Ladakh - part 4 - Homestays: staying by locals

 "But if you walk Markha, you can actually do homestay trek and then you don't need tent at all," mentions a friend while we are packing for Ladakh. This is the first time I have heard about homestays. Five minutes before departure of our bus to Prague airport I am still deciding if to take the tent or not. There is no time to think anymore and decision is enforced by circumstances. Tent stays at home in the hall. Let's explore what homestay actually means.

 As we walk through the Markha valley, we pass wooden plates next to houses with handwritten signs "Homestay Parma", "Tsarik homestay" or "Olthang homestay". By the last one, we open the wooden gate, walk the few stone steps down to the house and ask for the homestay. 

The man points us to his wife standing at the door who speaks good enough English to explain us, that we can go in and shows us our room with three mattresses on the ground and a pile of very warm blankets next to it where we will sleep in our sleeping bags. 

1500 rupies per person per night for sleep, breakfast, dinner and packed lunch. We are a bit surprised. The prices compared to the internet increased since the last year from 1200 INR to 1500 INR, which is not cheap considering the standard prices in Ladakh. Quite an inflation. However, the price is not to be bargain about, it is fixed over the whole valley. We only discuss if we pay for Robert or not - somewhere we pay for him 500 INR, somewhere nothing...

We take off our shoes in front of the doors and enter the half-build house. The upper layer of the house is still in the production - three men are just taking mud from the hole behind the house where the soil is mixed with the water and prepare in the simple forms new "mud bricks". Piling bricks and gluing them with mud cement. This is how the second floor of the house is slowly raising. Next to the fence are standing tiny trees without branches binded together. These will be used for ceilings and roof. I really like the simple gradual process of building here. However, they are not really ready for rainy times to come. When the thunderstorm hits the house in the evening, the woman is climbing to the roof and attaching big foil over it to protect her home from quick destruction.

The living room is covered by carpets and we sit by small nicely drawn tables, enjoying mint and milk tea, talking to other guys (Carribean boy and Spanish girl) and observe our hosting woman who is kneeing by her small metal stove, preparing for us a dinner. Today we will not get dhal and rice as yesterday, but chutagi - very good soup with pasta and vegetable (spinach and carrots collected from the garden around the house). The food is really very tasty. 

Robert is running around the room and rolling over his head. Yesterday, he was just calmly sitting on the ground and cuddling for 30 minutes a cat and then playing for ages with a tiny car he found on the ground. Here is no cat and he lost the car he got yesterday (which was the major tragic of the day), the environment is already more known and he is slowly getting more and more excited and courageous. Putting him to bed takes some nerves. Fortunately (for him) we have warm water in our bottles so he doesn't have to be showered under the cold

water from the well.

In the morning, I visit the toilet, which is a small building with a hole in the middle, where poo is covered by dust using a shovel. 

Outside, on her knees, is in the light rain sitting again the woman, heating the metal plate by the fire from few slowly burning sticks, making chapati for our breakfast. There is so much beauty and charm in this woman who is nicely dressed and preparing the food while being also modern age enterpreneur who learnt English in the family to run the homestay. Most of the homestays have water barrels for warm water on the roof, solar panel next to house and nice pump on their garden - these seem to be coming from some developmental projects in India.

It was great that we decided for homestays. Apart from the fact that we could carry lighter luggages, two nights in the houses of locals enabled us to see how they live, eat and survive in these places cut most of the year from the rest of the world. 

Talking to them and other hikers was also interesting, although I really enjoyed being for other two nights just alone in one of the "stable tent". 

For lunch we got typically baked potato, egg, bread pocket with spinach or other bakery, sweet drink and some small chocolate bar. I removed the chocolate bars from the packages before Robert could see them and collected them in a separate box. Later, on the way over the pass, we used them as a doping to fill us with the needed energy and improve Robert's mood as well.