Markha Valley Trek

I've decided for the first time to contextualize my photos with text.

To end my 7 weeks in India I went back to Ladakh to go trekking.  When I was there the first time, there was still snow on the high passes.

Tourist season in Ladakh started on May 1st this year once cars were able to get over the mountain roads from the south.

When I arrived in Leh the second time around the town was filled with domestic tourists.  In April there had been only one restaurant open.  Now there were dozens.  Indian workers from all over the country had arrived to service the tourists and to work on construction projects.  Bollywood films played on restaurant TVs and black smoke hung above and behind bumper to bumper traffic jams in the narrow streets.

Having left Delhi looking forward to fresh air and silence, I wasn't interested in hanging out in town for very long.

I decided to hike the Markha Valley Trail.  I acclimated to the altitude for three days in Leh and set off with my guide Tsanzing.

I was connected to a fabulous local wilderness guide named Tsanzing who served as a translator and was wonderful company for eight days.

The Markha Valley (with the Markha River at its base) runs parallel to the Leh Valley which carries the Indus down from the Himalayas.

It's not possible (not yet) to drive to the Markha Valley.  High mountain passes protect it from three sides and the Zanskar River cuts off the fourth.

We reached the valley by walking to a village named Rumbak and then up over a high pass.  The Indian government is currently building a road to Rumbak to allow tourists convenient access during the winter when snow leopards can be spotted.  Inevitably, the introduction of noises and smells and people will push the snow leopards further into the wilderness.  Along with the enormous amount of garbage that has been strewn by worker along its length, another downside to this road's construction is that the small villages on the way to Rumbak, which previously could rely on hikers overnighting for extra funds, are now easily bypassed by jeeps that can make it further into the wilderness then they could before.

The Markha Valley itself is the location of another road project.  A few years ago construction started on a road from the Zanskar River up through the valley with the goal of connecting its tiny villages by car.  Environmentalists were able to halt construction on this road and a flood washed out the bridge that would have connected it over the river to other roads that eventually lead to the highway.  Construction on a new bridge is supposedly going to start soon and more road will inevitably be built after that.

Speaking with the villagers,  the general consensus seemed to be that a road up the valley would be welcomed.

Despite the whole area encompassing the valley being labeled a national park on maps and signs, the exact meaning of that term, at least in this part of India is unclear to me.  The "park" is in fact controlled if not owned by the region's largest monastery and the villagers have cultivated the valley floor with fields and tree plantations.  There's no real sense of any organized preservation efforts.  The valley is pristine only because it's so sparsely populated and, I would imagine, the Ladakhi's apparently traditional hygienic customs that seem so out of place in India, a country where littering is absolutely seemingly the norm almost everywhere.

The locals we spoke to said that they had hoped preserving the valley without a road would insure greater income through tourism.  Unfortunately, they told us, that never panned out and they now hope a road will bring opportunities for selling their produce and wood and make life in this desolate place somewhat easier.

Ladakh was closed to outsiders until 1986 and it's only since then, approximately only one generation, that the main towns in the region have been built up into small cities.  For only about two decades more than that, the Indian army has been making its presence felt in the region, building up bases and troop numbers to repel and discourage encroachment by Pakistan and China. With that change, villagers have taken to using currency for transactions rather than barter and trade and many spend the warmer months working in Leh or Kargil.  Schools in Leh are closed in the dead of winter and the children return to the villages to spend the coldest months hunkered down inside mud brick homes.

All of this is to say that the population we met in the villages along the valley floor in June was largely female and aging.

I cannot think of another place where I have witnessed such hard work carried out for so many hours day after day.

The women wake up long before sunrise to make breakfast and are still churning butter of baking bread well into the night.  Between those activities they spend the daylight hours harvesting saplings for roofs, building homes as a community, drying dung for stove fuel, shepherding goats and sheep and tilling and planting the fields.  All the while they're always ready to host the occasional foreign trekker who wanders in hoping for a cup of tea.

With the greater integration of northern and southern India, rice and Dal have become the staples of the villagers' diet.  When available they clearly prefer more traditional dishes based on barley.  There is almost no variety in what the locals are able to grow or acquire day in and day out.

My point in describing how unbelievably hard life is for these villagers is only to illustrate why no one could possibly blame them for wanting a road.  The truth is that, with or without the road, the specific valley culture and lifestyle that I saw will probably not be around for much longer.