"we two are super fast walkers"

that's a direct quote from tashi, my trekking guide. tashi, an aspiring flight attendant, is a little bit like alex from extremely loud and incredibly close, a villager who yearns to escape what he sees as the mundaneity of the village and has a general grasp of english with some lovely variations. now, like i said, leh is like nothing i knew existed. it's some combination of desert, my thoughts concerning the planet mars and the himalayas. last week i went on a trek through the markha valley/ hemis national park. for three nights i stayed with ladakhi families, arguably the most hospitable fabulous people in the world and for four days i hiked over some pretty incredible terrain, including crossing a 16,000 foot pass in a snowstorm. i am pretty sure i got frostbite on my fingers, despite 3 jackets, making a peanut butter sandwich under some prayer flags...

so, in 2001 snow leopard conservancy set up a homestay program to assist local economies and off-set the cost of lost livestock due to snow leopards. now, families agree to open their homes to trekkers in the summer months (for a fee) and not kill the endangered leopards that attack their animals. the conservancy is also responsible for parachute tents run by village women interspersed in the trekking routes. i wish i'd thought of that. it's awesome.

during the hike i couldn't help but feel that i was witnessing something endangered. each of the families had children attending school in leh, sometimes a multiple day journey away. one of the villages only had one house left and another had shrunk from four to two houses in the last few years. but the small families greeted me more than warmly with countless cups of tea sheep's milk tea (which i can no longer speak of) and ladakhi butter tea (which i can speak of less than the sheep's milk), huge meals, warm conversation (with tashi as a translator), chang-- an alcoholic barley concoction that resembles the hybrid of sake, beer and lemonade and a general openness that is usually reserved for one's closest friends.

we combined the last two days of the trek into one (explaining both the brevity of the trek and tashi's comment) and when we reached chiling crossed the river in a little basket on a pulley. i saved just enough battery in my ipod to listen all the way back to leh and remembered how much i love ipod + mass transport in a foreign country. i ooze love. and will add pictures someday.... someday...