We are not beyond the rare cheesey moment on our travels.  So between visiting schools and fortress gompas and walking high passes, and having our back wheels slide at 5200M at 30cm from a 500M drop … we just had to visit a little colony of central asian camels.  They are reputedly the off-spring of animals that plied the Ladakh–Xinjiang caravans up until the closure of the India-China border in the 1940s.

They are incredibly cute beats, with incredibly bad breathe.  Very polite.  This is major quiz night general knowledge, so read carefully: the Bactrian camel has two humps on its back, in contrast to the single-humped dromedary camel.  Bactrian camels belong to a fairly small group of animals that regularly eat snow to provide their water needs. Any animals living above the snowline are obliged to do this as snow and ice are the only forms of water during winter, and by doing so their range is greatly enlarged. The latent heat of snow and ice is enormous compared with the heat capacity of water, demanding a large sacrifice in heat energy and forcing animals to eat only small amounts at a time.

In Leh there is a small supply of Nubra valley camel hair made into fabric … there is a very nice piece that may need to go into a suitcase ….