Day 21 - July 2 - Back on the trail

We left Padum in the morning, though not as early as we would have liked. We were delayed by the need to switch to yet another taxi from the Padum taxi union, who had cracked down on our Kargil driver and ruled that he could no longer take us anywhere in the valley. We would have been more angry if we had not understood that these poor local drivers have only three months to make all their money for the year. Besides, the trekking company was paying.

We started by backtracking to the Sani monastery, which we had passed on the way into town. At that time we couldn't stop because we were rushing to get to the Stongde festival, but now we had time to look around at this unusual structure. The main room was only about 400 years old, although it held some Kashmiri-style artwork that was clearly much older. But behind the structure were an ancient chörten and chapels on a site that had been continually used since Buddhism was first introduced to this area from Kashmir over 2000 years ago, long before it came to Tibet. A cemetery further back held a ring of stones carved in the 8th century, which were still used in cremation ceremonies.


Our taxi then took us down the valley of the Tsarap river to the south, where we would be hiking for the rest of our trip. Along the way we visited two more monasteries including Bardan, which is built on top of a large rock.


Our taxi dropped us at the trailhead at Raru. Since BRO is working on extending the road toward the pass, we actually could have mad our driver take us a few kilometers further, but after four days of bumping over rocks, we were happy to begin walking again.

On this first afternoon back on the trail, we went only about two hours to the campsite at Ichar, a village with another visually impressive hillside monastery.