Rainy Day Trip

Today the Koreans and I hired a jeep and visited four monasteries in Ladakh: Taktok, Chemrey, Stakna and Matho. It was a rainy day which is unusual for Ladakh, but it’s happening more frequently in the past few years due to global warming (and is having disastrous effects on the walls and murals of the monasteries, etc.). Nevertheless, it was a beautiful day and I made tons of images. Above is our driver Tenzin at Karu, a grubby road stop town near some army camps. I don’t know why but I started photographing like a madwoman at Karu, everything looked so beautiful, maybe it was the light and not having shot since I returned from Zanskar, or maybe it was Tenzin’s curly hair, or some creative spirit running wild in Ladakh that day… I used my 50mm wide open throughout the day, which made me a lot looser and I like what happened. The women working with the two horses and a dzo were making cooking oil from the grass. They sing songs when they do this kind of work that apparently the animals love and won’t budge without. I’d like to have some of these songs translated for my book…