Bringing thread counts to Ladakh

My heart sinks as I open the New York Times travel section and spot the headline: "Bringing Luxury to a Rugged Himalayan Haven." Which area is doomed now, I wonder. Oh, fine, I should have known -- Ladakh!

Ladakh is a high-altitude Buddhist region, administratively incorporated within Indian Kashmir, an area so remote that the article describes it as:

a region formerly the exclusive province of trekkers and religious pilgrims willing to trade comfort for the hope of transcendence.

But no longer! The article describes its writer's travel with a tour company

that takes travelers used to high thread counts and high tea on treks through the Himalayas.

The tour, led by "an Eton-educated art history expert with a preference for ascots and roll-your-own cigarettes," takes its pampered guests to specially renovated rooms in local homes.

There were chef-prepared dinners, hot showers, and heavenly beds made with Shaki's own linens. Handmade soaps stood beside the copper bathroom basins.

Well, ain't that just ducky?

The article marvels that "places like Ladakh can still exist." How much longer does the writer believe that "places like Ladakh" will continue to exist, once truckloads of "handmade soaps" and "Shaki's own linens" begin arriving from the lowlands?

I trekked in Ladakh for a bit under three weeks in 2005. As the article says, the region is remote and, by Western standards, primitive. The landscapes are stunning. The people are poor -- again, by Western standards -- but spiritually rich. The region's capital, Leh, was already, in 2005, a trekking center with small, inexpensive hotels, pizza joints and cybercafés. Even we trekkers, by our very presence, were helping to change the lives and attitudes of the peoples among whom we trekked -- we perhaps blended in by our simple lives and meals, but not by our modern clothes and camping gear. But we at least trekked with a company that was dedicated both to minimizing our cultural impact and to spending our money on goods and services produced by local residents.

Travel in itself is homogenizing -- it changes both the travelers and the people they visit. Travel's impact is entirely favorable on the traveler; it can often be favorable on those visited. But the greater the disparity in appearances, including apparent wealth, between the two groups, the earlier the place visited will lose the unique qualities that made it worth visiting.

I understand that there is a selfish emotion involved here -- a desire to keep an area impoverished and primitive for the entertainment of the Western visitor. It's easy to call a people poor in assets but rich in spirituality, and to use that as an excuse for perpetuating poverty and hardship. But, on the other hand, comparison of societies before and after "Westernization" and influx of luxury tourist dollars leaves me unconvinced that the changes brought by tourism represent unalloyed improvement.

But Westernization will continue, everywhere, and will result in a more homogenized world. As tourists, however, we have some responsibility to ensure that our travel does not encourage the more undesirable aspects of this change, and, in so far as possible, encourages actual improvement in the lives of the people we visit.

I don't think that "bringing luxury" to permit more light-hearted travel for visitors to the Himalayas is the answer. Nor is it the answer, in the long run, to the interests of Western tourism. I'm reminded of the struggle to create the North Cascades National Park in my own state. Critics complained that park advocates wanted to "lock up" the wilderness, making it available only to "hardy hikers and mountaineers." (These phrases were repeated ad nauseum.) They wanted roads throughout the park, and trams to the more interesting summits. They seemed determined to overlook the fact that the attraction of the North Cascades consisted not merely in the scenery -- more easily viewed in picture books and movies -- but in the fact that the North Cascades was one of the few remaining true wilderness areas in America where humans could experience something of the solitude experienced by the pioneers, where a hiker could find himself forced to rely on his own preparations, skills and stamina to complete his hike.

I'm sorry to read of "luxury tours" to the Himalayas, just as I'm sorry to read of helicopter trips to Everest Base Camp and road building throughout the Andes. These changes may seem to promise, in the short run, greater opportunities to tourists and more money to local people; in the long run, they degrade the travel experience of those doing the visiting, and the lives and cultures of the persons being visited.