The weather had improved overnight, and we were able to make the final part of our drive in sunshine.

We first stopped at the monastery in Rangdum, the place where we had slept. Built on a hill overlooking the barren alpine valley, Rangdum Gompa had the haphazard design of an old monastery built before the standardizing influence of international communication. A monk was chanting in a small cell with protectors at the back.

The pass was not much higher than the alpine valley floor, just a high place where two long valleys joined their heads. On the south side, now Zanskar proper, a huge glacier wound down from the peaks of the Great Himalaya range. Although no higher then the mountains to the north, the Great Himalaya get the full blast of the monsoon from the south. The upper Zanskar valley was also more green than others we had passed through.

We arrived at lunchtime in Padum, the largest town in the Zanskar valley and once the capital of its separate kingdom. “Largest” is relative since Padum only has a few stores and about 1000 residents. Rebuilt in the nineteenth century, Padum has the feeling of a Wild West town, haphazardly arranged and ending abruptly in fields.

After lunch we hurried to Stongde, a hilltop monastery where we'd just learned another festival was taking place. This was the second day and the dancing had not yet begun.

Of all the monastic festivals we had visited, this had the feel of a village event. Only a handful of foreigners were there, and hundreds of the local attendees were dressed in traditional costume. At the tea break before the final dances, many of these filed up to place katas (ceremonial scarves) on a very old picture of the Dalai Lama, then sat around the monastic plaza drinking butter tea. Most were women with small children not old enough to be in school. One was breast feeding her baby with little self-consciousness.

Before the dancing, they brought in a yak, a sheep and a dog for ceremonial blessing. We happened to be standing close enough to the yak to be sprayed by the mudlike fluid they spread on its back. The yak seemed particularly unhappy about having chang (local alcohol) spread on its head and tried to shake vigorously. Blessing completed, the animals were led down the stairs and tied up outside.

The dancing was like the other monastic dances we had seen, but more intimate and informal. The monastic plaza was smaller, so the rows of local people often walked through the dancers and participated.

At least on the day we witnessed, there was no stabbing of an effigy, but the torma ceremonial figures made from tsampa (barley meal) served the same function of soaking up and destroying evil spirits. The climactic dance featured mostly older monks in black hats, traditionally the oldest and strongest of the tantric traditions. At the end, they carried the tormas out of the monastery and down a hill, where they threw the tormas on the ground to destroy the evil spirits they had taken in.