Driving through the mountains for hours on end makes one hungry. After nine hours of being on the road, the Ladhaki landscape appeared edible. Dusty brown chocolate truffle mountains, sharp Black Forest cake mountains, purple blueberry pie mountains and soft tiramisu-like caramel colored mountains topped with snow. Running through this delicious landscape is the River Indus: chocolate milkshake making its way through pancake plains. Ladakh is truly the land of high-altitude desserts.
Tso Kar lay at the end of one of these delectable drives, where a hot bowl of Maggie noodles put an end to my food-related hallucinations. Tso Kar, a vast salt water lake, sits at the center of a mosaic of bright green marshland and smooth white salt mounds hosting a range of rare species such as the black-necked crane and the kiang.
The salt mounds and wetlands of the Tso Kar basin
Here in Tso Kar, everything is beautiful. The elegant birds that inhabit the plains, the local people whose sun-wrinkled skin deepens their smiles, the ornate monastery with bright colored murals… I could go on. What I found most beautiful of all was that the community that lives around Tso Kar still follows its nomadic traditions. I found it fascinating that close to a hundred families should pack up their belongings, gather the old and the young and move across the plains through the summer, herding their animals till winter came. Without romanticizing the hardships of their lives, I am in awe of their connection to the landscape and the seasons, their local knowledge and their willingness to follow a nomadic existence in spite of the influence that tourism has had on the region. I wonder how many of the younger nomads value this hard yet beautiful way of living and how many of them have desires of living in a city with access to a school, a hospital and an internet connection.
The Thukje gonpa
With the melting of the snow and the opening of the mountain passes, visitors like myself pour into Ladakh, bringing with us our fast paced, mall-cultured, Swiggy- assisted lives. I wonder if there is a way of amalgamating these two worlds in such a way that the communities that inhabit Tso Kar are able to choose the future they want. I am so grateful to have witnessed this stunning alien landscape at this pivotal moment in time.
The author, with edible mountains behind her.