We have been having lots of fun with Xavier’s performance kite at high altitude.

A blustering wind howls down the Leh Valley most afternoons, picking up dust and debris, and forcing us all to cover up and get in doors.  It reminds us, despite the encircling snow capped mountains, that we are living in a cold desert.

In our ‘backyard’ – the building sites behind us – Xavier has been flying his kite and providing entertainment to some of our less well-to-do neighbours.  While we are living in a comfortable traditional Ladakhi home – a walled ‘compound’, there are a great many families of  ‘summer migrants’ living around us in quite appalling conditions.  No electricity, no running water, their homes rented windowless mud brick bunkers. They come from the Hindu south and provide the labour for the frenzied period of construction that occurs in the short summer. They are the folk wielding sledgehammers – the rock breakers – who work all day cracking granite into rectangular building blocks.  Or they head off, men and women, in the morning to work on roads or building sites.  Not earning much, but more than they would from where they come from in the south.  The children do not go to school, but play in the dirt or the local melt stream (now dry).