Zanskar 2024 – Afterthoughts

Middle of October 2024

 

 

Usually there are always a few pictures of me on here that haven’t already been posted on the blog. Problem: there are hardly any. I rarely tend to take selfies and as I was travelling unaccompanied, no one else took photos of me either. I’ve now enriched this with three screenshots from dance videos.

 

Somehow this trip was ‘a lot’. So lots of new things, so lots of things I hadn’t seen in a long time, so lots of encounters, so lots of emotion, so lots of overwhelming scenery and emptiness, so lots of warmth in the encounters. I had the feeling that I was rushing through it and was stressed by the lack of time. But I actually knew it. If it hadn’t been for that, I might have fallen over. However, I still felt very ‘at home’ and familiar and didn’t want to go back in the end. But that’s how I felt on all my previous trips to India.

 

I also wonder about myself – and would like to have the time to find out why this is actually the case. Why do I feel like I feel in India?

 

 

I had chosen Ladakh/Zanskar because I was so curious to see what the new roads would be like. And I found it exciting because it seemed to me that big changes were happening – and I like to get to see things like that straight away. Unfortunately, it was too short to really follow it up, but it wasn’t bad as a teaser and a little insight. It’s just dominating how a landscape feeling changes from a route that seemed completely isolated to me on 2 treks and now it was ‘completely normal’ to drive through it on the road. On the other hand, I had this feeling of a landscape devoid of people and barely tangible eternal nature again. It seemed like a large area to me. But these large areas are shrinking all the time. When and where can you hike for days without meeting anyone?

 

 

Even though the trek felt a bit long and exhausting, I want to continue doing a lot of things like this. And the combination with the many people beforehand was also great.

 

 

 

I liked that I was surprised so often. Of course I had memories and an idea – and then there were these unexpected changes. How so many nuns in Zanskar were doing so well for example.

 

 

Of course, I also thought about tourism. That there are still some treks in Zanskar that people can do. That everything has become so much easier by car. That there are various accommodation options in Zanskar. But what will happen next? None of the people I spoke to seemed to be looking forward to a rosy future. Isn’t that crazy? After soooo many years of hoping for proper street access. And now they feel they’ve been overrun by it.

 

I am not the same in that sense, but I can sympathise with the part that thinks it’s a bit too much in too short a time.

 

 

At the moment, I can only say that I am very happy to have done this tour. With exactly everything I experienced. And I hope to come back to the area, meet people again, get to know new people and walk around in the countryside again. And I’m also too curious to find out what happens next with Zanskar.