An Epic Himalayan Adventure — July 2018
Guest Blog by Staffan Jönsson — GHE July 2018 member

When you flip the switch to turn on the light at night, you don’t think twice about it. We are all born and raised with electricity, and take it as natural as that the sun rises each morning and that the stars twinkle at night.
In addition, we have roads and railway; cars, buses and trains that take us anywhere we want to go. We have enough money to buy food every day, and if we don’t feel like cooking, we go out to a restaurant. We have gone to school, had the chance to study at University, and continue to learn throughout life by reading newspapers, listening to the radio or watching TV.
But what if we would take away the roads, railways and the electricity? If we would have to face nature as it is, without internet and cellphone access? What if our survival of the next winter, with 2–3 meters of snow, negative 30–40-degree C temperatures is based on how well we tender our crop and collect fuel during the few summer months? We would be utterly lost and probably not survive to see the snow melt and the next spring arrive.

Global Himalayan Expedition(GHE) is an organization that is set up to provide access to solar powered electricity for remote villages, to enable education and to develop solar powered homestays for sustainable tourism. I had the great fortune to be part of the 2018 July Expedition to electrify the village of Sking in the Zanskar valley of Ladakh, a part of Jammu & Kashmir state in northern India.
The village is reachable by a 2-day trek from the end of a dirt road, either from the end of the valley over the Shingo-La pass at 5091 m elevation, or by trekking up from the end of the road that originates in Padum. Located at 4100 m, the village consists of 32 households and is beautifully set on a plateau above the Kargyak river that later joins the Tsarap River at Purne. Rainfall in the summer is more or less inexistent, hence the surrounding mountains are brownish walls of stone and gravel, free from all but the most resistant small plants.

The houses are well built structures made of self-made clay bricks, which are joined together by clay, using wooden structures for windows and doorways. The 2 story homes have flat roofs which are used to store and dry fodder for the animals as well as yak dung for heating and cooking. The inner floor and the roof are constructed by wood, ranging from a few logs down to small branches, placed in an alternate 90° system, starting with the biggest diameter log, and which is covered on the top by clay.

The houses typically contain 5–10 rooms, distributed between summer and winter kitchen, living room, one or more bedrooms, prayer room, storage rooms and animal room. The yaks and goats are kept in the house during the winter months, providing heat to keep the cold out and protecting them from being prey to the snow leopard, which comes close to the villages in the winter in the hunt for food.
The expedition team consisted of 16 volunteers from around the globe. During the 2 weeks we were together we learnt to know and appreciate each other, and despite a big variation in age, ethnic and cultural background we were united to a well-functioning team through our common objective to electrify the village. Needless to say, one of the most important benefits of such an expedition is the teamwork and the bonding that occurs when working together for a greater cause.

After 2 days of acclimatization in Leh, and an early morning mountain bike tour, we loaded the buses and hit the road. The road between Leh and Sarchu was scenic, bumpy at places and covers several high points such as the Tanglang La pass at 5’328 meters. In the evening we arrived safely in Sarchu at a tent camp, where we had dinner and soon went to sleep. The next morning, we awoke to a beautiful blue sky.

After a few more hours in the bus, we reached the end of the road just below the Shingo La pass. There the horses were waiting, ready to carry our equipment as well as the major part of our luggage. We trekked slowly as some of us were feeling the effects of the altitude, but we still reached our campsite well before dark. The caravan of horses passed us early, and it was a welcoming site to see the kitchen tent and the dining tent already being erected as we walked on to the site. We were served tea in a hut inhabited by a family tending to the yaks, all while the local team set up our tents. They were of course not affected by the altitude, but most of the volunteers were feeling quite worn, which made us quickly seek the warmth of our sleeping bags once another delicious dinner was consumed.
Strengthened by a hearty breakfast, we took off down the valley in direction of our village. The upper part of the Kargyak valley is not inhabited, and we walked for many hours without seeing any signs of human settlements. No roads, no cars, no connectivity — just nature!
We greeted an on-coming horse caravan with the local greeting Julley!
There was an air of excitement in the team as we approached the village, and we stopped a few hundred meters before to collect everyone so that we would make a collective entrance. We were certainly not disappointed, as we were greeted by the typical local drums and we were given khatak’s (the white silk scarfs) by the villagers as we entered. The whole village was gathered and we were served black sweet tea and “salty” tea which is tea with yak milk.

The next two days we set out electrifying the village! This means entering each of the 32 houses, working with the locals to decide where the 7 light fixtures per house should be located, mounting them as well as the solar panels on the roof, placing the batteries and the charge controllers and wiring it all up! In addition to the interior lighting, we installed a number of “street lights”, which will allow safe passage between the houses at night.
Time for the big moment, and yes, the village lit up in every direction, houses, streetlights cast a bright glow and we united with the villagers in applauds and cheers! A truly memorable experience! The kitchen team had made a cake, we were presented a new khatak and served chang, the local barley beer. Thereafter dancing commenced, the villagers in their festive costumes, and in the end we all joined in and celebrated the electrification of Sking!

Next day we took farewell of the villagers to continue our trek along the river. It was not without a sense of pride that we left Sking behind us. We had accomplished what we came here for, and we had done it in only 2 days! It is quite amazing what a dedicated and motivated team can achieve, as long as the vectors are aligned and of course we profited a lot from the GHE team’s experience, having done this over 60 times by now.
One of key take-backs for me from the entire trip is sustainability. It starts with the overall mission, and how the expedition is CO2 negative, after including both local transportation and all participants air travel in the calculation. However, it goes much deeper than that, in that all equipment is manufactured in India, that the LED light bulbs and charge controllers are of GHE design for remote small grids. The GHE team is heavily relying on local resources for trekking, transportation etc, and have educated 2 local women to become engineers in order to assure local maintenance support for the villages in the region. But the highest level of sustainability was found in the village of Sking itself! How they use natures resources like collecting the yak dung, drying it in the sun and using it for cooking and heating, how they carefully water their crop by re-directing the water streams each morning, gives us urban dwellers much food for thought.

Trekking usually is a time to gather your thoughts, which there was ample of opportunity to do. In addition, trekking in a group of likewise minded people gave plenty of instances for interesting conversations. You always found yourself next to someone else, and it was easy and rewarding to strike up a conversation, so that at the end of the trip I really had the feeling that I know the team a whole lot better.
This trip exceeded my expectations in every regard, not because I had low expectations, but because it was well planned, the team was skillfully handpicked (apart from the written application form there was a phone interview to get accepted) and the fact that no pictures can do justice to the grandness of the Himalayan mountains. But most of all, it left a sense of having made an impact on people’s life’s, people that are living far more sustainably than we do, people that not only sit around and wait for “someone” or the government to come and help them, but who actually made a conscious decision to collect the basic fee and join the GHE electrification effort! For these people, the flipping of a switch to get electric light is a big thing and a life changing event!

And for me, one thing is for sure, I will never forget the sunrise over the mountains or how the stars twinkle at night in the Zanskar Valley!
Staffan Jönsson
Want to make this your adventure? Join the next GHE expedition: www.ghe.co.in/join
