Kashmir is actually separated into several regions.  In the north, the Kashmir Valley makes up the western section, is predominantly Muslim, and is covered in forest.  The eastern section is called Ladakh, is mostly Buddhist and is a desert mountain region.  The city of Kargil, where India and Pakistan fought a war in 1999 separates the two.  Kargil is not a terribly lovely place. In fact, as a Polish tourist told me “It’s really one of the shitholes of the world.”  But the drive from Srinigar in Kashmir to Leh in Ladakh is long, and most tourists split it up by spending the night in Kargil.

The Ladakh side of Kargil is very popular for trekking.  It’s dotted with tiny villages, most of which are based around a Buddhist gompa (aka monastery) and these gompas are open to tourists.  Other than this, I was really surprised how similar it seemed to the American southwest.  The reds and yellows of the hills and their shapes made me think that if Joseph Smith had been followed by Tibetan buddhists instead of Mormons, this is exactly what Utah would look like.

The city of Leh is on the edge of a large valley, surrounded by snow-topped peaks and is the central city for tourists visiting Ladakh.  Within the city are a few cool sights.  I visited Leh Palace, a crumbling old palace that is being restored by the Indian Archeological Society.  There are fantastic views down over the city from the roof. Inside is also a room dedicated to how awesome the Indian Archeological Society is.  I think they probably do all right for the funds they have, but it’s sad how much of India’s historical heritage has been allowed to decay and how desperately in need of repair everything is.

I also visited Shanti Stup\pa which is quite a steep trek up from town.  It was made by Japanese monks to promote world peace (according to my guidebook) and is a beautiful white spire reaching up into the sky, surrounded by murals of the buddha.  Like every sight I visited in Ladakh, the views were incredible.

It was also the Ladakh Festival when I visited.   The festival is a very tourist-oriented celebration from September 1st to September 15th.  Luckily, this allowed me to see a Chaam dance, which is a buddhist dance normally reserved for holidays.  The most interesting was the Dance of the Ten Terrors in which ten monks dressed up in fearsome masks and danced in a circle to the rhythm of drums.  Overall, I really enjoyed the costumes, but was a little disappointed by the dance, which I found to be very simple.

Twenty kilometers outside of town, I visited two other interesting sights, mostly for the large gilded statues of the Buddha they contained.  One was Shey Palace, another dilapidated former palace topped by a fort with more fantastic views.  The other was the huge active monastery  Thiksey Gompa.  Thiksey Gompa was probably my favorite sight.  It has several different temple rooms, the first of which contains a three story statue of the Buddha wearing a gilded headdress.  Check out the photos.  Another room is the prayer room which contains benches, drums, murals, small statues and many other Buddhist elements.  If you arrive at 7 AM, you can watch the monks perform their morning prayers (I didn’t do this because I am lazy.)  Down towards the bottom of the monastery, the museum contains a whole lot of Buddhist items, organized in no particular order that I could understand.  As I walked back to the road to hitch a ride on a truck back into town, I could see all the white huts along the hill where the hundreds of monks who live at the gompa stay.

These[were the major sights I saw in Leh.  I didn't visit any of the monasteries further out because I was satisfied with Thiksey Gompa.  I intended to do a long trek from Lamayuru to Padum but, due to how much I struggled on the easier trek, I decided to skip it and I'll consider coming back at the end of my trip for that.

Overall, Leh is a decent city but it's incredibly touristy.  The whole center portion of the city is knick knack shops, travel agencies and guesthouses.  It also suffers from, as Cartman from South Park would say, a goddamn hippie infestation.  Drum circles, jam sessions, dreadlocks, and huge amounts of marijuana are everywhere. I don't hate hippies, but there are three major things typical of hippies that bother me.  A lot of travellers in India succumb to these as well, even if they're not dreadlocked, so I feel like I ought to lay them out here.

Aesthetics.  I don't think travelling is an excuse to not shower, let your facial hair grow ridiculously, get your hair completely messy or dreadlocked, and not wash your clothes.  Even if you're staying for two dollars, you have access to water to bathe with, shave with and wash your clothes in.  I'm also not particularly a fan of "going native" and wearing traditional Indian clothes either.  This bothers me because most Indians don't wear that clothing themselves.  Sometimes the clothes have particular religious significance.  But more importantly, a lot of hippies bemoan the destruction of traditional culture to modernization, but then they drop their own culture in favor of an alien one which they prefer:  The same thing they're criticizing modern Indians for doing.  To me, this implies a value system for cultures, something I find hypocritical.  They're saying, it's ok to drop Western culture for Indian culture but it's not ok to drop Indian culture for Western.

