profound questions about our place on earth, and figured in a controversy that preceded the writing of the IPCC’s fifth report in 2014. But before I tell you about it, let me give you an impression of the landform that piqued my curiosity. Even though the muddy river was at its widest in summer, when we drove along it, the valley it flowed through was very much broader. The two-lane road seemed to be on a plain, and there was enough flat land around it that the road could have had four lanes through much of the valley. I’d never seen this in a mountain stream before.

Another remarkable feature was the profusion of loose rock and pebbles, some jagged, as if a scree had spilled down slope, others completely rounded as if by the action of water and glacier over millennia. A further enigma was visible in the sand dunes and mud flows that were could be seen at places along the river. This is a special mystery because the land has very little rain: no more than a 100 mm in a year. The patterns of erosion are not due to rain.

What a curious tourist like me sees is a very small part of the questions that arise in the mind of a geologist who walks through this landscape. So all my questions, and more, are answered in the extensive geological literature that is easily available these days. The answer lies in a dynamic and fluctuating history of glaciers and ice dams in the last 150 thousand years in this region. An early study counted over 2000 glaciers active in the upper Shyok valley, which were highly dynamic, receding and expanding rapidly, but whose extent had not changed significantly between 1973 and 2011.

When this paper was published as the 5th IPCC report was being drafted, it gave rise to an immediate controversy about global warming. If glaciers had not melted in the Himalayas, as they had in the Alps, then how could the latter be due to anthropogenic warming? An old friend was involved in the group that found the answer: Himalayan glaciers are mostly rock covered, unlike the open glaciers of the Alps, and it is the thinning of the ice layer under the scree that reveals the extent of melting. Their ground surveys revealed that glaciers here were melting as quickly as Alpine ice flows. Further studies confirmed this, and the IPCC’s AR5 report had a chapter on this topic which reported this as the consensus of scientific opinion.

We passed one of the largest tributaries of the Shyok in this stretch. I had looked down the other valley on our way west in the morning and had a glimpse of the high peaks of the Karakoram range. Even in this light I could see an ice-covered peak as we sped by. In the upper reaches of the Shyok river, after it descends from the Rimo glacier and flows south, the river marks the geological suture between Ladakh and the Karakoram. In the stretch that we drove through, the river had turned north and west, and again come close to the Karakoram range. I can’t figure out from maps which river descended from the Karakoram to join the Shyok so far in the west.

We’d switched between the left and right banks a few times over bridges, most in good repair. The exception allowed a single vehicle to cross at a time. Waiting for our turn in the small queue, I’d told The Family how these crossing were once considered treacherous. The many caravans which were washed away in this stretch of the silk route gave the the river its name, Shyok, the river of death. But these summer floods were seldom caused by rain. They were more often due to the melting of ice dams which had formed over winters. Some ice dams can last quite long, and collect sedimentary deposits, some of which I’d seen exposed during the day. The failure of these ice dams cause enormous floods and quick erosion. This is also perhaps the reason for the wide river valley we saw.

As we approached the Hunder-Diskit area, the clouds opened up, and dappled sunlight streaked the mountain sides. In this place farming and irrigation is transforming the land. The forest department is busy planting cypress in a bid to green this land, forgetting, as it has since colonial times, that introducing an exotic species leads to catastrophe a few decades on. But you cannot fault the locals for turning to agriculture this wide fluvial-lacustrine valley fill, created by the ancient ice dams. Human sympathy is due when impoverished people try to better their own lot through historically tested means such as agriculture. However, it seems that corporations and bureaucracy which follow any such expansion of human activity create changes inimical to the human world. Is this Gaia at work?

