Leh Polo match

Completely by chance we heard some horses walking down a little path near our guest house. We decided to follow them and discovered a Polo match going on. It was superb, really fast and quite dangerous as a spectator. The horses are all Zanskar ponies, small and perfect for high altitude. At 3,500m they ran constantly for about an hour.

Ladakhi portraits slideshow

Sengi La

On the top of the Sengi La, Jo made a little panoramic video of the view. Here it is:

Video to show monkees' mum

We arrived at Phuktal Gompa to meet Stanzin's brother (a young monk). We delivered a letter which we thought would be touching and emotional..it actually said - 'Make them tea and give them food' - so we ended up in a room with a senior monk and 4 monkees.

Stanzin's brother was also called Stanzin...just like his sister and about 40% of the people in Zanskar.

We eventually made this video to show his mum, who we would be staying with a week later.

'Julay' means hello,thankyou, goodbye, excuse me.

An Indian haircut

I started off the trip with big, blond, curly hair - nobody could even see my face - I became a hairstyle - a man with hair - I wasn't Simon anymore.

With Isabelle's brave support I had the curls removed. I so wanted to keep them........

They felt like bushy pubes sat there on my lap.

A great toilet discovery

We'd been staying in hotels for a few days and all of us had noticed that there was something weird about the toilets - a slightly different seat attachment system we all thought.

None of us looked - we just assumed and got on with the thrills of the Israeli ghetto in Manali Old Town - why do they stick together like a herd?

I ended up examining the bathroom in Jo's hotel room and decided to investigate the 'mildly interesting' toilet hinge by actually looking at it, pressing buttons, lifting seats and turning taps - firing water all over myself and across the room by accident, completely unaware that water would come out from a flexible hose attached under the seat with the force of a police water cannon being used to disperse rioters.

Amazed by the undoubted genius of this invention, we decided to start the 'no to toilet paper!!!' campaign and promote this new, hygenic, environmental solution to our friends, through our expertly made advertisement feature (adverture).
We hope that eventually, by word of mouth, the idea will spread and people will begin to demand such a fitting on every toilet on Earth.
HELP SAVE THE RAINFORESTS

Zanskar roofs

This is Stanzin's house from the outside - the roof is covered with fodder for the animals in the winter - there's a really red dry plant that they seem to find all over the place. There are also dried dung cakes stacked everywhere, ready for winter - to cook with and also heat the house. Here's some more Yak cake roofs:

Taj Mahal

We travelled from Delhi to Agra to see the Taj Mahal. It was absolutely beautiful and really worth seeing although the cost of $15 is pretty steep. They should give you 24 hours in there for that price (several visits). It had to be the cleanest place we saw in our brief trip around India.

Indian Roads and animals

India seems to have an inability to keep animals off the roads, there are 30,000 Brahimincal Cows (Sacred) in Delhi and they just wander the streets being fed by local people despite widespread begging. Their waste is everywhere and is quite hard to avoid. In Rajasthan camels were used to pull large carts and also elephants were still being used on some roads. There were still the predictable sacred cows everywhere.

Indian Dentists

We were walking down the street in Jaipur and found several dental stalls, we chatted to these guys who were really friendly and they explained how they had acrylic teeth, front sets, complete sets of false teeth (from dead people) and cold also do extractions and fillings. All we could think was thank God we don't have toothache.

Stanzin and his family

Stanzin's younger brother - lives in a monastery called Phuktal Gompa - a beautiful place about 4 days walk from Padum - perched on a cliff up a side valley off the Kargiak river near Purne. We went to visit him with a message from Stanzin ('Make them tea and feed them') and recorded a video to play to Stanzin and his parents when we got to his village (Shi)

When we did eventually get to Shi, it was beautiful, on a big junction in the river with loads of pasture for the horses and Yaks. We had food there and camped outside the house. The rooms are all designed to keep out the cold, small doors - completely made from mud and wood. All the animals live downstairs during the winter and their heat keeps the people above them warm. The whole Zanskar valley is cut off from October until June, the only way out is over very high passes or for a few weeks in the middle of winter people use the frozen river as a road - a 10 day journey only takes 3 days. The temperatures are around -20C on average although in the sun it can hit 15C. Most people spend the winter sitting on the sunny side of the house, moving as the sun moves. The only time people really leave is to take the animals to water. Snow leopards come down from the hills and attack the animals (One of Stanzin's ponies had a huge wound on it's back from a recent attack and wasn't working at all)

Stanzin, being the older brother, provides for 12 members of his family including all his brothers and sisters, his parents, grandparents and his wife and daughter. He can manage about 4 treks a year if he is very lucky, but as we saw, most of the money he earns vanishes as he walks along the path - 2000 rupees here for his brother to see the eye doctor in Padum, 1000 rupees for his mother in laws medicine, 2000 rupees to take his grandmother to the hospital. He pays for one brother to go to a private school in Reru and another sister to go to a school in Padum. He is 31 and lives with his parents in the family home. His wife comes from one of the few villages with trees (Ichar) so he was saving up to build a house for himself in Shi. We set him up an email address to help him get work and I put it on several Ladakh forums and on the Lonely Planet website, but his chances of reading email are limited - at least 4 days walk away. He'd never used a computer before but was very quick to learn (moving the mouse up the screen initially meant lifting it in the air)

stanzingstobphial@yahoo.co.in OR stanzinstobphial@yahoo.co.in

Lamayuru to Darcha Trek (20 days)

The trek was amazing - we managed to buy a pressure cooker of a pony man finishing a trek with a large group, Stanzin ferretted around in Wanla and found enough food to keep us alive, flour, ghee, rice, dahl, jam, potatoes, cabbage, tea and soup....it wasn't exciting but it contained calories. For a few days eating wasn't easy anyway - altitude removes your appetite and when you walk 20-25km a day you're almost too knackered to eat in the evenings. We carried our stuff - Stanzin and the two ponies carried food and his things. The first 10 days were very up and down, 3 passes close to 5000m, lots of villages and hard work.

The second section, from Padum to Darcha was much easier and we spent lots of time with Stanzin's family and friends, at their houses, or just camped in their villages. Most of the walk followed the Kargiak river and then we climbed the 5000m Shingo La pass and walked down to Darcha.

Lamayuru

Here we found Stanzin our pony man, but no food...... we decided to walk to start our trek with no food and hopefully buy food at the next two villages of Wanla and Phanjila. We also needed a pressure cooker (rice cooks very slowly at this altitude - water boils at about 85C) and plates. In Lamayuru the village was very chilled - mainly old people left behind with the little children. The village has the best Gompa (monastery) in the region and also a very strange post office (a red box attached to a post)....It worked - the mail arrived.

Getting to Lamayuru

We got a jeep from Leh to Lamayuru - 140km West of Leh. The journey was amazing and throught the barest but most beautiful scenery - the only colour is the sky and a few fertile patches of land near rivers. It's a world of army trucks and police checks with it being so close to Pakistan. There are lots of old Amabassador taxis moving people around this deserted world - most of them are over 30 years old.