Sadly, it is time for us to leave Leh.

We are now feeling a little time pinched. We need to pack up our bags again, including our latest knitting projects,

and start moving west. We only have a few weeks left of our travels to journey across to Kashmir, down to Jammu and Amritsar, then across to Navdanya (Vandana Shiva’s farm), back to Jashan’s family farm in Punjab, before leaving India and heading for home to reconnect with friends, neighbours, family and Zero, who has been staying with this dear unschooling family.

Meet Preethipal, whose first family comes from Jammu, and Natasha, Daya (aka Black Cockatoo), and older brother Jasper. Zero has been living with this loving lot since we left nearly four months back. We hold so much gratitude for them all.

So, we went to buy tickets for the government bus from Leh to Srinagar. It leaves at 2pm each afternoon to travel 420kms. Because the road is closed from 10pm every night until dawn, it means the bus has to stop in the middle of the night and that would mean we’d be travelling across two days without sleep. (We marvel at those who can sleep on these wild buses). At the ticketing office, Patrick enquired a number of times trying to understand why this bus, (unlike the Manali to Leh bus, which covers roughly the same distance and leaves at dawn), doesn’t leave at first light and get in on dusk. He really wanted to understand, and our  government ticketing mate really wanted to explain.

Almost everything that has to be done through a government office in India is, to our logic, upside down thinking. To send a package home, for example, took us over an hour in a GPO, where we were the only customers. It required several trips to various offices in the building to get a slip signed, something else scanned, an item approved up the chain of bureaucratic command, and even a trip to another office around outside the building to print off some more forms. We were frisked before entering the GPO by armed guards, so Patrick, wearing his Ghurkha khukuri knife, quickly opted to stay outside the gates, hanging around, waiting and waiting, with the lads and their automatic rifles in the street.

At the Leh bus station, after about five attempts at an explanation – “Listen here Mister Australia” – Patrick was none the wiser. After all the diagrams, mud maps of the journey, and justifications for leaving at 2pm, the only thing Patrick could ascertain was the leaving time has been this way for 16 years, and therefore cannot be changed. The ticket officer had impeccable English, Patrick had shit Hindi and Ladakhi, and the two fellas finished off with a good laugh. After 30 minutes we left without purchasing tickets.

Later in the day we met a young couple from Punjab, Ritika and Ritesh, and got yarning. They were planning to hire a share-taxi to Kargil, half way to Srinagar, the next day and invited us to join them. The cost each was little more than the price of a bus ticket. We left at first light,

not knowing how we would get from Kargil to Srinagar but mother country willing we would arrive in Kargil with time to either find another mode of transport or book a room. We once again found ourselves moving in divine lands,

which held divine and simple culture.

After a few hours we came across a solo yak on the roadside. Yak, sheep and goats have been herded by Ladakh shepherds for generations.

We stopped to say g’day to this curious and gentle beast, stretch our legs, take a photo,

and play some cricket.

We travelled on, taking it pretty slowly as Woody and Ritika had developed motion sickness. The dogs in a little village we stopped in had the benefit of Woody’s omelette breakfast, after he brought it up. They first took a sniff,

then dived right in. Ritika and Ritesh are on their first road trip as a couple, having met at work. Their parents don’t know they are together and these youngtimers said that they are going to have to break it to their folks, at some point, that they want to be together, and not have their marriages arranged.

Breaking from traditional culture is big for many people we met in India, especially as culture is so rich here, with so many diverse ethnic and religious groups and lifeways. And for some, staying with the traditional ways is all they know, as with these Ladakhis. We felt such kinship for their ways and colour and textile.

Because, like Tibetans, Ladakh folk are not aggressive but relational and contextual, and because their customs and traditions are lived into presence, they shine as a people. And they stand up to bullies, like the Chinese army, who earlier this year tried to stop herders performing their cultural and economic lifeways. Ladakh culture is a whole culture, and seeing a wholly in-tact culture gives us a better sense of our own reculturing with community-kin back home, as infant and entirely different as it is.

We stopped for a pee break and came across this welcome party for a Ladakh leader.

Today, Ladakh shepherds are loosing territory, but not just to the Chinese authorities. They are also being barred from ranging with their sheep, goats and yaks by the Indian military, (the 8th largest army in the world), who have ever greater control in the Indian Himalayas.

There is growing militarisation across the frontier between China and India.

Our journey with the Punjabi love birds ended at Kargil. They went north to find India’s most northern town, Thang, with Ritesh’s brother, an army officer. We couldn’t find a local bus for the afternoon or the next day, so we booked another share taxi for the following day, and checked into this hotel for the night,

in this room,

drifted the second largest human centre in Ladakh through the afternoon,

and left for Srinagar the next morning with four other passengers and a driver. We three inhabited the backety back.

