An initiative at the crossroads
On the rough, winding road that climbs through a vast mountain pass between Nubra and Leh city, Kunzang Deachen lamented as the wind waltzed her fine hair : “There are no Ladakhi faces in tourist’s photos”. The millions mile journey began from that simple exclamation.
Initiated in 1974, tourist arrivals in Ladakh have skyrocketed from nearly naught to approximately 450,000 so far in 2022, in eight months from January 1 to August 31 . When Covid-19 restrictions on international flights lessened recently, never have images of Ladakh so proliferated among Vietnamese travel social platforms. Yet, tourism does not arrive in any land without the binding tentacle of the development project, advertisements, and globalization. Traditional webs of communal reciprocity are supplanted by the introduction of the monetary economy, personal sense of self-esteem is undermined by the glamorous image of foreigners, and natural resources are stretched to breaking point by unsustainable lifestyles of an upsurging population.
Not only the local community of Ladakh but also travelers are approaching a crucial junction, as global tourism again begins to pick up after the interregnum brought about by the pandemic. The incomparable benefit and joy of traveling has matured into the desire for meaningful and thoughtful means of meeting an unfamiliar land. ”VCIL Travel School 2022 - Ladakh: Mindful Travel & Sustainable Living'' emerged at this crossroads out of friendship between Vietnamese and Ladakhis. The project is a gift of heartful collaboration between VCIL Community and Local Futures Ladakh team after our first encounter in May 2022.
Since 2018, VCIL Travel School can be described as a series of learning journeys to various communities and countries with transformative educational purposes. Unsettled by Kunzang’s saying, we decided the theme of the program this time in Ladakh was “Mindful Travel and Sustainable Living”. It aimed to rethink and redefine how education as well as tourism has happened. The program intended to stay away from a typical superficial tour and foster a more fulfilling and nourishing travel experience. By offering participants a specially curated immersion into the local culture, we gave an idea of how sustainable and conducive to well-being the traditional Ladakhi way of life is. It also introduced the devastating cultural, psychological and ecological consequences of globalization and mass tourism as well as the systemic solution of localization. Many of those important ideas are hardly conveyed by words, but can easily touch any soul through deep experience.
After a few weeks of calling for participation and logistics preparation, on 28th of August 2022, eighteen Vietnamese youthful souls took their baby step on the magical land of high passes (the meaning of the name “Ladakh”). From that point, the 14 days unlearning and relearning caravan was set into motion. Participants came from diverse paths of life and locations across Vietnam: some of them just walked out of their corporate jobs, some of them were taking a gap year and in the transition period, some were looking for new inspiration and direction for their life, some were just purely interested in the dazzlingly beautiful landscape of Ladakh, etc.
Pedagogies of the “soil”
The foremost principle that guides us through our program design is utilizing context-based education. We are all familiar with the image of students encapsulated in the artificial factory classroom of modern schooling. VCIL Travel School seeks to challenge this model and follow a different approach. Instead of imposing the abstract concept of - for example, an apricot - through wordy instruction, we let participants taste the fruit.
Any outsiders who have close contact to Ladakhi culture with a humble mind are inevitably fascinated by the people, by their value and the way they see the world. One cannot help but ask questions like: “Why were they always smiling? And how did they support themselves in relative comfort in such a hostile environment?” The land and people of Ladakh possesses a rich repertoire of lessons to offer the globalizing world. VCIL Community would like to share those lessons by curating and coordinating the context embodying those values. The invitation was to travel slowly, to connect with Ladakhi people and sleep, eat, work, and play side by side with locals. Besides, we organized workshops and facilitated discussions with researchers, monks, students and local entrepreneurs.
It also means that we have to thrust people out of their comfort zone to utterly unfamiliar conditions. From that space of strangeness, taken-for-granted assumptions about life will be broken apart and space for profound transformation can be opened up inside the learner's heart. Merely transmitting knowledge wasn’t our priority therefore, apart from holding the learning space, we gave participants a lot of room for self-reflection. Just like natural farming, we concentrate on nurturing the healthy soil, then each seed on the land will sprout and take root in its own best way.
In doing so, the organizers must trust the inner teacher of everyone and let them take responsibility for their own learning. All of us are amazed by the result of this process. Says the Vietnamese proverb:
“ Đi một ngày đàng học một sàng khôn
Each day of travel earns one basket of wisdom "
In addition, we took into account the impact of our presence on the place. We relied on local NGOs such as Local Futures, Tibetan Heritage Fund (THF), and The Student’ s Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh (SECMOL) to facilitate our learning experience. We would endeavored to supplement and encourage the local economy by eating organically grown traditional food, spending money at purposeful small local businesses and staying with local families as much as possible. The intention was orienting tourism that serves local culture and economies, rather than the other way around.
