"HIKING INTO THE OBLIVION WORLD"

I love going out of my way, beyond what I know, and finding my way back a few extra miles, by another trail, with a compass that argues with the map…nights alone in hotels and guests houses in remote Himalayan towns where I know no one and no one I know knows where I am, nights with strange paintings and floral spreads and cable television that furnish a reprieve from my own biography, I have lost myself though I know where I am. Moments when I say to myself as feet or car clear a crest or around a bend, I have never seen this place before. Times when some architectural detail on vista that has escaped me these many years says to me that I never did know where I was, even when I was home.

It had nothing do with why I travel alone or people around me. It only to do with how it feels to be in the wild.  There is no place on earth that is so pure and wild than Ladakh. With what it was like to walk for miles for no reason other than to witness the accumulation of mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers, and grasses, sunrises, and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way. That’s what Ladakhis knew, I supposed. And what monks knew and invaders knew and what thousands of people who preceded and followed them knew. It was what I knew before I even really did before I could have known how truly hard and glorious this place would be, how profoundly the trail would both shatter and shelter me.

It’s been 3 months since I am back from Ladakh but I never stopped thinking about it, probably I will never stop thinking about Ladakh and Ladakhis.i wanna go back there and feel that pure wild feeling, which I believe, can be felt only in gray mountains of Ladakh. Every wild lover, lone traveler, the hiker should hike into this oblivion world. juleh!!!…. juleh!!!… Juleh!!!…