North to Ladakh ( a wonderful different story from John Burns NYT)

[SoCalDem]

Not new, but in a search for recent stuff, I found this delighful travelogue from a family trip he took :)

enjoy..


http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=travel&res=9B06E2D8103DF93BA15751C0A96F958260


North to Ladakh, on a High-Altitude Adventure

By JOHN F. BURNS
Published: February 28, 1999

When my family and I planned an overland journey to Ladakh last summer, it seemed like the ideal conclusion to our assignment in India, where I had spent nearly five years as the South Asia correspondent of The New York Times. Our aim was to round out our travels with a trip so ambitious and compelling that it would ease the wrench of leaving a country that had entwined our hearts.

The plan was to make a two-week, 2,500-mile round-trip road journey northward from New Delhi -- first, across the north Indian plain to the foothills of the Himalayas, then up the deep valleys and over the mountains to Ladakh, a part of ancient Tibet that became a northern outpost of India when it was annexed by Britain in the mid-19th century. Along the way, we would cross several of the world's highest-altitude road passes, one of them at nearly 18,000 feet, close to the height of the base camp used by mountaineers planning ascents of Mount Everest.

In Ladakh, we would explore a territory that has been Buddhist since the third century B.C., and of special significance to Tibetan Buddhists for the past 40 years, when it became a safe redoubt for many of those fleeing the Chinese Communist brutalization of Tibet. For fun, we would camp in the mountains; shoot the headwaters of the Indus on a raft; browse the Tibetan markets in Leh, Ladakh's capital, and mingle with the Western back-packers who have trekked to Ladakh since India opened overland routes to foreigners in 1989.

I had traveled previously to Leh to interview the Dalai Lama, who has spent part of many summers visiting Ladakh since he left Tibet in 1959 to begin his exile in India. But I made that journey by air, gazing down from 30,000 feet as the Indian Airlines plane flew across the narrowing triangle of Indian territory that lies beyond Simla, the old British retreat in the Himalayan foothills north of New Delhi, which is a staging post for travels into what ancient Indians knew as ''the land beyond the mountains.''

We had, I thought, all we needed for the trip: A Japanese-made four-wheel-drive vehicle, an Isuzu Trooper; plenty of experience of the vicissitudes of driving in rural India, and a family mature enough to handle any trials the journey might bring. Our children, Jamie, 17, and Emily, 15, had traveled with us to assignments in Russia, China and Canada, before India, and would be home for our last weeks in India from their boarding schools in England. Jamie's girlfriend, Sarah, 16, the daughter of a New Delhi-based diplomat, had also volunteered to come along.

An added challenge came from making the trip in August, in the middle of the north Indian monsoon, when swollen rivers in the Himalayas burst their banks and landslides carry away entire villages in the regions we would cross. Once into Ladakh, though, with valley floors at 10,000 feet, we would be in the one part of India where we could escape the rains and the stifling humidity. Guidebooks promised us 75-degree days and cloudless skies.

A few nagging counterpoints came from Jane, my wife, whose innate skepticism has restrained many a harebrained scheme. ''Do you know any foreigner who has driven over those passes?'' she asked. ''And how will we fix the vehicle if anything goes wrong?'' Finally, a query inspired by Jane's lifelong passion for smoking: ''How do you suppose I'll cope at 18,000 feet?''

snip....