Traversing through space-time
As the first beams of sunrise were illuminating the fuselage of the aircraft to Leh, our eyelids dilated in front of the mishmash of still, azure sky and giant desolate mountain ranges. Expansive, enthralling, and literally breathtaking! Shortly after landing, the thickening and dense air occupied our little nostril to shred the vein into bloody nasal mucus. Most of us have never been to this high altitude (at least 3,500m) given the fact that we live next to the South China sea.
In contrast to the seemingly harsh environment, local people and coordinators welcomed our group with a great sense of hospitality and affection. During our arrival at the guest house, the host offered each of us a cotton white scarf - khatak - which symbolizes purity, compassion and warm welcoming. Settling down in the chansa - a unique blend of living room, kitchen and guest room - we gathered around the stove and enjoyed the first meal together. Vegetables were picked from the garden and food was served on colorful choktse – traditional short Ladakhi tables. Its coziness made one participant chuckle - “It just felt like home”. It was not easy to find a unique homestay like this with a neat traditional chansa and local family management given the fast phase of urbanization and massive homogenous modern housing projects in Leh.
After one day of acclimatization and resting, we began the program with a heritage walk to Old Town Leh led by a cultural researcher from THF. Under the fluttering flags whispering prayers to the winds, we listened to ghost stories, historical dramas, and learned about efforts for cultural and architectural conversation by local NGOs. The next morning, we had a pleasant conversation with the famous lama Gyelong Paldan, where he conveyed core Buddhist teachings such as the four noble truths: suffering (dukha), origin of suffering (samudaya), ending of suffering (nirodha), the path to liberation (magga) and four elements of true love: loving kindness (maitri), compassion (karuna), joy (mudita), equanimity (upeksha). We spent the rest of the day visiting Stakna, Matho, and Thiksey monasteries where the lama explained to us the Wheel of Life, representing the cycle of life, death, rebirth and suffering. The most profound expression of Buddhism in Ladakh lies in the most subtle values and attitudes of the people. Many participants already noticed the relaxed attitude and contentment of Ladakhis in everyday activities.
Time is measured loosely and relatively. Vocabulary to depict time is all broad and generous. For example, gongrot means “from after dark till bedtime”. Most of the appointments in Ladakh we had were never exactly ”on time”, hence it gave us several hours’ leeway. Yet it meant that the Ladakhis had an abundance of time. This had disturbed the habitual rigid mindset of some industrialized citizens from Vietnam. Modern city people have all of the time-saving machines but are still in a state of urgency and scarcity of time.
The most exciting part was, however, living in the remote village. Packing up our vivid memories in congested Leh, we traveled to Tarchit village for the next 3 days. There was no internet, no mobile network and no access to automobiles. The group were divided into five different households, each of which is 15 minutes away from the others by walk. Living side by side with Ladakhi families, we were able to observe many interesting customs. First we learnt about the practice of dzangs - or “insincere refusal” where our polite denial “I’m full” can be understood as “I’m still hungry”! The host insisted on serving us new food unless we gently cover our bowl and smiled, saying “Dik ley!” . In my eyes, this is a symbol of immense generosity and hospitality. Guests were treated as gods, one would say, they even gave the most beautiful place in their house for us to sleep.
Then we helped them in harvesting mature peas from lush green fields and hauling recently-threshed mustard seed straw from small terraced fields. Inspired by their attitude, we worked at a gentle pace and had a surprising amount of leisure, accompanied by laughter and gossiping. As elsewhere on the Tibetan Plateau, the principal crop is barley; the diet is based on its roasted flour - ngamphe. Considering the pristine environment, whole, unrefined food and regular exercise, the villagers exuded a sense of well-being, vitality and high spirits.
Traditionally, farmers help one another to gather their crops in a staggered fashion, maintain elaborate networks of hand-dug canal irrigation systems using simple spades and rocks, and process their harvests using communal gravity-fed water mills. Those are examples of “convivial tools” - which give users the opportunity to enrich the environment rather than degrading it. The characteristics of those technologies, as described by Alex Jensen , include: social necessity, place-based, non-polluting, durable functional use, democratic, etc. Villagers are, basically, “community-reliant” to make ends meet.
