Cups of tea, pashmina and momos-Here's how to go touring India on a budget In the Ladakh region of northern India, the town of Leh is known for its beauty and culture, and for the experience of buying a cashmere scarf
I told the owner, George Sher Ali, that I’d been in his shop before, several years before, and his ears perked up. “Tell me what you bought,” he said, and reached for a tall stack of old assignment notebooks. “I will tell you exactly when you came in.” I said I’d been into his art and print shop, L’Araba Fenice, roughly eight years ago on a trip to Leh, a town in the Ladakh region of Jammu and Kashmir, in the far north of India. I bought two or three postcards, as had a friend who had come with me. He flipped through the pages of a few dog-eared notebooks for several minutes before announcing decisively, “This is you. Five postcards.” And he pointed at a hand-scrawled entry in a ledger dated Sept. 19, 2010. It was eight years ago to the day that I’d visited his store.