Ladakhi Food: The Little Sister

Baltistan (बल्तिस्तान, སྦལ་ཏི་སྟཱན) is such a small part of Ladakh that it is possible to forget about it altogether. But that would be a mistake. Raymond Chandler’s novel The Little Sister begins with Philip Marlowe being knocked out by a blonde wielding high heels. That how different Balti food can be from that in other parts of Ladakh. I’ve never eaten a salad like this before. Our table in The Balti Kitchen overlooked the fields of Turtuk village, and we could see all the ingredients growing right there. A leafy salad with blackberries, dwarf red and white cherries and apricot, dried apple, apricot nuts and walnut, it was so fresh, juicy, and crunchy that you didn’t minded the lack of a dressing.

The salad was preceded by the drink. I’d chosen the apricot juice and The Family had decided to try cherry. We sipped our drinks and silently exchanged glasses. Excellent drinks both. The apricot was heavier with fibre and sweet. The mint crushed into it gave it a nice fresh feel. The cherries were tart with a bit of sweetness, and the crunch of walnut was a nice touch. The salad was followed by Moskot: buckwheat pancakes (thin and crisp as a crepe) covered in yogurt sauce mixed with pureed walnuts, onions and green chili. Wonderfully fresh, with just a bit of spiciness from the chilis. Buckwheat pancakes are pan-Ladakhi, as ubiquitous as femme fatales in Chandler’s books, but the sauce was as unusual as one wielding a high heel rather than a gun.

We didn’t need any more food, but I’d already ordered the Baleh. In Tibetan that word just means soup. This one had hand-rolled noodles, bits of chuffea (which is yogurt dried into a cheesy mass), peas, little pieces of potato and carrots, and topped with several fresh herbs. Again a very aromatic dish. We’d hesitated a bit over a soupy stew, the squu, but our hotel’s kitchen had produced it for us the previous night. Although we liked it a lot, we decided to try out the new dish.

Sharing the table with the two of us was a group of women from the extreme east of the country: Arunachal Pradesh. That part of the country is as high as this, but more lush because it receives a large amount of rain. They ordered in Tibetan, a language that they share with the Balti people. We chatted a bit about how they’d traveled across the country with three changes of flights. In Ladakh meat is very limited, we were told it was in deference to the non-violent beliefs of the Buddhists. But the women next to us told that their husbands, all Buddhists, and the same sect as the Ladakhis, had gone off to look for a place which served meat. They joined the group later, having eaten a Hyderabadi biryani at a more touristy restaurant elsewhere. In the end I figured that it is just the same as any traditional farming community: they eat meat sparingly. As people get more urbanized they begin to eat more and more meat.

We were pretty full. At these altitudes your appetite decreases. But we’d already ordered a dessert: Kambo kushu. This turned out to be home made apple-flavoured biscuits, with a handful of blackberries, raspberries, mulberry, and nuts dumped over it, the whole thing drenched in honey and (don’t hold your breath!) chocolate sauce. I suppose the love of chocolate is a human universal!

Turtuk: lives and livelihood

We hear the word village and we think of fields and farming. We’re never wrong about this today, although the first villages are found from about 3000 years before agriculture developed. Over millennia, the development of agriculture has completely wiped out the hunter-gatherer economy that birthed villages. Turtuk was surrounded with terraced fields, largely given over to wheat, but with patches full of a variety of vegetables.

Between houses there were numerous apricot and cherry trees. Both of these fruits were different from the variety we’d eaten before. The apricots were small, perhaps 2 or 3 centimeters across, and terribly sweet. The cherries were also tiny, about 5 millimeters across, and tasted tartly sweet. We’d been seeing the dwarf apricots ever since we arrived in Ladakh, but the cherries were new to us. Hunder, the village with our hotel, was at an altitude of 3000 meters. From there we’d driven downstream of Shyok for about three hours, and then climbed about 200 meters to Turtuk. That put us at an altitude which was about the same as Hunder. At these heights perhaps these dwarf varieties of fruits grow best.