In consequence, those tools will lose productivity and power when the community is broken down. Tarchit is not exempt from rapid urban migration. We hardly found any young people there. As a result, the workload is increasing on the shoulders of old people and especially women who are left behind. It was heart-breakening to see one grandma staying in her house alone. It was even more discouraging to encounter Coca Cola and Indian action movies in the household. The nature of globalization can be put succinctly this way: “It is much easier for a Coke bottle to enter a house in Tarchit than for a Ladakhi to travel to the US”. Globalization frees corporations, but limits people.
We left Tarchit with nostalgia and a some tears. Then we spent one night in Liksey village and headed to SECMOL the next day. This alternative learning center , which was established only for those students who “failed” the 10th class exam – or rather, who were failed by the mainstream educational system – was truly awe-inspiring in terms of architecture design and philosophy of education. The spirit of 3H (Head, Hand, Heart) truly embodies every action and thought of the students. It has built a cooperative environment, fostered learning by doing and offered personal mentorship. We also had a workshop on natural building, passive solar design and climate change. From diminishing snowpack and glacial mass to the increasing frequency and severity of cloudbursts and glacial lake outburst floods, extreme environmental shifts have already begun to register in Ladakh.
The last destination of the journey was Nubra valley. Without much instruction and facilitation, participants witnessed with their own eyes the trend of mass tourism. Guesthouses outnumber local homes. There were no family-run homestays, no authentic engagement with local people, and many superficial entertaining activities. The flow of the program painted two different possibilities of tourism in Ladakh: one commodity-based and one community-based.
The middle at the end
“How do you know that your program has an impact?” is the frequent question asked by our friends.
If we take people’s words seriously, then many interesting thoughts appeared during our reflection time. One participant shared that concepts like “sustainability” and “ecology” had meant little to him before, but he understood it through very simple and practical daily activities like using the compost toilet (which he eventually admitted that it saves more time than western water-flushing one). The other, who is a start-up founder, started to question the obsession with infinite growth among investors; and rethink about the proper “scale” of business . One mentioned simplicity and its relation to happiness. Plus countless wonderful transformations that we cannot take credit for.
If we take into account the effect on the local economy, we have spent money as meaningfully as possible on local people and enterprises. We have shown the villagers our preference for local food and traditional crafts, and encouraged them to preserve their own culture.
But are participants going to take the inspiration seriously to create long-lasting change? Or will they stick to their life as normal when they go back to their “comfortable” settings? And will the money and image of outsiders spoil the villager’s and unwittingly impose modernist aspirations? Those are open questions that no one dares to claim a certain answer on. We didn’t expect the program to be a miracle-performing package that would solve all the problems of modernity.
What organizers can assert, however, was that new inquiries were made. Creative doors to exploring life beyond the urban, growth-based industrial economy were opened . Perhaps in the time between worlds like this, we need better questions than right answers.
The project is still in its incipient stages, there is still a lot of room for improvement. Many possibilities can be explored when the program resumes next year: better transportation coordination, more in-depth discussion on globalization and localization, adding trekking for 3 days, etc. Nevertheless, learning from Ladakhis, we are content and satisfied with what we have achieved.
In our final words, we would like to express our sincere gratitude to Kunzang Deachen for her tireless efforts in coordinating and taking care of logistics. The trip would not have been possible without her. We are grateful to Alex Jensen, Padma Rigzin and Jigmet Singge from Local Futures Ladakh team for enriching our discussions with their view points and experience.
Thank you Haldupa Guest House, SECMOL and HIAL for hosting us generously and warmly. We revere all of the Ama-les, Aba-les, Nonos and Nomos at Tarchit village and everywhere else we went; your happiness truly touches our souls deeply.
Last but not least, we appreciated non-human beings that contributed and blessed us throughout this journey: the more-than-human, the mountains, wildlife, spirits, village animals, and many more.
We arrived with luggage of excitement, and departed with a bow of humility.
“Julley!”
Reference
Gupta, V. (2022) ‘As tourism grows in Leh, so does concern about its environmental impacts’, Mongabay India, 27 September. https://india.mongabay.com/2022/09/as-tourism-grows-in-leh-so-does-the-concern-about-its-environmental-impact/.
Jensen, A. (2021) ‘Appropriate technology, traditional cultures and degrowth’, Local Futures blog, 30 November. https://www.localfutures.org/appropriate-technology-traditional-cultures-and-degrowth/.
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