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| Hunder |
Continued from the previous post...
Did you know that baby camels love biscuit and cookies? Well, I didn’t and I learnt that in Hunder.
Most tourist accommodation in Ladakh are shut in winter and Habib Guest House was probably the only one open in Hunder, which I chose as my base. Hunder is known for its Bactrian camels and camel rides, though I already knew that I couldn’t enjoy a ride because they don’t happen in winter.
It’s believed that the ancestors of these camels, which are a native of central Asia, came to Hunder via the Silk Route. However, a Bactrian camel ride wasn’t particularly on my wish list and, so, I was ok with it. However, I was pleasantly surprised to meet a camel and its baby in an enclosure behind the guest house when I went out to explore the deserted cold desert of Hunder.
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| My friend, the baby camel |
The moment I stood outside the wire enclosure, the baby camel came running to me. It showed all its teeth and I wondered whether it was grinning or snarling at me! It kept trying to bite the wire and for a moment I was actually a little scared. A man was chopping firewood close by and he laughed and told me it was “asking” for food!
I wondered what to give my little friend. What do camels eat? Those who have watched Satyajit Ray’s Sonar Kella or The Golden Fort have the answer ready. For my readers who are not from Bengal let me explain. There’s a comic sequence in the movie when a character, Lalmohanbabu, asks the hero, the detective Feluda, what camels eat. He replies, “Thorny bushes”. So, Lalmohanbabu asks again, “Do they leave out the thorns?”
Anyway, feeling too tired to hunt for thorny bushes for my friend, I decided to ask the man what could be a substitute. “Do you have biscuits? It loves biscuits.” That was a revelation! I ran inside and returned with the packets of biscuits I had bought on the way to Diskit as emergency ration.
I still felt scared of its huge teeth, though, and wondered if the little one could — deliberately or accidentally — bite off my fingers if I tried to shove the biscuits through the wire. “Don’t be scared,” the man assured me. “It won’t bite.”
Tentatively, I stuffed a biscuit/cookie through the wires, gingerly holding it by one corner. It vanished within a second and all I could hear was “scrunch-scrunch chomp-chomp”. Another biscuit vanished too. And a third one. And a fourth. I can’t remember how many went through the wires but I felt a little scared that if the camel fell ill, the biscuits/cookies might be blamed!
So, much to my little friend’s disappointment, I stopped the supply. It gave me a dejected look and kept trying to chew up the wires. Such was the pathos in that scene that I sadly turned around and left with the poor creature still trying to shove its mouth through the wires.
The young couple I had met at Diskit had put up in Habib, too. We were treated to a fabulous dinner by the hosts. The owner’s son was taking care of all our needs while his mother and cousin cooked for us. I had already acquired a taste for the Ladakhi noon chai(salt-and-butter tea) and was given it every time I asked for a cup. However, there was no running water because the pipelines were frozen. Warm water came in a bucket every morning.
After dinner, I went out to try to capture the Milky Way on my lens. I had brought my tripod solely for this purpose since Hunder is supposed to have one of the clearest skies in India. Unfortunately, the Milky Way, as we see it, was not visible at that time of the year but the sky was so clear that the stars seemed right within my reach.
It was dark and biting cold, and as I set up the tripod in a suitable location just near the gate, two army men walked in. They stared at me for a second, but made no remark. I sheepishly imagined that they probably thought I was completely crazy but were kind enough to not voice their opinion. My host, too, came out after a while and asked me exactly what I was doing at that hour out in that cold. I showed him some shots and he went inside satisfied. I hoped he no longer thought I was a runaway lunatic or something.
My room was made warm by the bukhari, which, my experience in Ladakh told me, was far superior to any heater in the world. However, I thought that it was not so environment-friendly when my host told me that the wood used for the bukharis came from some kind of berry tree which dies in the winter anyway. “It’s of no use unless it’s used as firewood,” he claimed. I don’t know if that is true, though.
Before I go on to Turtuk on the Pakistan border (which will come in the next post), let me recount my second night in Hunder. On the first night, I knew the couple were in the guest house as well. On the second day, they left for Pangong while I went to Turtuk and returned to Hunder for the second night before leaving for Leh the next morning. So, on the second night, I was all alone in the entire guest house. The Army jawans I had met stayed in separate quarters on the same compound.
It was a slightly scary prospect. I imagined all kinds of dreadful things happening to me and all the scariest scenes from those horror movies I have managed to watch through the tiny gaps within my fingers came back to haunt me. But I put up a brave face and pretended as if staying in a deserted guest house in a deserted village is the most common thing to do and I have done it umpteen times.
The hosts stayed in a separate house in the same compound and my driver had put up with them. So, even if I screamed at night, no one would hear me through that howling wind. “You can lock the main door of the guest house from inside, if it makes you any comfortable,” my host offered me very helpfully. “No thanks,” I said, imagining myself getting murdered in a guest house locked from inside and the case never getting solved.
The warmth of the bukhari and the exhaustion of my day trip to Turtuk made sure that I went off to sleep, but, as luck would have it, I woke up in the middle of the night. The room wasn’t completely dark. The well-lit night sky made sure that the room was semi-dark, which I find scarier than the completely dark. The swaying poplars outside cast swaying shadows inside the room and the howling wind made the perfect horror movie background music. And, to top it all, all sorts of sound seemed to be coming from the bathroom!
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| White-capped water redstart clicked in Hunder |
Mustering enough courage, I shone the torch all around the room and that made me feel better. The sound, obviously, was due to the wooden walls and ceilings, which were expanding in the cold. But I kept imagining that someone was trying to break in through the half-broken bathroom window. Finally, deciding that I had had enough of my dose of wild imagination, I drifted off to sleep.
Yeah, I survived that night!