Dolma’s Garden
My home-base in Ladakh is the Skit Tsal guest house in Leh. It’s a traditional home stay in a nice, big house run by a lovely couple, Dolma and Phunchok. The grandfather, who’s still chugging along at 92, and their two young sons live here too. The two-story house is located in Leh’s upper Karzoo [...]
Glorious Alchi
Alchi is the artistic gem of Ladakh. Its temples and stupas are filled with beautiful, well-preserved Buddhist artwork from the 11-12th centuries, pre-dating the Tibetan style that came later. It’s said to be one of the 108 temples founded by Rinchen Zangpo, the 10th century scholar and translator of Buddhist Sanskrit texts. The whole life [...]
Wanla Gompa
One of the four branches of Lamayuru monastery, Wanla Monastery dates to the time of Rinchen Zangpo (958-1055) and shares features with Lamayuru’s ancient Sengge-Gang temple and the temples at Alchi, Mangyu and Sumda Chun. All are located in the same general area west of Leh. Wanla gompa is set high on a hill overlooking [...]
Sengge-Gang at Lamayuru
Lamayuru is perhaps the oldest monastery in Ladakh, thought to be a site of the ancient Bön religion of Tibet. Legend has it that Rinchen Zangpo (958-1055), who is said to have built 108 temples in western Tibet, built two temples and five stupas at Lamayuru. One of thos is probably Sengge-Gang, whose wall paintings [...]
Sitapatara
This is the one of the few statues of Sitapatara in Ladakh. She’s from the 17th century and lives inside the shrine at Leh Palace. Sitapatara is worshipped in Tibetan Buddhism as a protectress from harm, diseases and evil spirits. Her hand gesture is symbolic of this. She looks like a female Avaloketesvara with the [...]
Hemis Festival
The biggest and most commercial festival in Ladakh is not the best, but still worth checking out. Thousands of people, mostly tourists and photographers, attend Hemis Monastery’s annual summer festival. It’s unbearably packed, pushy and hot, but it’s still Ladakhi and for that worth the effort to visit. I couldn’t even see the masked dancing [...]
A Room With a View
This is the view from my room at eight o’clock Sunday morning. My guesthouse is in the north part of Leh, which is rural and wealthy compared to other parts of town and wasn’t affected by the floods. It’s perfectly quiet and lovely here. The fields have been harvested and fall is in the air. [...]
10 Things I Love About Ladakh
The Sounds — Waking up to the sounds of silence, nature, animals and people working quietly has a way of setting me straight. The Friendliness — There are few places in the world where you can approach a house and ask whomever is there for a cup of tea or a meal or give you [...]
Sumda Chun
Yesterday I hired a car/driver and traveled with a Ladakhi friend/guide to visit two remote monasteries west of Leh: Sumda Chun and Mangyu. Along with Alchi, they form a trilogy of early Tibetan Buddhist temples dating from the 11th century. The artwork of these temples is totally unlike the other Buddhist temples in the region [...]
Tso Moriri Trip
Here’s a small set of photos from a three-day trip with the Koreans, Tenzin the driver, and my Ladakhi friend Nurboo. We visited Tso Moriri and Tso Kar Lakes, the nomads who live around them, a couple of monasteries, and the Rumtse area where the Indian and Asian continents collided. It wasn’t a great photo [...]
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 [...]
Living, working and moving on
After vowing that I’d never wait tables again, I have to eat my words. For the past week I’ve waited tables at Norlak, the little Tibetan restaurant where I’ve eaten daily since arriving in Leh. I knew that the place was short staffed (their cook left a few weeks ago, tourists have been pouring into [...]
12th Century Meditation Cave
Over the past few days I’ve traveled by bus to Saspol, a sweet little village about two hours from Leh, to photograph this meditation cave. The mountainside above Saspol is dotted with meditation caves and thankfully they’re off the tourist circuit. The one shown here is the largest and contains 12th century murals on all [...]
Road to Lamayuru
I was invited by a few of the dentists working for the dZi Foundation to go on a day trip to the monasteries at Lamayuru and Alchi, and since I hadn’t been on a single road trip since I arrived over a month ago and can’t pass up a trip to a monastery I thought [...]
Stupas at Shey
About 15 km from Leh near Shey Palace there’s a large field with hundreds of stupas in various states of erosion. Stupas are built to offer respect to the Buddha; some house physical relics of the Buddha, mantras on paper or other objects. Apparently the ones at Shey were built by people as a form [...]
Leh, Ladakh
Leh, the capital of Ladakh, sits at 3,505 meters (11,500 feet) above sea level in a valley in the Ladakh Range of the Himalayas. Although part of India since independence in 1947, Ladakh is distinctly Central Asian as it borders Tibet in the east, Xinjiang in the north, Baltistan (in Pakistan) in the northwest, Kashmir [...]
