The next morning we left Pangong Tso with some sadness, although our trip back to Leh lay through the remarkable monastery of Thiksey, the largest in Ladakh and home to some 16th-century frescoes of people and animals being flayed alive and other intriguing images that we believe Picasso must have looked at before he started painting. Another chapel housed a beautiful contemporary Buddha statue that the Dalai Lama is enraptured with.
Close to Leh, we visited another former royal palace of Ladakhi kings, Shey, and marveled at the 10th-century Buddhist rock carvings forgotten on its roadside. Both Thiksey and Shey had some of the loveliest views onto a mountain valley that featured a stark divide between a rocky desert and a green oasis with lush fields.
The following day, our last in Ladakh, Misha was working furiously and I strolled around the playground of Leh--a paradoxical city of 20,000 and 3,000 tourists (I know the exact number because it was in the news--Leh, as you may have read, was hit by a freak flood two days ago that sadly destroyed the homes of many Tibetan refugees living in its suburb and killed close to 200 people).
But on this July day, Leh was its usual, a peaceful, leafy place surrounded by mountains on all sides. Walking around this town for even five minutes is not the most transcendental experience, however, because you quickly realize that Leh sells just about everything from India to its tourists (for many of them, this is their one glimpse of the country, so they are eager to snap up everything from pashminas to turquoise jewelry to Tibetan singing bowls).
Speaking of the bowls, I could not resist--after spending an hour in a store chock full of them, I was fascinated. They are made of bronze and resound with an ever-escalating hum when you drag a wooden stick around them--apparently, this is a Buddhist meditation technique and can be done for hours. Somehow, after many screeching attempts, the one I bought does not resonate quite as beautifully as it did for the saleslady, but I do not lose hope.
Another, non-commercial, experience for me that day (besides tasting the delicious mountain apricots) was walking through the winding passageways of Leh to the little-known 9th-century Gokhang stupa. In the middle of a shady grove with a mountain stream running through it, the stupa is somewhat off the well-trodden tourist track, even despite the 5th-century carvings still visible on the rocks nearby. And, when I stood outside it and looked at its familiar Tibetan shape, with imprints of the craftsmen's hands still visible after all these centuries, I truly felt like I had been to a world where spirituality and tradition have not yet lost the fight with modernity.
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