Tosh, September 30th, 2016

Sitting in a cozy room, full of cushions and low tables, very common in India's guesthouses. The guest house, Sky Star, in Tosh, still in Parvathi, is sitting on the very high hills of Tosh. We got here to meet two friends from Israel who promised us the view of our life. They didn't lie.

The view from our guest house

We arrived here after a walk of 6 hours from Khir-Ganga. Khir-Ganga is the name of a place in the mountains which have hot springs. We went there and thought we would find a village, but instead we found a group of restaurants that rent their space during the night, for the tourists who come to enjoy the hot springs. There are no roads there, the only way to get there is by foot. We started walking at 10am in the morning and arrived by 18 in the evening, right in time to enjoy the hot springs in the sunset.

It was a hard walk. We took the wrong turn at the beginning, and climbed the wrong mountain. After a while we realized that and walked back. This mistake cost us two hours, but in India time is not money. Well, maybe it is, but everything is so cheap. So we went back, almost to the beginning, and started walking the right path. It took us about 4 hours from there. On the way we met many tourists like us who made this walk. One who sat on a rock on the side, playing his dij, a few friends we knew from before, a few friends we made on the way.

One of the main problems I confront as a developer on the way, is working without internet. A lot of villages are off the grid, some even without electricity, so I can't talk about internet. Here, in Tosh, we don't have internet, so I need to decide what to do. Most of the time I just decide to enjoy myself and don't do anything. But if I want to work, I need to think a bit creatively, because many things require a connection, documentation, package managers, etc. Even sometimes you just want connection to get some muse. So there is a need to improvise and getting things ready beforehand.

My current project will be to open a blog and start uploading these posts to it. It's very hard to do it without an internet connection, because you don't want to open a blog from zero, but you mostly use an existing platform that gives you the content management and discussion forum. Since the blog idea came to my head I didn't have a connection, I only write. I might sit tomorrow on the designing, and that's it.

Acrobalance at Pangong

When we arrived to Khir-Ganga, after a long walk, we decided to go straight to the spring. The village is on the side of the mountain, the spring is the highest point in the village, and on the way to it there're a lot of restaurants, which act as guesthouses at night. We got to the spring and outside are sitting like 8 friends that we've met when we were in Ladakh. We went with them on a trip to Nubrah Valley and Pangong lake. Both are main attractions for tourists in Leh, very very beautiful and very recommended. Pangong is a lake that sits on the border between India and China, at 4500 meters above sea level. We stayed at the lake for a night, got there late and left at around 10 in the morning. So we saw the sun rising and it was very beautiful, but I think a perfect visit to the lake should be for at least a day, to see the lake at all the hours of the day.

So we met again our friends from Ladakh in the middle of nowhere. Washing in the spring is separated, the men are sitting in the open space and the women are sitting inside a room. So I sat with my friends and enjoyed the hot water. The air is cold, it was even raining on us at the end of the walk, so you can understand the feeling we had. It was amazing.

We woke up in the morning and had breakfast, and we started walking to Tosh. It's a long way down, and then a walk on the other side of the river until the dam of Barisiani, from there you need to climb the road until Tosh. Our guest house is the highest (for now) in the village, which means another 30 minutes' climb, but totally worth it.

Another suggestion I have for travelers, is the app Maps.me, it's an offline map, full of details. Both trails from Kalga to Khir-Ganga and from Khir-Ganga to Tosh are on the map, and a lot of guesthouses and restaurants appear on the map. We were in a village called Turtuk in Ladakh, which is completely in the middle of nowhere, electricity once a day between 19 to 23, but our guesthouse was mapped. You download the map, then choose the zone that you need; for example, I downloaded the India map, which is about 500 MB, and now I have all these without any internet connection.

That's it for today, in two days it's Rosh Hashana, the first day of the jewish year. I will probably find time to work on the blog by then.