Calum Brown explores the retreating wilderness of the Indian Himalaya.
The taxi driver stops and glances doubtfully back at us. There is the hint of a track leaving the road and heading up the dry valley on our right, but no trace of our expected destination, the village of Skampari. Our map suggests that a directional mishap has occurred, placing us further from the village than we were before our brief ride, but the driver is unperturbed.
“You walk two mountains, then Skampari.” He nods encouragingly, illustrating the course of our forthcoming labours with his fingers. Although we know that there is a road and even a daily bus to the village, there is a certain allure to his proposed route. We are after all setting off on an eleven-day trek over high Himalayan passes, and a few extra kilometres through these lower hills will help us acclimatise. Besides, it may prove to be a short cut to higher areas. We pay our driver and watch with a certain envy as he retreats into the busy streets of Leh.
We are standing at the edge of the Old Town, a close-packed extremity of the larger, modern Leh that fills most of the valley behind us. From this angle, and most others, the stone buildings of Old Leh seem to crumble as they spread; gradually disintegrating roofs and walls that become scattered heaps of boulders in the surrounding desert.
Leh is the capital of Ladakh, a region in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir known as ‘Little Tibet’. Its isolation and scenic grandeur have long attracted visitors, as has the religious significance of the area - Tibetan Buddhism flourishes unmolested here. Due to its proximity to two contested borders, it is also subject to a heavy army presence. Ironically, this too has boosted tourism by stimulating road building and the establishment of an airport with daily flights to Delhi. Aided by clever irrigation and the scale of the Indus valley, Leh has become a large, green, spacious town with many leafy garden restaurants and guesthouses. Villages that were once separate are now enveloped by the greater whole, and the continuing expansion is bounded only by rocky ridges that flank the town.
It is to these that my friend Adrian and I turn our attention as we set off towards the elusive Skampari. However, we quickly find ourselves surrounded by one of the less congenial consequences of the town’s success. At a respectful distance from the road litter starts to appear, and soon piles are obvious, extending across the narrow floor of the valley. In places attempts have been made to burn them, leaving perimeters of distorted plastic and charred glass. A group of shepherds sit nearby, eyeing their scavenging goats and us with similar scepticism.
The bulk of this rubbish is made up of plastic water bottles that in much of India represent the safest water supply available to tourists. Many places, including Leh, have found themselves poorly equipped to deal with the quantity of this kind of waste that ever-increasing tourist numbers produce. Some guesthouses have taken a lead in supplying boiled and filtered water to their customers, but packaged consumables have thrived here before an infrastructure capable of handling the results is in place. The situation isn’t helped by the strangely elaborate packaging used on many products, although the scarcity of plastic bags has obviously proved a blessing.
It is a situation that many are concerned about. Nawang, the travel agent who arranged our permits for this trek, has a passion for preserving the environment and culture of Ladakh matched only by his commitment to introducing tourists to the area. These are desires that often seem to be mutually exclusive, especially in a country that needs the revenue from a strong tourist industry but can ill-afford to invest in limiting its impact.
When we first met him, Nawang told us proudly of an annual litter-picking trip that he and several other travel agents make to Tso Moriri, a vast high-altitude lake near the Tibetan border and popular trekking destination. Many local companies run ‘Jeep Safaris’ to the shore, and Nawang is appalled at the rapid accumulation of debris. Similar build-ups are occurring on many of his beloved local treks, and so he sends an extra horse or two with his groups to carry back what they can.
Litter is not the only downside that Nawang sees to Ladakh’s popularity. Although just in his thirties, he has witnessed many worrying changes in the rich and varied Ladakhi culture of which he is justifiably proud. Leh, he feels, has lost much of its original character through expansion and westernisation. Traditional ways of life and forms of dress are losing their significance for an outward-looking younger generation, many members of which have become involved in the drug culture that is prevalent amongst travellers to India.
The point is illustrated by an area of ruined buildings that we pass through on the second day of our trek. Nawang later tells us that these were once summerhouses where families would go to graze their livestock on the rich pasture created by spring melt water. One belongs to his own family, but all are now disused; records of a lifestyle that is fading from the outlying villages of Leh.