The wheat was ripening in the fields. Lower down I’d seen the harvest in progress. But here it looked liked the growing season would last another 10 days or a week. Every isolated small patch of ground was used to grow something: vegetables. This was early enough in the season that I saw many vegetable flowers: potatoes (the featured photo), tomatoes (the Solanum flower in the gallery above), a cucumber with its edible yellow flowers, peas (perhaps, I don’t know its flowers), and others that you don’t see here, like carrots, radish, runners of beans and edible leaves, and the third edible Solanum, namely brinjal. In trips to jungles I equate Solanum with poisonous weeds. Seeing these three varieties of Solanum flowers in tended fields reminded me of the European reluctance to eat tomatoes and potatoes when they were first imported from the Americas. Quite an understandable caution, I thought.

The ethnic Ladakhis seem to follow Buddhism and Islam in about equal numbers. The Buddhist population largely lives in the eastern, higher, parts of Ladakh, and the muslims in the western, lower regions. I’d said earlier that geographically Ladakh is where the roof of the world slopes down to meet central Asia. This is not only a metaphor. Along this slope Buddhism and, later, Islam traveled eastwards, following the silk route. From the higher parts of the village I could spot the small dome of the village mosque, but I didn’t pass it. It seems to stand towards one edge of the village. Religion has its normal place in Ladakh, present in the family, but secondary to work and livelihood in the larger community.

No description of mountain villages can be complete without its beasts of burden. No car or motorcycle can negotiate the lanes of this village. I saw no bicycles either. But I passed a corral which held a donkey munching on its fodder. It raised its head and posed for me, but brayed at me when I walked away. Perhaps it expected me to feed it. I was on my way to a surprisingly good lunch, and didn’t have time to spend on a donkey.

Balti faces

Before we got to our wonderful Balti (बल्ति) lunch in Turtuk village, close to the Line of Control, we met the people who have this kind of food every day. A recent genetic study indicated that the Balti people are a mixture of Central Asian Dardic and Tibetan gene groups, but in these lands where humans were settled before the end of the ice age, each of these “parent” groups must have resulted from forgotten mixings of human genes. The story of modern humanity is such a wonderful complex tapestry that one despairs at the easy classification of hurriedly thrown together videos and magazine articles. But look at some of the faces we saw on our brief walk, and you see the whole complexity of humanity.

The village is traditional. I mean that men present a social face to strangers and women have a separate place. So it turned out to be most fruitful for The Family and me to divide the job of photographing people. She took photos of the women and girls, and I took photos of the men and boys. Even so, women are diffident about a camera. This mother carried a child on her back in a manner which we have seen across the Himalayas. In the eastern Himalayas mothers look at the camera and smile. Here women look down and away, effectively sending the message “I’m not here.”

This old lady was selling bags of apricot nuts. This is an industry in the village. Apricot kernels are dried and then cracked to extract the edible nuts (they taste a bit like almonds). The remainder of the kernel yields apricot oil, which serves as a wonderful moisturizer in the extremely dry air of this altitude. She was highly voluble and a fount of knowledge about the village. But when she saw a camera she protested, “Why do you want a picture of an old woman?” Because you have been a teacher to us was an answer that dimmed her protests, but did not stop them altogether.

I’ve shown you this face in an earlier post. Abdul Rashid is a large farmer, as holdings here go, and an entrepreneur. He owns The Balti Kitchen where we had lunch, and runs a shop with preserves and jams from his farm and orchard. His own chosen role now is to chat with passers by. He is a natural conversationalist and reminded me of the carpet salesmen in Istanbul: happy to invite you in for a chai and a conversation, and if it leads to business, even better. But if it doesn’t, then you have still had a good time. Most of the men here do not mind being photographed.

Women’s work is no less strenuous than men’s in this extreme environment. While The Family and I slowly walked up and down the sloping paths of the village, this middle aged lady steadily walked uphill with a fairly heavy load of fodder on her back. Again, she wouldn’t meet The Family’s eyes. This was such a difference from the women she’d met east of this region, The Family told me later. Even later, I thought this difference was superficial. But during the years of the pandemic past, I found that women across the whole of south east Asia, between the ages of menarche and menopause, access health facilities at half the rate at which men do. Men and women access health facilities equally outside that range of ages. All societies have this difference, it is only more visible here. Travel can open your eyes to your own surroundings.