Winter is coming, and Ladakh folk are drying fodder, building their firewood supplies, and no doubt preserving their foods.

As we inched towards Srinagar and the altitude dropped, more grazing land appeared.

We arrived in Drass, a town that boasts it is ‘the second coldest inhabited place in the world’.

We asked a café owner here how he spends the winters, which can get down to -60°. He said he and people in his village do a lot of sleeping and resting, because they work hard during the rest of the year. We swapped notes on heating and cooking systems, he told us about his wood stove at his home, we showed him a photo of ours, and we sat down to eat his delicious omelettes.

We are getting used to having chai and omelette for breakfast or lunch. This one, later in the day, came with a local pickle.

The combo of chai and egg has a goodly effect on our bowels, as do squat toilets, like the one in the café in Drass.

This region is known for its trekking,

which is largely a global tourist caper. These highlands are made increasing available to tourists, that is the global bourgeoisie,

but less and less for local, earth-bonded, indigenous peoples. There seems to be a perception that enclosures and clearances ended in the nineteenth century, but it’s been a continual progression since the 12th century, at least in contemporary colonial terms.

The land began changing again more radically after Drass.

Poplars, deodars, chinars, firs, mulberries and walnuts grow in the Kashmir Valley, and pines began cropping up too,

and acute rocks that held the road from sliding. Yes, we travelled along those precarious road shelves,

on and down to the flood plains below, which became more generous and giving of grass and fodder.

Then, from browsing and grazing culture country, came more intensive agrarianism, with small holding cropping,

which eventually merged into outlying suburbs and roadside stalls,

before we arrived at Srinagar’s Dal Lake, and to a floating offer for chai.

We were dropped at the southern end. We had booked a cheap houseboat that looked lovely online. We stepped into a shikara,

and went off to discover a barely floating shit box that stank of mould. We rang the manager and asked him why the online spruik was so completely different to the reality. It was a stupid question, which Instagram had already answered for us years before. Patrick told him we’d look for something else, but the man, Hashim, kindly offered an upgrade to another boat for the same price. We moved onto the old, creaking and better smelling Teal Heritage houseboat,

and met Tariq, the caretaker, who got fishing with Woody.

We fell asleep that night bunkered down on the elderly boat, wondering whether the beds would fall through the hull, listening to the Indian army and Pakistani insurgents firing good night missiles at each other.

The morning brought another reality. A dreaminess, perhaps even a tiredness that duckboarded through our days here.

It’s hot down south. In a few days it will be 36 degrees in Jammu. We need to press on, but something is stopping us.

Srinagar had a distinctly different feel to it from everywhere else we have visited in India. We walked the streets,

coming across an old friend we hadn’t seen since last summer back at home.

There are pushy hawkers on the streets and on visiting shikaras, here,

trying to sell anything they can. Sometimes we said yes and bought tea or fruit, but when we said no, it was often ignored. The mood here is predatory, cynical, gender-lopsided and utterly picturesque.

Within 24 hours of each other, two very public fights broke out just across the water from us, on the street. Everywhere we went, armed police and soldiers stood by, on alert.

Perhaps the heightened aggression and intensity in the air was due to Indian prime minister Modi coming to Srinagar, for the forthcoming elections, which explains the heavy militarisation on the streets.

We’d noticed a political fervour back in the Kashmir Valley.

On our fourth morning, we adults woke and ran a bath, a thing we hadn’t had access to for the entire trip. As the bath filled we joked about it falling through the floorboards into the lake, and how we missed our cold water plunging. Patrick had strangely taken ill the previous day and had spent the whole of it in bed, completely drained of all life. After our bath, where we had used the quiet of the morning to check in with each other, we dressed and sat outside beholding the morning before the hawkers started their rounds,

Woody kept sleeping and after a while we turned on the phone to reply to comments and other correspondence. There was a message from Patrick’s sister, Hen, asking Patrick to call her.

……

The long and the short of it is we are signing off from this journey now, a little prematurely. We have someone very dear to us who is very unwell, and we need to head back to Australia immediately. Dear friends have made this possible, with three flights booked from Srinagar to Delhi to KL to Sydney in 24 hours, almost the complete opposite journey to how we got here.

So, we need to pack up this little room, this life on the road,

and get moving, quickly.

Thank you, Dearest Reader, for the love and support we’ve received from you throughout our journey. We are so grateful you have joined us along the way from the sidelines to share our highs and lows. We are going to spend some time offline now, and gather with family.

Signing off from India, from this failed hitchhiking, but so much more journey. With love, and big emotions, Artist as Family.