Chasing the Dalai Lama

Most of India swelters in July-August, but there’s no better time to make tracks for India’s ‘Little Tibet’. The Dalai Lama thought so, too.

Flying over Nun and Kun in the Hindu Kush, en route to Ladakh

The fabled land of Ladakh, a geographic and cultural outlier of Tibet, fits somewhat uneasily within the State of Jammu & Kashmir. Ladakh means ‘land of high passes’, and way back in the Eighties I had experienced the two-day bus ride from Srinagar, the Kashmiri capital, up to Leh, Ladakh’s largest town, nestled in the Indus Valley. The Leh-Manali Road, an even longer and more tortuous journey, is now the favoured route (but more of that later).

This year, for my long-anticipated return to Ladakh I chose the soft option of catching a 5am flight up from Delhi. I had not anticipated that a welcoming party of red-robed monks would be waiting at Leh’s modest airport on my arrival at 6:30… no, it was the Dalai Lama himself, the head of their faith, who was expected within the hour.

Rapt in the words of the Dalai Lama

Before long I joined most of the town’s 27,000-strong population to line the route of His Holiness’ motorcade – a great excuse for one and all to dress up in their best fur-trimmed robes and chunky turquoise necklaces. The saintly visitor was tucked safely inside a police car with tinted windows, so we barely glimpsed him passing by. Another morning, we caught the briefest of glimpses as his entourage departed the inauguration of a new temple outside Leh.

So HH and I could settle down to acclimatise to the 3,500-metre altitude (that’s almost 11,500 ft). Well, he’s a Tibetan born and bred, after all. On leaving torrid Delhi behind, the ambient temperature fell from 36 degrees overnight to 16 degrees Celsius on a typically clear, bright morning.

Golden Maitreya Buddha at Thikse Monastery

Here in Leh, snow-capped peaks cluster all around a starkly barren valley, interrupted by bright-green patches of cultivation, fed by snow melt. I settled into a pleasant guesthouse, with apricot trees sheltering a stone-flagged courtyard and picture windows from my room looking out over town to the mountains.

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