Lazy Leh

Not been up to much since I got to Leh, partly due to recovering from the mad minibus ride from Manali, but I do like the place so far. Have met some nice people here already, and hopefully going to some kind of full moon party in a couple of nights. In the day time I've been doing lots of reading and writing again, going for little walks and checking out the more local sights. Yesterday I climbed up to Leh palace and explored the inside of the building, including one corridor with an open doorway at the end with a sheer drop back down to the town below it. Then climbing right to the top for amazing views over Leh and the rest of the valley.

After the palace I went to the Ladakhi Women's Alliance, where I saw a film called Ancient Futures - Learning From Ladakh. It was certainly thought provoking, though I also thought it was overly negative. The film was by a westerner observing the effect of modernisation on Ladakhi culture and ecology. I've had similar arguments before about modernisation and whether traditional cultures should change/be changed. I think given the nature of the world and how it's virtually impossible to be isolated or insulated from it (North Korea being the exception perhaps), it's a losing battle to prevent the spread of culture - for better or for worse - across national or traditional boundaries. All you can really do, in my opinion, is with a lot of things - "harm reduce"; attempt to mitigate the worst effects of modernisation and the spreading of other cultures. For example, the film was very critical of the education system in Ladakh (in the 90's), because all it was teaching children was foreign languages and how to get jobs in an industrialised society, whereas Ladakh was a completely rural/co-operative society traditionally.

Like I said, it's a thought-provoking subject!

Today I kept things a bit lighter and walked out to the Donkey Sanctuary outside town, which was excellent. In Ladakh, donkeys are used as beasts of burden but often when they get older and lose their strength they're just turned lose to wander the country or the streets of Leh, where they're often attacked by packs of stray dogs; the strays sometimes will eat baby donkeys too. I met a couple of other travelers there, despite it being in the middle of nowhere, on of whom had brought 1.5kgs of carrots and apples to feed them.

I can't help feeling sorry for the dogs too, though. I guess this is common in many parts of the world, but there's so many strays wandering the streets of the towns and cities, surviving by scavenging the waste of humans.

Conversely, I wonder what people who insist pigeons are vermin think about stray dogs in places like this? Are stray dogs also vermin? This is one of the things I love about traveling, it makes you think about things you never would normally, and blurs the lines a lot with domesticated animals. In the west we have these very clear lines about what gets eaten (and usually cruelly intensively farmed), what gets shot or poisoned because it's clearly vermin, and what we take home, look after, share our family lives with and are outraged at bad treatment of. Traveling in countries that don't follow these rigid boundaries can be quite eye opening.

Personally the only conclusion is that all animals should be treated fairly, and we should take fucking responsibility for the "vermin" in our towns and cities: it is there, and behaves as it does, because of us being the filthy, disgusting, polluting animals we very often are.

"A nation can be judged by how it treats its animals." - Gandhi