Day Three - visit to the Hemis monastry
Today was a much more relaxed day than yesterday. We visited a couple of monastries in the neighbourhood and it took us five hours.
The first one was the Hemis monastery, this one was the furthrest. It was nestled in the mountains and was neat to see how a community had built up around it. This was one of the older and well respected monastery we were told. Frankly speaking if you have seen one monastery you have seen them all. There was however something calm about where each of these monasteries were located - always up on a hill. We also visited Stakna, Thicksay and then the Shey Palace. The Shey Palace used to be the ancient capital of Ladakh. On the way to and from these places you got to see the stupas along the way and the unique houses of the people of Ladakh. Close to the Shey palace there were some rock carvings from ancient times which we photographed, what was amazing was that they were not protected in any way from vandalism etc. In fact one of them had the sign ‘Horn Please’ painted on it - its a pity I did not get a photograph of that.
The Shey Palace was high up on the mountain and climbing up was quite a chore, we did manage to make it. We did not enter any of the temples and I photographed the inside of one of them from the outside.
I wonder why the depictions of the gods and goddesses are so scary - I thought that Buddhism was a peaceful, non violent religion. I guess I will not comment much because I do not know much about it. I did hear that this is due to the ‘tantrik’ influence.
We returned to the Hotel and were told by the driver that he would be back later to take us to see the Shanti Stupa which is not very far from the Hotel. However, we had had enough of the ‘Gompas’ and the ‘Stupas’ for the day and asked him to let it be. We relaxed and then went out for dinner at a restuarant close by. The Cheese Bean Chilli Burrito that Arpit ordered was unlike any Burrito that we had eaten in Toronto and so I took a photograph of it, the white stuff is the cheese. I also picked up a book - Rohinton Mistry’s ‘Such a long Journey’.
