Majestic Leh City, Northern India
Finding Peace on the Tibetan PlateauBy Adam Roy
My first glimpse of the Himalayas is exactly what I expected it to be. Drifting alpine snowfields span toward the 
horizon, punctured by crowds of craggy, cloud-licked peaks. As I peer down from the window of the Air India jet, the vista clicks easily into my mental map, evoking well-worn tales of Sherpas, yaks and mustachioed British mountaineers. All very familiar stuff.
Then the landscape begins to change. The ice-encrusted peaks disappear. In their place, rows of bare cliffs jut skyward like the half-excavated ribcage of some monstrous dinosaur, simmering red ochre in the early morning sun. As we cross one final ridge, the city of Leh comes into view, a lone streak of green tucked into the arid mountains.
This is Ladakh, northern India's oasis of the unexpected. Since the 9th century nobleman Nyima Gon founded the first kingdom in this remote corner of the Tibetan Plateau, Ladakh has been a land all its own, a place where Tibetan Buddhism holds sway and monsoon floods give way to high-altitude scrub desert. It is a region so desolate that one Mughal historian deemed it the most “useless place” on earth, yet so breathtakingly gorgeous that tens of thousands of travelers have braved dizzying alpine roads and the pall of border violence in neighboring Kashmir just to glimpse it for themselves.
After touching down at Leh's airport and filling out the mass of paperwork that seems to accompany any trip in Jammu and Kashmir state, we rendezvous with our guide, Phuntsog Spon. As director of Kailash Travels, Phuntsog has spent years organizing sightseeing excursions and fortnight-long wilderness treks for visitors. Watching the spry, weatherbeaten Phuntsog honk and weave his way through Leh's pedestrian traffic, it's no stretch to imagine him powering through the backcountry himself, trailing a string of panting tourists behind him.
We putter our way past gated schoolyards and blocks of handicraft shops before pulling into the Shambala Hotel, a whitewashed, two-story stack of guest rooms topped with a string of Tibetan prayer flags. Perhaps 
sensing the extent to which the one-two punch of our red-eye flight and the sudden 11,000 foot jump in altitude has addled our poor Midwestern brains, Phuntsog suggests that we take the rest of the morning off and leave the afternoon for some local sightseeing.
That afternoon, accompanied by a guide from Phuntsog's agency, we pay a visit to Leh Palace. Dating back to the 17th century, when King Sengge Namgyal moved Ladakh's capital from Shey, this eponymous landmark is the centerpiece of ancient Leh, a nine-story mountainside palace built in the terraced style of Tibetan royalty.
We slowly ascend the floors of the palace, navigating our way through cavelike hallways and dusty chambers where fragments of murals still cling to the walls. Finally, we climb a pair of rickety wooden ladders to find ourselves on the roof, looking down over the urban landscape of Leh. The panorama of brick shops and polo grounds below us evokes a time when Leh was the locus of its own world, the nerve center of a vast Ladakhi kingdom.
We wake up at dawn to watch morning prayers at Thikse Gompa, a Lhasa-like complex of Buddhist shrines and living quarters 18 km from Leh which holds the distinction of being the area's largest monastery. By the time we take off our shoes and pad into the dimly-lit prayer hall, the hundred or so monks who call Thikse home are already seated and well into their morning ritual, a rapid communal chant punctuated by ringing bells and low, droning horn blasts.
Next to the corner where I am sitting is a group of what are probably the youngest, and most certainly the liveliest, monks in Thikse. The saffron-clad youngsters, none of whom appear to be older than six, seem more focused on sneaking curious peeks at their visitors and roughhousing 
than on their prayers.
Our last stop, Shey Palace, has a distinctly rugged feel, a clifftop outpost that looks out over the town of Shey on one side and the desolate Himalayan wilderness on the other. Uninhabited since the 17th century, the palace is now a shrine, the nooks and crannies of which hide any number of priceless artifacts, including Ladakh's largest stupa and largest golden Buddha. We unexpectedly encounter the latter when we wander into an unassuming alcove and find ourselves face-to-face with the three story statue, shafts of sunlight glinting off its placid, jewel-encrusted face.
Topping the very peak of the cliff is Shey's fort, a small guard post built out of the surrounding stone. Now in ruins, the fort is a reminder of Ladakh's history of conflict, during which the kingdom faced military challenges from Kashmiri generals, Indian Maharajas and, on one unusual occasion, the fifth Dalai Lama.
The stairs and ladders end at the top floor of the palace complex, so the only way to reach the fort is to climb up the narrow ridge connecting the two peaks. After a quick but challenging scramble over a few dozen meters of boulders and loose rock, we duck under a string a prayer flags and step into the fort's crumbling walls.
Our reward is an eagle-eye view of Leh like none we've seen. From this high up, Leh looks impossibly small, a green sliver buried in the haystack of the Himalayas. I catch myself feeling almost surprised, and thoroughly glad, that we ever managed to find it.
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