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2003-07-08 - Leh - Alchi - Leh (Day 84)

While in the shop looking at paintings yesterday, only one customer came in during the hours I was there, but she joined in the review of the paintings and looked through them with me (though in the end, she too left without a purchase). I came to find she was a law student in Virginia and as she was leaving, invited me to join her and a friend in a tour of the monasteries to the west. I had planned to make the same tour and had been told the ride was wonderful, but having to give up the wind in my hair for a jeep was a tough choice. In the end, I opted to see if these law students would have any humor and joined them for the trip.

Andrea and Carly turned out to be quite fun, though they had me quite worried at the start of the trip as the first conversation was on Indian Constitutional Law and guarantee to a quality of life - (yup, that was a bit overly deep for 9am!) ...but fortunately we all soon laughed that this was way too law-geek for this morning and conversation relaxed as we made our way to the first monetary at Phiyang.

Here we were very lucky to be in time to watch the morning puja (prayer ceremony) with a number of monks in the central hall bathed in soft light filtering through from the second floor, chanting in time to the ceremonial drums and horns. One very young monk was sitting in the darkness at the back so I went to take his photograph. After taking it, I turned on the LCD screen to show him and as he was looking I see the eldest monk look up from his prayer book and I thought, "uh, oh! Busted!"... Now in context this monk is clearly quite old with a long gray beard and hair tied up in a top knot. He doesn't look like the kind who is going to take any nonsense, especially from such a young monk - however, as I'm looking at him certain he'll take the baton from the ceremonial drum and throw it at either the monk or I for showing disrespect during prayers, I see him get this amazing grin for just a second then he looks back down at the prayer book and joins in the chants again. "Whew! That was close!" The little monk had not noticed any of this, enthralled with checking out his picture on the camera back.

We continue on to Basgo, which even from the road it was easy to see the amazing part of these buildings was that they were even standing at all. Perched on top of wind-etched sandstone and blending into the hills themselves, the former palace and monastery were in an incredible state of decay. On the walk up there were a number of workers carrying stones on wooden backpacks with two pegs sticking out to rest the rocks on, up to the monetary in an effort to try to keep the place in shape - but its clear that any restoration work on the buildings was fighting against hundreds of years of destruction caused by the elements in this harsh climate of wind, sun and cold and probably wouldn't lead to much.

The next stop was the monasteries at Alchi, which seemed just the opposite of Basgo, in that Basgo was a place "time destroyed" and Alchi was a place "time forgot". Way back in the hills away from the Indus, Alchi was one of the earliest monasteries in the area and its design, carvings and paintings are very different from the newer monasteries closer to Leh which all seemed to be related if not copies of each other. Alchi's depictions of people in Mugal dress whose look and feel was very Arabic, quite different from the standard Tibetan influence.

One of the items I found most amusing was one tree on the monastery grounds, which had a plaque saying that this was the original walking stick of the founding monk, now grown into a tree. It was a very nice touch and a pleasant legend I'd like to believe.

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