Leh, Ladakh, India
Day 4: Leh Palace, Tsemo Castle, Leh market
Part of the Ladakh 2017 Trip series
2017-09-13, 22:28, JASON
BUDGET, STAY: Tsetan Guest House
2017-09-13, 22:28, JASON
BUDGET, STAY: Tsetan Guest House
They say altitude sickess takes a day or two to set in, and I didn't believe them. It wasn't until I woke up with a pounding headache that I realized it does.
The night was horrible. Kept waking up. Blanket too hot. Then too cold. Feverish. One of those nights.
I end up staying in bed until 11:30 since I feel incapacitated. Then, I realized I'd spent three days to Leh on this god-forsaken mountain top of a town, so I was going to see it. I pull myself out of bed to go. Thorin's been waiting and using the internet since about 09:00. We decide to head up to Leh Palace and take a look at the market. I couldn't not get myself up for this:
The market has an "old-trading post" feel to it, that kind of desert, sandy vibe, similar to a caricature of an "Arabian Market" that you would see somewhere. And, there's a bunch of white people everywhere.
I'll never understand white fascination with exotic places (especially India, in particular). But it's pretty white. I mean, you can walk around and see them doing the "Southeast Asian" thing. Among the white people are the various looks of the locals, from the more exotic and handsome Kashmiri folk to your local Tibetan or Ladakhi people. They're uncategorizable. I've never seen people that looked so mixed, and from spectrums of mixed-white-Asian to mixed-Asian-Asian. And so, I just use ethnicity to refer to them: They're Ladakhi. They're Tibetan. They're Kashmiri. They're Indian. These seem to be the distinguishing facts that people care about here.
To get to Leh Palace, we go through an older part of town and climb against the old Palace's back side in order to reach the top. Along the way, we turn around and take a few pictures of what we see, the higher we go.
Strangely enough, the altitude effects wear off for me while I climb. The circulation in my body picks up again and I feel like my head is oxygenated. There's still a slight ache in the back, but it's not as bad as when I woke up. The air is incredibly fresh, and there's not a cloud in the sky. The exercise helps.
When we finally make it up to the Palace, we pay our foreigner fee and enter. Most of it is pretty unpreserved, which is nice. But more or less it's a museum housed inside the Palace. When we get to the 9th floor after looping around the maze of what is the Old Palace, we see a small temple at the top of the mountain, which seems very far away. We also see a few people starting at the base of the mountain and climbing up slowly. I feel a bit better, but in no mood to climb that mountain.
It's not until we get down that we see the path to the base of the mountain in fact isn't very far. The scaling up of the mountain is still high but I decide to go through with it anyway. I want to contextualize myself a bit. I made it all the way here, and I'm lucky to be in Leh. What's a bit of climbing the mountain? So I climb. But the more I climb, again, the better I feel. The headache disappears even for a bit. We eventually make it up there and pay the (cheaper) tourist price to climb some old ladders to the top of the monastery. There's two white people sitting on the ledge there looking out into beautiful Leh, trying to be spiritual. Blah. We leave.
I hadn't had an appetite all day today. Something about not feeling like eating, but I know I should. Thorin and I ducked into a Pakistani place earlier before departing to Leh palace who was serving mutton, and even though Thorin had only ordered one dish, the man came with two so I was forced to eat some (delicious) mutton. I'm sure it was great but I was really not in the mood, but, I was too embarrassed not to eat it. So I did. After that, I really had no appetite to eat anything else.
When we were walking through the market, the only thing that somewhat struck my interest was apricots. Leh this time of year apparently has really good apricots -- they're meant to be very sweet, full of that apricot flavor. In the daytime, the market has its main shops open to the public. However, in the afternoon, the street is lined with older ladies selling vegetables and fruits on mats they've laid out along the sidewalk. The place seems to sink in with a bit of local flavor and come alive from the morning market. The sun is setting and the place picks up in activity.
I go up to an auntie selling apricots. She lets us try it first before selling it to us. When we give her the seed back, she takes a rock and smashes it, revealing a nut. What the fuck? Is that where nuts come from?? It tastes like an almond. We decide to go with one variety of the apricots - it's a bit sweeter and darker in color compared to the one we don't get. She takes out some pieces of metal and counterbalances 500 grams of apricots on her scale and puts them in a plastic bag and we nod in approval.
We sit in a middle platform in the middle of Leh market. The headache slowly sinks back in, but the taste of the apricot alleviates it a bit. No other fruit could have satisfied me as much as that bag of apricots did. Something about the flavor of the apricots was perfectly fitting for that moment. Not too sweet, not too potent, just a dull sweetness. That good, nectarine flavor. The aunties continue to try to sell their produce in the background. The mountains still stand tall in the backdrop.
