Searching for the crystalline beauties of Ladakh

A visit to the Ladakh Rocks and Minerals Museum, and looking for precious stones and crystals amid the precarious boulders of the region

- Srinath Perur

Standing unsteadily on a ledge high above the Zanskar river, I tried to tell myself it would be all right. After all the person who had brought me there, Phunchok Angchok, was not only standing farther along the same ledge, but had even found a stable enough perch to get out his rock hammer and chisel. And there was the remote possibility of finding gold. I held on to a crevice with one hand, hoped for the best and got out my phone to take a picture. The undocumented risk is not worth taking.

I had met Angchok, 56, a few days earlier at the Ladakh Rocks and Minerals Museum in Leh, which he founded in 2014. The museum felt extraordinary-a room full of crystals, fossils, rocks and meteorites, all collected by him over the years. I had been in Ladakh for a few days and no matter how often one has visited, or how inured one is to the charm of landscapes, the place takes your breath away.

Sometimes literally so, since it's so high up. The air is cold and dry and thin, the light sharp. The views vast and humbling, sometimes maddeningly pretty, sometimes hauntingly bare and bleak. Ladakh looks like it has been forged in some tremendous cosmic struggle.

Which it, kind of, has.

A chart at the museum gives a ground report spanning tens of millions of years: the Indian tectonic plate ploughed into and under the Eurasian plate, something it continues to do, a few centimetres every year. In the process, a sea was closed, volcanoes erupted, vast quantities of earth were scraped off, piled up and folded, forming what we know as the Himalaya.