Thu, Jul 21

3:58 pm: today was our rafting day. We were ready at 8:30 sharp as instructed - the van came about half hour later. Then it picked up another couple from ireland - gerard is a postman there and sarah teaches at a primary school. Its interesting to contrast between the financial ability of a postman in ireland and in india - imagine an indian postman taking a month off to go see ireland! life gets to balance itself somewhere.... offshoring is here to grow...

So we reached the campsite at Phey around 10, got our lifejackets and helmets on, and into the rafts. All five of us were in one raft. Next to us was another raft with couple of couples.

the indus river is pretty mild for rafting, especially if you compare it to ganges at rishikesh. So there were a couple of rapids, but mostly silent. The scenery is breathtaking. And the whole drill of 'forward','back','left forward' etc was interesting. We stopped midway for some relaxation and juice. And sure, there was some water splashing between the other raft and ours.




Towards the end, pawan and I jumped into the water. It was cold. But it was great fun to swim in the river, especially if one doesn't know how to swim! In the last leg, the indus meets river zanskar, which is even more cold - I am glad we had our swim before that!



We reached nimmu at around 1, had a change and quick lunch. so gerard came up and told pawan that he looked like george cloony - man! Pawan was like grnning from cheek to cheek - and he shot through the roof when gerard told him that it was actually sarah who thought there was a resemblence - needless to say, pawan was a different person for rest of the day - smiling at nothing... He even offered gerard and sarah to stay with him in delhi on their way back :-)

We then headed back for Leh, and I am just done witha quick nap and a shower.

10:52 pm: around 5, we went to neetu's office to get a sense of where are air reservations stand - lawang came after some time and said he will get us on the plane any which way - for tomorrow, we are going to rent a car to go to khardungla.

We went to the ladakh cultural show. Its a small affair - happens daily across hotel kangri. We were the only three 'guests' - in the beginning, it looked like we'd made a mistake by going there - there was this bunch of people playing drum and shehnai in a corner and that's it. But after a while, I guess they must have been waiting for more people to come, a lady came out and started explaining each item. The show was basically a dance and music show. Interesting stuff. They also had a ladakhi kitchen and gave us butter tea - pawan chose to have none of it, I just tasted, and kshitij had two full cups. They invited us to join them in the last dance item.






We then thought we'd head for hotel ibex bar, but they told us it was a dry day on account of full moon. None of the town joints seems to offer chhang - the local barley beer - and they told us its available in nepali homes behind the bus stand. We thought we'd skip it for the day, and went back to world garden cafe. We bought a deck of cards and had a great evening of teen patti interspersed with food. Being a dry day, it was a much sober affair today than yesterday, even though some of the same people were around. We folded up at around 10, and pawan had lost some money to both me and kshitij - he didn't seem to mind that a bit, and was still lost in his 'cloo(w)ny smile'!