Cups of tea, pashmina and momos: Here's how to go touring India on a budget

In the Ladakh region of northern India, the town of Leh is known for its beauty and culture, and for the experience of buying a cashmere scarf

I told the owner, George Sher Ali, that I’d been in his shop before, several years before, and his ears perked up. “Tell me what you bought,” he said, and reached for a tall stack of old assignment notebooks. “I will tell you exactly when you came in.”

I said I’d been into his art and print shop, L’Araba Fenice, roughly eight years ago on a trip to Leh, a town in the Ladakh region of Jammu and Kashmir, in the far north of India. I bought two or three postcards, as had a friend who had come with me. He flipped through the pages of a few dog-eared notebooks for several minutes before announcing decisively, “This is you. Five postcards.” And he pointed at a hand-scrawled entry in a ledger dated Sept. 19, 2010. It was eight years ago to the day that I’d visited his store.

Leh (pronounced LAY), once the royal seat of a former Buddhist kingdom, is a place with a seemingly undying memory, ageless and eternal as the mountains that surround it. The Ladakh region, dotted with poplars and dominated by the Himalayas, has changed noticeably over the last decade, welcoming more tourists, restaurants and guesthouses. But it remains a wondrous destination for the adventurous traveler, full of captivating scenery, generous and friendly people, and accessible monasteries and holy places nearby. And it doesn’t hurt that it can all be done fairly inexpensively.

A couple of planning tips: You’ll probably want to arrive by plane. The flight to Leh’s Kushok Bakula Rimpochee Airport from New Delhi is about an hour, compared to a 25-hour drive. Flights, fortunately, can be cheap. I bought a one-way ticket directly through Air India for about 2,800 Indian rupees, or less than $40. Because of the unpredictable mountain climate at such high altitude (Leh is at around 11,500 feet), flights arrive and depart in the morning. Don’t plan to hop an evening flight.

After arriving in Delhi, I spent a couple of days sightseeing and getting used to the time change before heading up to Leh early one morning. My trip was part of a longer journey to India, to places that will be featured in future columns. You can expect a good deal of bureaucracy when it comes to travel in this country. Have copies of your itinerary printed out, and a copy of the credit card with which you made a given ticket purchase, or the card itself.

Despite the territorial jockeying between China, Pakistan and India over the disputed Kashmir region, you won’t need any kind of special visa or permit to visit Leh, or sites on the Srinagar-Leh Highway that runs west from town — your Indian visa will do. But if you want to go to certain areas like the Nubra Valley, north of Leh, you’ll need a special Inner Line Permit. The price depends on the length of the permit, but will run in the neighborhood of 400 to 500 rupees.

Friends I’d met during my previous trip to Leh — Tundup, a native of the area, and Sina, a Swiss national who visits frequently — picked me up at the airport and dropped me at my lodgings, the Hotel Spic-n-Span on Old Leh Road (double rooms cost around $45 to $60 per night online). There are hundreds of hotels and guesthouses in Leh, at every price point, but I’d recommend staying within walking distance of the Main Bazaar, the hub of shopping and dining activity in town.

The bazaar is a good destination for your first day in Leh — you’ll want to take it easy and drink plenty of water as your body acclimates to the noticeable change in altitude. The bazaar, once open to cars, but now a pedestrian walkway, is bedecked with banners from the local mosque and colorful Buddhist prayer flags. Street dogs trot lazily between vendors peddling local apricots (200 grams, almost half a pound, will run about 100 rupees), while hawkers call from their storefronts, promising the best prices for pashmina shawls and handmade crafts. In the distance, the nine-story Leh Palace surveys the activity below.

Through the entrance to the compact Tibetan Refugee Market, you’ll find the Central Asian Museum (50 rupees entrance fee), a small but worthwhile cataloging of the history and customs of the area.

No trip to Leh would be complete without buying a scarf of some kind (it’ll help with the chilly temperatures and dust, too), and the purchasing is part of the experience. You do not simply walk into a store and buy a scarf — it’s a relationship. Majid, the storekeeper at Pashmina House on the north end of the bazaar (the Google Maps location is not quite correct — the shop is further north), sat me down with a cup of tea and told me, at some length, details about the origins of pashmina, or cashmere woven from the fur of Pashmina goats. At least half an hour passed before the subject of price was even broached and even then it was done almost distastefully, with numbers being punched into a calculator and passed back and forth between us.

