January 7, 2021
The summer after I returned from my language year abroad, travel bug having firmly embedded its fangs into my neck, the chance to go on a trek in Northern India came up. With what I had to spare of my student loan, I felt entitled to push my year of travelling a little further. It had become an addiction for me; I anxiously raked through my experiences abroad and felt they weren’t “enough” they hadn’t shaped me sufficiently yet, broken me in.
Some French and Belgian friends were planning a trek in Ladakh, geographically part of India, in the northern state of Jammu and Kashmir, but ethnically and culturally Tibetan and therefore, presumably, Buddhist. This piqued my interest, less for the hiking element than the prospect of diving into a human environment that was completely unknown to me. In that aloof, reductive way Westerners often have of thinking we can peel away the cultural clutter of Oriental wisdom and take a draught of it neat, I was intrigued by B