Over the weeks in Ladakh we often had trouble uploading photos and text to the internet.  Ladakh has a 2G phone network … and it often breaks down.  It was also turned off occasionally for political reasons … to shutdown social networking.  The main service, BNSL, which has the widest coverage, is also state owned and controlled.  With over 500,000 troops in Kashmir/Ladakh, security issues sometimes take precedence over blogging.  Power was also only on for a few hours every evening – so getting ‘charge’ was always important.  Stealing ‘charge’ became Xavier’s number one pastime.

So … we have archived many jpegs which we will put up over the next few weeks.  So … the blog is not necessarily chronological.

We went to the Polo Final a few weeks ago: the coppers versus the army, and the army guys one.  It was wild, and quite frankly, very dangerous.  Occasionally the crowd crept onto the pitch and had to scatter as the ponies galloped on to them.  The players seemed to find it quite easy to whack the ball on the full, to the delight of the several thousand in the crowd.  Polo is big here and has been for hundreds of years.