How was your holiday? Mine was excellent …

Good morning. How was your holiday? Mine was excellent, thanks for asking. I went to Leh and Shey and Lamayuru. Delhi first and then into the Himalayas with my woolly hat and fleecey jacket made from recycled plastic fizzy drink bottles.

Leh is the principal town in the Ladakh region. It has Christian churches and Buddhist temples and Islamic mosques and cows wandering the streets and the people aren’t shooting each other, which is reasonable. And it has freshly baked flat bread.

I visited a school in Shey. They teach kids about climate change even though they’re 3000 metres above the rising high tide mark. They teach them in English.

About 200 of the school’s 500 kids are boarders because their parents are nomadic yak herders up near China, which is probably like living in the King Country and going to boarding school in Cambridge.

The school is built so that the sun heats the rooms and water. The principal said the school needs more IT equipment, music stuff, footballs, and library books. Which is like any NZ school.

The kids told me they’re happy – mostly because they have warm beds to sleep in and plenty of sensational food such as the vegetable curry we had for lunch in the sunny dining room with a view of the mountains.

 And I drove, I was driven, in a four wheel drive down the Indus Valley across barren moonscape plateaus –why aren’t they plateaux? This is where the world’s sandpits begin as house-sized boulders crashing down hillsides into the river and grinding and crushing their way out to sea.

The road was built and is maintained by the Indian Army as part of its border defence network.

We passed families ploughing fields with pairs of yaks pulling a handmade wooden ploughshare. Little kids were helping. They weren’t down at the Manukau Mall stuffing their faces with burgers and Once Were Potatoes with their obese bums sticking out of their jeans.

Lamayuru is a town about a very long way from Manukau Mall. Three boys came up to me at the monastery and said hello. They were monk-lets, which is my word for a trainee monk.
They weren’t asking for money. They weren’t asking for anything. They just wanted to practise their English. I asked them what they did all day – without a shopping mall or a McDonalds or skateboards or face? They said they’re very busy learning and working around the monastery – cleaning and helping in the kitchen.

The sign over the entrance to a government school in Leh said ‘Enter to Learn. Leave to Serve.’

— Peter Giddens