None of these issues are unique to Ladakh. The bulk of Indian and international tourism leaves a high-water mark on the southern slopes of the Great Himalayan Range, in places like Dharamsala and Manali where travelling is relatively easy. In these first risings of the Indian Himalayas, tourism-driven changes are far more advanced and dramatic than they are further north. Networks of new roads and hydroelectric projects trace all but the most isolated valleys, hotels and shops spread out and meet along major routes, and rubbish chokes nearby streams and gullies.
Despite this, the central irony of any tourist industry is clearest in a region like Ladakh; somewhere people go because it is untouched. The tension between the impact of tourism and the original reason for its development is universal and difficult to resolve. The attitudes of visitors, unwilling to leave their customary comforts behind them when they travel, are partly to blame, as are the inevitable difficulties that local people face in balancing economic aspirations against environmental degradation. It is to the detriment of many popular Himalayan regions that a tourist industry, once established, can grow independently of its basis, leaving financial motivations unchecked.
These, however, are issues that appear less pressing as we continue our trek over the Digar La into the Nubra valley. This ancient Yak trail was followed in 1821 by an adventurous English veterinary surgeon named William Moorcroft as part of an impressive but ill-fated exploratory expedition. It now receives relatively little western foot traffic, the majority of visitors preferring to travel to the Nubra valley, which was opened to foreigners in 1994, by jeep. The road route is especially popular as it crosses the Khardung La, widely but dubiously asserted to be the world’s highest motorable pass.
We are accompanied by a cautious escort of two dogs which leave us that night after a distant, though thorough, appraisal of our campsite without having approached us. Until we reach the village of Digar, perched two days walk away above the Nubra valley floor, we are alone with the marmots and the yaks that occupy these areas in surprisingly large numbers.
At about 17,000 feet, mist and light snow deprive us of our anticipated views of the south-eastern tip of the Karakoram mountain range, but it is clear that we are surrounded by untouched tracts of land that extend unbroken, save for the odd valley, for an intimidating distance in every direction. These mountains stretch south through India, west into Pakistan, north through China towards Kazakhstan, and east almost all the way to the Pacific Ocean. From this vantage point it is hard to conceive of a process capable of altering this great wilderness. It is simply too immense.
Such complacency, though, is dangerous. Valleys throughout the Indian Himalayas form vein-like systems of villages and rivers, linked by mountain passes that are agricultural and social highways. The diffuse, small-scale pattern of habitation that is necessary to support communities in this inhospitable land has provided a template for creeping change to reach into every region. The Nubra valley is no exception to this, and when we descend to the village of Digar we find a newly bulldozed road where recently there was only a footpath.
Many villages are enjoying the benefits of intensive road building programs throughout the Indian Himalayan states. There are many advantages to local people in having a vehicular link to the outside world. Not least among these is the tourist business that drives forward the advancing frontier of unspoiled but easy-to-reach destinations. Digar, however, is yet to reap these rewards of its new road. We pass through and continue on our way, only meeting other tourists late the next day in a village that boasts restaurants and guest houses.
As we return to Leh over another pass, we encounter a familiar pattern. Another new road links villages to the main highway, and only the final dwellings below the pass remain to be connected. Outside a large first aid centre we meet a group of men sporting western clothes and baseball caps. They are friendly and amused by us. This early in the year only yaks cross these passes for fun.
Their township is vividly green, fed by streams from glaciers that lie hidden in the mountains above. Cows and goats idle alongside irrigation ditches at the boundaries between small, irregular fields. The way of life here would be familiar to generations of earlier occupants of this area, but the issues faced by these men are more recognisable to us.
The satellite dishes that adorn some of their houses are an opening to an outside world that has arrived here on foot, in jeeps and in planes. The money and ideas that accompany it are altering many aspects of this land and the lives of its inhabitants, for better and for worse. Meanwhile the momentum of development builds, driven but not directed by visitors who seem collectively uncertain of what they want from the Himalaya.
BMC member Calum Brown is a graduate in Astrophysics currently working towards an MSc in Sustainable Mountain Development with the University of the Highlands and Islands. He lives in the Highlands where he developed his interests in climbing and photography.
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