Spirituality.  A lot of people associate India with religion, especially Buddhism, which is a religion that has mostly died out in India, despite the Buddha having spent all his time in what is now India.  For this reason, a lot of people come to India seeking some sort of spiritual enlightenment.  This bothers me for two reasons:  For one, it tends to emphasize the idea that India is a country which is dominated by religion, an idea originating from British colonization, which has limited historical validity but has caused a lot of the problems in the subcontinent today.  Other than that, I guess I'm just very skeptical of the concept of spiritual enlightenment.  I think that discovering the true nature of the world can be life-changing.  Broadening my horizons through discovery of other cultures can also open my mind to alternate views.  But the notion of transcendence to a higher spiritual plane through meditation is to me a red herring.  To some degree it strikes me as an abdication of reality, a willful disregard for the here and now.  This is my core dislike of buddhism itself too, and I guess it leads into my next point.

Politics/philosophy.  The hippie political philosophy tends to be peace, friendship, love and harmony.  To me, it seems extraordinarily unrealistic and ignorant of the realities of global economics.  They tend to bemoan globalization, the IMF, free market economies, money itself, and even private property while simultaneously lamenting the poverty around them.  They fail to see how globalization and free market politics, often influenced by the IMF have created positive economies in many Asian countries, including India, China, Singapore, etc. and brought huge quantities of people out of crushing poverty and into the modern world (hundreds of millions in China.)  They like the concept of communism, but ignore all the failed communist states that prove its inability to provide an egalitarian society for citizens.

Making this argument usually causes them to criticize modern, Western life and idealize the life of the rural subsistence farmers around them, citing how picturesque and simple life is "in that village over there."  This completely ignores two things:  first of all, the fact that life is not at all easy for the people they are idealizing, who usually have poor nutrition, little education and in fact desperately want the life Westerners live.  Secondly, they ignore the fact that, by staying for two dollars a day and eating for sixty cents, they are profiting dramatically from the inequality of lifestyle between the West and the third world.  It's hard for me to put my disillusionment with office work up against the misery of bathing in a shit-filled stream, having no electricity and working 12 hours a day in the sun on a tiny farm just to feed lentils and rice once a day to my family to keep them from starving.  Western life may be boring and dehumanizing at times but it beats the hell out of abject poverty.

Lastly, it annoys me that hippies seem to think that saying that war is stupid should bring peace.  War is a terrible, awful thing and no country should ever go to war with another.  There absolutely ought to be better ways for nations to resolve disputes than the massacre of hundreds of thousands of people.  But to think that countries will stop fighting if we point out how mutually destructive war is, seems to me to be completely dismissive of human nature, as established by thousands of years of history.  There may come a point when we actually achieve world peace, but it seems to me that it's far more likely that it will come from establishing a world order which makes it economically and politically infeasible, rather than through everyone in the whole world suddenly realizing the blatantly obvious fact that war sucks.  It turns out that the economic liberalization and globalization that hippies bemoan and the democracy they don't seem particularly attached to are fairly effective for the countries which have them at preventing war between them.  If we can get every country in the world into the haves and get rid of the have nots, we can both eliminate poverty and bring world peace.  I think that comes from hard work and hard choices, not slogans and agitation.

Some people far more intelligent than me have pointed out that the failure of my parents' generation (which encompasses the hippie movement of the 60s) was that they tore everything down and failed to put up a better social order.  To me, this is the continuing problem I have with hippies.  I don't hear real answers to the problems of the world.  I just hear "Isn't it obvious, man?"  "That's just wrong you know?" "We could just stop fighting, right?"  It rings incredibly self-centered to me. The hippie has the ability to sit in coffee houses in the third world and share weed and the enlightenment to say that war sucks.  So why doesn't everyone share and stop fighting?  It's very easy for someone who produces nothing o want to share and not fight.  Consider the famous Steal This Book by Abbie Hoffman.  A small few can live off the excess of Western society, eating the discarded food of markets, sleeping on thrown out mattresses, etc.  But if the whole world stops producing, where will the excess come from? Only a few can live that way. I think the collapse of the hippie utopia in San Francisco after the Summer of Love illustrates this pretty dramatically.

Traveling the world for years, forgoing most of my material possessions:  I have some hippie characteristics.  But I think I strive to find the intersection of the values that hippies have (peace, elimination of poverty, common understanding) and the ways those things can be created in a real world with real humans with real interests.  Rather than appealing to the best in people, I think we should just accept the system we have (which acknowledges and accommodates the flaws of human nature,) fix the parts that don't work and give time for things to get better.  For a group so focused on love and happiness, I find hippie philosophy incredibly pessimistic, selfish, and unwilling to accept reality.

I apologize for the rant.  I really ought to end by saying that calling out one group for words I'm putting in their mouths is really unfair.  Generalizing all this onto a single label and then criticizing those with that label is close-minded.  I chose the label "hippie" because it means something to people, but if you self-classify as a hippie and don't relate to the viewpoints or aesthetics I described here, then I apologize.