Strolling through the rustic villages of Nubra and Shyok Valley may just be the ideal way to shed your office stress. Once you are here you need not travel any further to get the real ‘away from it all’ feeling. Just immerse. Visit the homes of farmers whose livelihood and way of life is based on thousands of years of tradition. See how eco-friendly and sustainable their lifestyles are, and who knows learn from it.
To help you with this, we organize all kinds of activities. In the spring we’ll offer you the chance to sow the barley and steer the yaks while they plough the fields. Your reward will be measured in cups of chang (home-made barley beer). A little later in the season, we’ll accompany the shepherds who take the yak, cows and sheep to the higher pastures. While in september you may want to try and wield the sickle when the barley is ripe.
There are many things to be done in and around Shyok River Lodge, but the activity you might enjoy most is doing nothing. In fact, if you hoped to learn something on your holiday visit to this beautiful place, you might want to choose this.
For some, doing nothing is a waste of time, but for others it can be therapeutic, if not an art form. It is not just a matter of taking a holiday. By absorbing the peaceful serenity at Shyok River Lodge and engaging in the village life you may find yourself gradually understanding that time is a natural ally instead of your worst enemy. Understanding this will help you relax and enjoy the simple pleasures of life. You’ll even be more productive when you go back home.
We offer you a course in doing nothing for as long as you like. Your teachers won’t be well paid self-proclaimed mental health gurus. They’ll be much better, as they were born to a culture in which doing and not doing are always in perfect balance. To them effort is useful, but success no measure of life, and time is the natural vehicle of all changes, good and bad. Please meet the Ladakhi people.
What place can be a more suitable environment for cleansing your body and mind than the banks of a wild river running right between two of the mightiest mountain ranges in the world? We offer anything form short daily yoga sessions, as part of multi- day packages as well as dedicated courses of a week or longer. Our main teacher is Indian, and she has obtained her teaching degree from the famous Vedanta Dhanwantari Ashram in Neyyar Dam, Kerala. Apart from teaching pure Hatha Yoga, she has developed a unique mix of yoga and work-outs that helps to build both strength and flexibility, while at the same time burning body fat. We also work with American yoga teachers, especially on our yoga plus trekking tours. See www.jantreksandtravels.com/Yoga-toursEN.html.
Relax and engage
At Shyok River Lodge you can do day walks to your heart’s content. Besides the simple joy of walking the beautiful mountain trails, you may want to know more about these ancient mountains and their inhabitants. For that we have laid out a number of guided – or interpretative – walks. Your guide will point out the many birds and plants, he will tell you about the secret life of the snow leopard, whose pug marks we may encounter, and he’ll talk about how the Himalayas came about.
For those with a slightly more profound interest in all the beauty that surrounds you at Shyok River Lodge, there are 4-7 day courses on the ecology of the Himalayas.