Discovering Civilization in Ladakh
I’ve been back in town for almost a week since finishing a three week, 170 mile journey by foot through the Zanskar Mountains from Darcha to Lamayuru during which I journeyed over seven passes, the highest over 5,000m in altitude, accompanied by my wife, horseman Tanzing Shin and his horses Mapo and Napo. It was an epic experience.
The Upper Kargayak Valley
The town we’re in now is Leh, the capital of Ladakh, though it has a population of just 25,000 people, and Ladakh a population of just 200,000 in an area the size of England. While we were trekking we imagined civilization would hold many delights for us on our return, not least tandoori chicken, cold beer and chips, as well as books, internet and telephone access and hot showers. Yet returning to town hasn’t quite been the experience we imagined it to be. When Ghandi was asked what he thought about western civilization he famously replied that he thought it would be a very good idea. Similarly, on returning to what is meant to be civilization, it seemed remarkable how uncivilized it all is, particularly compared to many of the mountain villages we had been staying in and walking through on our trek. True, none of them had Salman Rushdie novels, or pizza, or Kingfisher lager, but they were clean, peaceful and friendly, they were proper communities where neighbours helped one another with the harvest and looking after their animals, and there was no waste. Human shit decomposes in dry latrines and is used as fertiliser. Animal shit, meanwhile, is carefully dried in the sun and used as solid fuel for stoves (there are barely any trees in the mountains). The very existence of these villages seemed like something of a miracle to us when we came across them. Our trek did not dip below 3,500m altitude (the highest mountain in Britain is lower than 1500m) and as Ladakh receives on average just 40mm of rain a year, much of the region is a high, arid, mountain-desert wilderness. Yet among this wilderness there are towns bordered by glacial debris, scree slopes and vast cliff faces that look like green oases with fields of barley, potatoes and peas and small copses of willow trees. The people in these remote villages create these oases by digging elaborate irrigation channels, often many kilometres long, that feed the land with glacial meltwater, and have done so for more than 2,000 years. In many ways all this feels more like civilization than the diesel fumes, plastic waste and hundreds of stray dogs that we found in Leh.
A similar story of how ‘civilized societies’ can learn a lot from these Ladakhi villages is told in two films that I managed to watch while in Leh: Ancient Futures and The Economics of Happiness. Ancient Futures is also a book by Helena Norberg-Hodge and it is an extremely thought-provoking study.
Ancient Futures
