Journeys in Ladakh, Part IX: Bedding down with the Monks

More beautiful monasteries were in store for us--none quite approached Alchi, but the temples at Chemrey and Hemis, the second-largest monastery in Ladakh, had some of the finer fresco work that we had yet seen.

In the evening, we took a walk around the lovely Hemis village, lying hidden in the mountains with its neat, almost well-to-do houses (it certainly beats being a slum dweller in Mumbai!) The people we saw, largely around the monastery, were engaged in making barley porridge in huge vats or working on repairing the monastery brick walls. They were medieval style, as is so often seen in India--hard physical labor done completely by hand, with dozens of people involved, passing objects to one another and doing a fair bit of standing around as a result.

Hemis was where we would spend the night--our path lay through the village and we needed a place to stay. While no hotels or homestays were available, a sign announced that the monastery rented out basic rooms. Little did we realize, at first, that the rooms, for which we could pay whatever we wanted (we gave around $10) would be monks' cells.

We were led to a truly tiny room, in the white mud brick passageway pictured here. It was occupied by two "beds" or, more accurately, thick carpets, perpendicular to each other, and a raised wooden surface which served as a table. There was a bookshelf built into the wall, filled with religious books and some pictures--no girls or rock stars but the Drukchen Lama, the second most important Tibetan lama after the Dalai and the leader of the Red Hat sect. There was another, locked case, in the wall; perhaps it held more interesting things. The compost toilet was outside, as was a place to wash, provided buckets of water were available. While the carpets were fairly comfortable, there was only a thin blanket--and it gets chilly at night in these parts, so some spiritual fortitude is needed.

In sum, the inhabitant of the cell truly lived like a monk. And, in the morning, up he got, in the room next to ours (since we were bedding down in his room, he moved to his neighbor's), said his prayers at 4 o'clock and, without attending the communal prayer at 7 (not an actual necessity, as we found out, or maybe our monk was just lazy), headed with the others into the communal kitchen (pictured at the top), to take his first meal of the day with his large extended family.