Toronto - March 14, 2025
Thank you Gusta
As promised in an earlier post I’ll close my documentary of this snow leopard journey by trying to put it, at least for my own satisfaction, into some useful/helpful context. But before I do, huge apologies for the very long delay in completing this last post, the events of the last 10 or 12 days have been disheartening in the extreme and have temporarily hijacked motivation and enthusiasm.
I remind myself that almost exactly 5 years ago we were overtaken by a lifetime event, one that no one had foreseen, that took our world by surprise, one for which we had no rules, no prior lived experience, no frame of reference and one whose outcome was the deaths of millions. A truly existential experience, a truly lifetime moment. And yet almost exactly 5 years on we are being overtaken by yet another existential, lifetime moment, not one with life or death consequences but one that will bring with it massive social and economic pain and dislocation to individuals and to families on both sides of the border. This time it’s caused by a different pathology, one not of the body but of the spirit and one which calls into question all the comfortable assumptions that we have had about the world and our place in it; who we are, who are friends are, who can be trusted and how we will manage and survive.
One of the things which has been fascinating to watch arising from this threat has been a very unexpected response, the country has been galvanised and unified in ways that I have not seen since the Canada v USSR hockey tournament in 1972. For my non-Canadian readers this may seem a very strange comparison but it is a fitting one. For many Canadians hockey has become the sporting metaphor for how to conduct oneself in competitive situations, and in 1972 against the Russians it was a proxy war on skates. The belief that Canada, as a very polite country who apologises for everyone else’s mistakes as well as its own, a country which is seen to be just a nice guy who would quickly roll over to the demands of Le Grand Orange, well that expectation was badly judged. Anyone who bought into that assumption has clearly never played hockey against Canadians, as that ’72 tournament will bear witness. How will it play out? Who knows, too early to tell but the one thing that I do know is that Canadians, small thing though it is, are now once again proudly attaching the maple leaf flag to all of their suitcases and backpacks!
To get an idea of the character of the barrage of reporting that is overwhelming us, this article from The Independent, a UK service, is as good an example as any.
All of the above is to ask, how many more lifetime, existential moments are we going to be lucky enough to survive? As Gusta, one of my readers and a good friend from New York, a psychologist, a gifted musician and composer, the creator of a daily cartoon which reflects on current events and the contributor of today’s lead image has it, ‘Stop this nonsense!’
But back to snow leopards, I asked all of our 6 other trip companions to tell me, on a scale of 1 - 5 their rating of the trip overall. Surprisingly, the Americans all rated it 4 out of 5 while our Australian fellow-traveller and I rated it as 1 or at our most generous, 2 out of 5 while V simply said it was the worst trip she had ever experienced. Why this difference?
I think it comes down to purpose and expectation. The 4 Americans and in particular the two Southern women who were travelling together were perfectly pleased since they had now ‘done’ snow leopards. By their same yardstick they had jointly ‘done’ a number of other countries and places. Neither of them were photographers but others shared their images so that they could palpably demonstrate that they too had ‘done’ Ladakh. The other two Americans, one of whom was quite a good photographer also felt that it was a 4 out of 5 since, given the limitations and constraints of access to the leopards, it was about the best that could be expected and we did after all see 4 different cats over the course of our stay. Using that logic one could equally make the case that going to an English country house shooting weekend would be an excellent way to learn about pheasants. Our tone and amenities may have been a little down-market but the essence of the experience was the same, line everyone up in a row, flush the quarry and let them bang away.
However after much thought, I have come to accept that my rating was as much an indictment of my own physical limitations as it was of the nature of the experience. Because there are other ways to see and photograph snow leopards in a very different manner. For example, I explored the idea of coming back to Ladakh, hiring one of the trained wildlife guides who accompanied us and heading for the portion of the Tibetan Plateau that extends into eastern Ladakh, about a 9 hour drive away from Leh. Because it’s a plateau ringed by the Himalayas, travel over the relatively flatter landscape is much easier, there are significantly fewer visitors and it’s possible to trek to locations where one can lie up in a blind with only the guide and so have a private and much more intimate experience with the animals than is possible out of Leh (see video below). However, as attractive as this scenario may be, as noted above my own physical limitations come into play. For starters the plateau is at 5,000+ metres, at least 1,000 metres higher than we had had to deal with and I know how exhausting the most trivial physical exertions were in Rumbak. Add the very real difficulties of trekking extended distances with heavy photography equipment and the significantly more primitive living and working conditions and I quickly came to the conclusion that on trips of this type I may well have to settle for either ‘doing’ Ladakh in the manner of our American compatriots or thinking that these will make excellent next-lifetime projects. Karma at work!
The video above was taken by one of our guides on his iPhone but in an entirely different area than the one we had access to. This was what I expected to see on our trip, sadly our experience fell far short.
More to come!
