Lost — and found — in Ladakh

Back in 2001 Fionnuala McHugh, a Hong Kong-based journalist, was looking for a place "where I could disappear from time to time."

She journeyed to Ladakh — a Tibetan Buddhist corner of Muslim-majority Kashmir — and "stepped into a new life."

Here is her haunting July 29 account of her transformation, as it appeared in the Financial Times.

Views from a found horizon

The first time, I went to Ladakh out of curiosity. It's one of those places that travellers want to see because for decades they couldn't: it only opened to tourists in 1974 and it's an anomaly — a Tibetan Buddhist corner of Muslim-majority Kashmir, a lonely crow's-nest sailing high above the babble and chaos of India.

I flew up from Delhi in August 2001 and I can still remember the disappointment of landing in the quarry that is Leh's military airfield. We were escorted off the plane by soldiers. Ladakh sits on the apex of Pakistan, India and China and so Leh, the capital, is a vast garrison town. The air, what there was of it at 3,500m, was filled with dust and the landscape looked arid and denuded as if it had been scraped raw by a vicious giant.

"Ugly," I wrote in my notebook, and next to that I scribbled that there was a Ladakhi driver outside the airport holding up a sign waiting for "Mr Proust". Of such ironies do remembrances of things past consist. Breathless and dizzy, I took a taxi to the Oriental Guest House, which a Delhi friend had recommended, and with that stepped into a new life.

In 2001, I'd been living in Asia for eight years and what I was looking for, though I didn't know it then, was a pocket of a place where I could fold myself up and disappear from time to time, as remote from my other life in Hong Kong but as close to my heart as it is possible to be in this cycle of existence.

That first summer at the Oriental consisted of exploring Ladakh's monasteries on afternoons of white heat and dark, juniper-scented interiors: you had to adjust your vision between the outside sun and the inner flame. In the early evenings, I would lie on my bed with the windows open, looking over at the pink snowline of the Stok range on the opposite side of the valley. In summer, the wind always rises at that hour and you hear the poplars and the willows rustling, the magpies screeching like football rattles and the unlocked glacial water pouring down from the mountains into Ladakh's streams. The wind blows over villages called Chiling and Snout and Egoo and, on the two-day road trip back down, I stopped at Pang and felt it.

"You should see Ladakh in winter," Nawang, who owns the Oriental, had told me. So cold, said fastidious friends in Delhi, shuddering. But four months later, in December 2001, I was back. The timing was not auspicious. In the interim, the World Trade Center had been destroyed in New York and India's parliament buildings had come under terrorist attack the previous week and its army had mobilised along the border with Pakistan. ("Madam, it is do or die," explained a Delhi waiter. "And we must do.") On the Jet Airways 737 from Delhi to Leh, there were six passengers - four Indians from the plains, huddled down at the back; Mr Yamada, who had a noodle shop in Tokyo and cheerfully planned to go trekking, and me.

Winter Ladakh was so different, it was another universe. Gone were the lacquered garden flowers of summer and the leaves quivering on the trees; gone was the sound of water; gone were the tourists and the Kashmiri traders flogging pashminas and dope; gone were the masseurs and pizza-sellers and New Age rebirthers. When I walked with cows and donkeys along the Changspa road from the Oriental into Leh, all I could hear was the ghostly sigh of last summer's posters ("Anyone fancy sharing a Jeep to Manali?") shredding in the winter wind. The Trans-Himalayan land had locked itself away behind a high wall of extreme cold and impermeable passes — you had to trade some hardship to get in. And, once you did, it was so beautiful in its isolation that the summer's lingering half-sense of a personal Shangri-la was gone. Now I knew for certain, when I looked out of my window at the dazzling Stok range, that this was a found horizon.

I couldn't — and still can't, even after my seventh trip in May with an eighth one planned in September — explain exactly why. In winter, there is no running water (washing is carried out at midday in a makeshift plastic greenhouse Nawang constructs in the denuded garden — I use a tin, labelled Ajanta Sterilised Paneer, to break the ice in a bucket of cold water, add it to a bucket of boiling water and then douse myself), everything stinks of kerosene, the electricity supply is erratic and, usually, the outside world generates only madness. One bright winter's afternoon, Nawang squatted outside next to me and drew a map of Kashmir's border with Pakistan in the dust and said that if there was war, he and his brother Dorj and his son Dawa would have to report to the army.

But war has not come, although the summer of 2002 had its moments of concern over a potential nuclear conflict. That previous February, I'd gone to hear the oracles at the Stok festival. When the fields fasten themselves up in winter, the local people are released from their rural duties so true Ladakhi gatherings are held in sub-zero temperatures. The oracles spoke in their own language, amid a stupendous whirling frenzy of cymbals and drums and dancers wearing skull-masks, but apparently their predictions only concerned rainfall. Nothing about, say, happenings in nearby Afghanistan? "You are not thinking locally," said a Ladakhi scholar, smiling. "Testing them is a foreign attitude. They don't like to be tested."

So I do not put Ladakh to the test. I do not question my own response. All I know is that, in the summer, the Indus is like turbulent chai, the fields are bright with mustard and barley, and the ramparts of the mountains are darkly watchful. I once stood at a monastery in Stok and saw a man below, standing waist-high in a pond, hurling logs into the air, and when I asked why, Nawang replied: "Cleaning the wood-smoke from his roof." And that is a summer memory — a glittering dot of water and the man exuberantly flinging his ceiling into the sky, up on the roof of the world.

In winter, the Indus is jade-green, frigidly clear, with daggers of ice in its heart. The chill is so sharp that it heightens your perceptions. I've felt the ground grow beneath my feet on this youngest part of the earth's surface, and it wasn't until I came to Ladakh that I finally understood the urge to prostrate oneself, in overwhelmed spiritual ecstasy, as the Tibetans do. The mountains jostle and ring in your head, until you feel you might burst with a sense of their magnificence. The dry air crackles with electricity. At night, in my sleeping bag, thousands of miles from any shore, there are so many sparks that I feel I'm swimming in a shoal of phosphorescent fish. I always have anxiety dreams about leaving or that I can't get back.

In the freezing mornings, it's a relief to get up and run downstairs to the kitchen where there is no man-made electricity but Dorje is watching the sun rise while revolving his prayer-wheel (Om Mani Padme Hum!), and butter-tea is being churned in the corner, and Nawang and Dawa call out "Jullay!", the all-purpose Ladakhi greeting, and another day in Ladakh begins. When I put my hands into my pockets to warm them, there's usually a dried apricot inside that someone has given me on the road. I know exactly what it will taste like: hard and unyielding at first, then a sudden softness, then a sweet, sweet surprise.