High and much drier

Sorry for the lack of updates; this just means i've been doing a lot of working and sleeping. There's a lot to talk about, but let's start with the weather.

This year has been unseasonably dry in all of Ladakh; indeed, most of India has been "suffering." More on the suffering later. The primary cause of the drought in Ladakh is the weak and late winter. The Indus Valley proper receives almost no rainfall year round. Instead, most of the water in the entire region comes ultimately from snow and glacier melt. This year snowfall was unusually light, what snow did fall came very late, and Dorje adds that there is a "problem" at altitude, where snow is not melting properly. Irrigation ditches that usually run daily are dry for weeks here. Entire crops are seriously behind schedule, if not abandoned outright.

The second cause of the drought is the late monsoon. This is primarily an affliction of the rest of India, where the monsoon not only brings water but also a relief from +100°F heat. Many districts in the north delayed the beginning of the summer school year, Uttar Pradesh is/was in the midst of a power crisis from so much AC, Mumbai was contemplating water rationing, you get the idea.

This has been a major problem for all of northern India with the exception of the hill states. There has been a "mad rush" of domestic tourists flocking to the cooler higher-altitude regions, which is nothing if not great for business. Surely the delayed monsoon also has something to do with the influx of domestic tourists in Leh, which has somewhat helped the region buck the global recession. More on that next time.