Friday Aug 16, Leh India

It was a long trip, not surprising since effectively the opposite side of the world.  Total travel time was about 29 hours, although long, essentially uneventful.  Two lessons:

Lesson 1:  If one leaves Vancouver late at night and you fly over the pole, don’t bother getting a window seat, it was pure black outside the full 14 hour flight from Vancouver to Delhi.

Lesson 2:  The cheapest airline is often not the cheapest airline.  We flew Spice Air from Delhi to Leh, the flight was $100, but…  it flew out of the other terminal way over there, a 1/2 hour “welcome to the chaos of the roads in India”  taxi ride, and everything was extra - the one checked bag plus bike box was $170, you want food - $4 for the worst sandwich I have every eaten, you want water, more rupees please.

The town of Leh is really interesting, located in the Himalayas, cut off from the rest of the world during the winter.  There are Budist temples high on the hills either side of town - good reference points to help get your bearings, particularly since none of the streets are straight for more than 20’.  Many many small Hotels, Guest houses and Home Stays.  Very friendly, very much a tourist town, a major centre for hiking, trekking, mountain biking etc.,  But Leh is at an elevation of 3,500M (11,500ft) - carrying bike and bags up two flights of stairs required some recovery time.

Speaking of elevation, they have an ultra marathon starting here today called LaUltra - 555km, 5 times to 17,500ft elevation and 5.5 days to complete.  For those that think that might be a bit of challenge, there are 333km, 222km and 111km versions - but all at high elevation 11,000ft+.

As I noted in my previous post, The Indian Government has moved to remove the special status of the Kashmir (the Kashmir is mainly Muslim, the rest of India mainly Hindu and Buddhist.  Leh has been part of Jammu and Kashmir but as part of this move by the Indian Government it is now part of India.  Leh is Buddhist, so they are very happy, in fact banners in the streets:

I had the fun of getting a local SIM card yesterday for my phone, the good news was for $4 I got the SIM card good for 28days with 1.6Gig a day of data (yes, I said a day), along with a bunch of normal calling and text features, they also threw in free TV on my phone.  The bad news, getting the SIM card was a three hour process.  Indians don’t understand the normal (to us) etiquette of queuing, add in that their sense of personal space is 1/4” - getting to the front of a queue is a very frustrating experience and to top it off when Dunnery and I did get to the front of the queue we were told to come back at 2:00 - it was time for their lunch break, and yes there was no memory of who had been where when the lunch break was called.

A couple notes from my wanders around Leh:

• cows have priority re rules of the road/alley/walkway

• many of the locals look very Mongolian - not surprising since Genghis Khan’s empire reached to the top of India
• smell of Incense wafting from various small temples
• lots of new construction - they seem to be doing very well from tourism

Unfortunately whilst attempting to clean up and organize photos I accidentally deleted several, so only one of Leh to post, more to come.

There is also a heavy military presence in Leh, some I expect has to do with the change of status of Jammu and Kashmir, but more significantly I expect it is connected to protecting the northern border with China (not that far from here).

P.S.

I am having trouble connecting to my email, I’m convinced it is a Telus problem, so feel free to forward to anyone that my blog is back going.