This week’s dream: nomads and monks on Ladakh’s high plateau
Caught between the Himalayas and the Karakoram range, the high desert of Ladakh in northern India is dazzling in its beauty. It is a fantastically tough environment, but it can be explored in style with the small Himalayan tour operator Shakti, says Pamela Goodman in House & Garden. In the past ten years, Shakti has restored six “exquisite” traditional houses across the state to accommodate guests. Ladakh’s capital, Leh, sits at 3,500 metres above sea level, and new arrivals spend two days acclimatising to the altitude at a house set on a picturesque bend in the Indus River. What follows is a breathtaking series of road trips and walks, taking in monasteries, forts, remote artisan workshops, deep canyons and epic views of snowcapped peaks.
The first stop is usually the monastery of Alchi, whose elaborate 11th century murals, depicting sinister guardian deities and sensual scenes of courtly carousing, are the grandest works of Himalayan Buddhist art to have survived the Mongol invasion.
From there, guests proceed to the most captivating of Shakti’s houses, in the tiny hamlet of Egoo. Inside it is decorated in a gorgeous local “rustic chic” style, and scattered across the remote valley around it are fields of barley and clumps of apple and apricot trees – “ribbons of lush greenery” in Ladakh’s vast desert. There’s white-water rafting, for those who want it, scrambles up to high stupas and the chance to camp beside the Tso Moriri, a blindingly blue, 16-mile-long lake just 50 miles from the Tibetan border, which sits at 4,522 metres above sea level. En route, you can visit Changpa nomads, deeply religious Buddhists who live in yak-wool tents and farm pashmina goats, from whose chins ultra-fine cashmere wool is harvested. But there are few signs of life by the lake itself, where the altitude pitches heart and lungs into “overdrive”, and the sense of isolation is thrilling. An eight-day trip costs from $7,159 per person, full board (shaktihimalaya.com).