The gender difference has an interesting effect on young boys. In a mixed group of under-10s, I saw boys who were happy to be photographed, asking me repeatedly to take photos of their antics, and others who would hide their faces. The process of differential socialization has started at this age. While young boys learn to be outgoing, young girls have started learning to quickly turn away from a camera. Interestingly, one of the boys who turned his face from the camera later came up to do a high five with me! I passed a torrent of faces on the street: the long noses of central Asia, the high cheekbones of the hills, the round eyes of the tourists, the different skin colours from different parts of India. What a wonderful mosaic, I thought as I walked towards our lunch.

Turtuk village

The day after we crossed Khardung La, we drove west as far as we could go and arrived at the lovely Balti (बल्ति) village of Turtuk. You get off the car, cross a bridge over a fast flowing mountain stream that empties into the Shyok river, and then climb up the side of a mountain. Nestled in the slope are the houses and agricultural fields of Turtuk.

Closest to the bridge is a cluster of restaurants aimed to draw in tourists. It had been sunny when we started, but clouds had gathered during the three hour drive which brought us to Turtuk just a little before lunch. We were nonplussed by the number of tourists who’d come here. Our driver Yasin was even more surprised, “Never seen so many cars here,” he exclaimed. Our luck, I suppose. We were not the only people trying to forget the lockdowns. The Family had her heart set on a restaurant called The Balti Kitchen, so we walked on up.

The recent political history of Baltistan (बल्तिस्तान, སྦལ་ཏི་སྟཱན) is easy to read from books. It was part of the Tibetan empire in the first millennium of the CE, then evolved into separate small kingdoms, became part of Ranjit Singh’s Sikh empire in the 19th century, and descended to the kingdom of Kashmir in 1840 following the destruction of the Sikh empire by the British. After the complex events of the mid-20th century (in 1947 it came to India along with the kingdom of Kashmir, then was taken by Pakistan in the 1947 war, and parts were re-taken by India in the 1971 war) it is now divided into two by the Line of Control. But who the Balti people are is perhaps as complex. The Balti language is closely related to Tibetan. A local farmer and entrepreneur (photo above) gave us his belief: that the Balti have both Tibetan and Central Asian blood in them. In some way this could be true, but the story is complicated by the discovery that people have lived here for nearly 7000 years, thrice as long as the silk route existed. There could have been ancient migrations and mixtures which are forgotten.

There was a bit of a steep climb right at the beginning, but after that the slope became more gentle. There seemed to be a single path through the middle of the village, with houses and fields on both sides. Agriculture and construction require terracing the landscape, and a tremendous amount of work goes into that. Although it is not obvious in the featured photo, men were at work in the fields. A wonderful feature of the village is that a clear mountain stream runs through it. We saw people come out houses and dip cupped palms into it to drink the water. We found the restaurant, made a reservation, and then decided to walk up to the topmost point of the village.

It wasn’t very far, but between taking photos, gawking, and pausing to catch our breath every now and then, it took us a little more than half an hour to reach the Balti Museum at the top. We passed a lovely selection of doors on the way, as you can see. Houses are made with dressed blocks of the local gneiss, and, sometimes a timber framework filled in with stone rubble. Interesting, I thought, because that means that there are stone masons at work somewhere. We saw a house under construction using modern techniques of steel-reinforced concrete. But even here, curtain walls between concrete beams are filled with dressed stone. Going by the number of houses under construction, the village is probably doing well with the tourist trade.

When we reached the museum we realized that it was time for lunch. We’d told Yasin to wait for two hours, and it would be hard to keep to that schedule as well as walk through the crowded museum. We turned back towards lunch. Little did we suspect how interesting that would be.