“And let me tell you, my friend,” he said. “The machine-made pashminas are 10 percent nylon. No one else will tell you this. But it is the truth.” The handmade pashminas ran in excess of 8,000 rupees, more than $100, as opposed to half that for the machine-woven scarves. I bought a machine-woven pashmina for myself (I honestly thought both were great; they both felt like spun cumulus clouds.) and a couple of beautifully patterned, very soft Merino wool scarves for 2,500 rupees apiece.

A couple of bartering tips: While it’s not the American way, try your best to get into it. Think of it as a dance or courting process, not as adversarial. Don’t jump right in with numbers. Chat, have some tea and relax. If you don’t like the price, act as if your heart has been broken, and walk away. Haggle hard, but if you know you’re going to buy something, let the vendor feel like they’ve won — they likely need the extra $5 or $10 more than you do.

Exploring a new place where the air is so thin will frequently leave you gasping for breath. Take a breather, and refill your water bottle at Dzomsa, a small, environmentally conscious shop that sells sterilized water refills (bring your own bottle) for just 7 rupees, as well as some local artisanal products. I bought a jar of sweet apricot jam for 130 rupees. The cheerful shopkeeper, a woman named Stanzin, also offers same-day laundry service, for 95 rupees per kilo of clothing.

If you need a bit more of a boost than water can provide, there are a number of good coffee places in town, another change from my last visit. Brazil Cafe, with a friendly staff and great rooftop deck, was a handy stop for Wi-Fi (coverage is not great in Leh, and you’ll learn to take it where you can find it) and a 150-rupee cappuccino, as well as a surprisingly good 100-rupee banana bread. The Yum Yum Cafe, located in courtyard off the main market, also has good coffee (80 rupees) and crunchy peanut cookies (50 rupees apiece).

More traditional Ladakhi fare is easy to find. The Himalayan Cafe has solid local food as well as good views of the palace and main bazaar. A vegetarian thenthuk — soup with thick, hand-pulled noodles, was just 110 rupees. An accompanying cup of rich Tibetan butter tea was powerfully dank and savory (40 rupees). You’ll want to try momos at some point — traditional filled dumplings — and you won’t find better than the potato and cheese variety (120 rupees) at Amdo Food, also on the Main Bazaar. With a yielding exterior and creamy, hearty filling, they’re perfect fuel for a mountain trek.

For a more modern take on local fare, try Namza, which is both a cafe and an upscale clothing store, owned by the designer Padma Yangchan. The clothes were a bit out of my league, price-wise, but the food was on point. A vegetarian o-chu tagi, soup with crimped, ear-shaped pasta, was very enjoyable (300 rupees). The restaurant Bon Appetit, off Changspa Road, takes some work to find after the sun goes down — when you see fellow diners approaching on a dark path with cellphone flashlights, you know you’ve found the right place. The gorgeously designed space has no rival in town, and the food is excellent. A big mutton burger with fries cost 300 rupees, and a bottle of pleasingly sour sea buckthorn juice to wash it down with was 100.

Venturing out of town is a good part of the fun of being in Leh, though, and I took advantage of the fact that my friend Sina had access to a car to explore the surrounding area. (For others, hiring a car and driver is easy, and encouraged, in Ladakh. The Ladakh Taxi Operator site can give you a good sense of what you can expect to pay for different trips. As always, bargain.)

We made our way early one morning, sun at our backs, to explore a few different holy sites in the area. After a brief stop for photos at the confluence of the Indus and Zanskar Rivers, we arrived at the Likir Monastery. Originally built in 1065 by the fifth king of Ladakh and reconstructed in the 18th century following a fire, the gompa (monastery) sits atop a hill, with snow-streaked mountains framing it picturesquely in the background. Admission is 30 rupees.

If you have the time, continue west for the next hour or two, winding along the Indus River through the pristine and rugged mountainscape. In 70 kilometers, or about 43 miles, you’ll reach Lamayuru Monastery, one of the most venerated and ancient monasteries in the region (50 rupees admission). A legend states that Arahat Madhyantika, who brought Buddhism to the region, visited the site and prophesied that teachings of the religion would flourish. The structure, which emits a certain serenity and calm, is situated in an area known as Moon Land, where the normally harsh lines of the mountainsides come together and fall in soft waves.

Lamayuru is a trek from Leh; If you want to visit somewhere a bit closer, Thikse Monastery is less than 20 kilometers west of town. Thikse, whose different white buildings cascade regally down a hillside, bears a resemblance to the Potala Palace in Tibet. We visited early, as the sun was rising, to catch morning prayers. Two young monks dressed in robes and orange headpieces stepped onto the roof and blew into their dung dkar, or conch shell horns. The ritual stunned us for its simplicity and beauty.

The New York Times Service