Silent clock movement for wall clock1/7/2024 Wangdus has taken it upon himself to put his small town on the tourist map: he just launched its first bakery, supplying fancy breads to nearby hotels. I eat in the home of the cherubic-faced village head Rigzin Wangdus, where he and his bright-eyed wife Tsewang Spaldon serve up a Ladakhi feast in their cosy dining room. The new Kyagar boutique hotel has brought a sleek elegance to an area of wild beauty, where more and more visitors are riding the same double-humped Bactrian camels that trudged the Silk Roads. I feel it in Sumur, where Sahara-esque sand dunes carpet the vast valley. In a flash, everything can change.”Ī Ladakhi dish from Namza Dining Tom Parkerįor now, though, hope is overriding caution. When I ask him how he feels about the task at hand, he replies in a line that sums up life in Ladakh: “It is as beautiful as it is risky. I’m grateful for Mehdi – our pink-cheeked driver, with a toothy smile – who safely transports us through the region. It is a dizzying landscape of sheer cliffs, dried-up river beds and wind-ravaged mountains that resemble the claws of some ancient, predatory creature. Everything else is politics.”įrom Turtuk, we drive along the Nubra Valley, passing military transit camps and border villages of waving children. We all experience joy, sadness and heartbreak the same way. India, Pakistan, the British – they don’t realise that we are all the same. I’m in touch with them, but I cannot visit. “Just beyond that mountain is where the rest of my family is. In a heartbreakingly beautiful mansion that lies in ruins, we meet the aging king Mohammad Khan Kacho, who points with his curved staff to snow-capped mountains in the distance. His words come back to me when we visit the old summer palace of the Yabgo dynasty, the rulers of erstwhile Baltistan. Guests sit around the thap as Wangmo and her team turn out steamed momo dumplings and chutagi, a thick soup with local pasta and mountain vegetables. Now, it is one of the star dishes at Alchi Kitchen, a rustic, wood-engraved restaurant – lined with traditional copper pots, filigreed plates and bright-red tables – that she set up above her home. It was her late mother who taught her to cook timsthuk, an earthy noodle soup brightened by Ladakhi peas, dried cheese and wild chives. “When I cook, I feel as if my mother is with me,” says the soft-spoken, bespectacled 43-year-old, as she watches over her all-women kitchen crew. From between her flour-coated palms, long, silken strands of noodles fall softly into a bowl. In Nilza Wangmo’s kitchen, in the monastic mountain village of Alchi, it’s just past one o’clock and the light has moved off the centre of the thap. As day becomes night, the shafts of light shift, cinematically capturing the dance of smoke in the air, while the thap casts shadows that tell the time. Many older Ladakhi homes have an opening through which the first rays of sunlight fall directly onto these earthen stoves, not only warming them before the cooking begins, but turning them into sundials. Everything revolves around the kitchen hearth, or “thap”, in Ladakh – even time.
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