Mint Lounge: Ladakh Cover Story

Analog Travel without a smartphone

September 11, 2026

I didn’t plan on telling my adult daughters about my childhood problems. But I did, in the middle of a fight with them in Ladakh. Maybe it was the thin air or the altitude sickness, but most likely it was because we didn’t have our smartphones with us.

We were in Wari-La on our way from Leh to Nubra Valley in Ladakh, and had stopped for a picnic at 17,427ft on top of the Ladakh range. Yaks grazed in the distance, a pristine glacial stream flowed between the rocks on the side of the road. Just beyond, in a green meadow, was a wooden picnic table with a white tablecloth that matched the patches of snow on the ground. Nearby, the crew from Stonehedge hotel in Nubra Valley boiled water for thukpa made with wild mushrooms and noodles. While we waited for the soup, they brought us basil-mozzarella sandwiches, made with sourdough bread from Leh’s HaHa bakery. Eating a restaurant-style lunch in this untouched place felt both surreal and luxurious.

Meal over, we would normally reach for our cellphones. Except there were no phones to be had. Before our nine-day trip, both my daughters, aged 29 and 24, and I had decided to leave our smartphones behind in Bengaluru. My husband carried his but limited his use to taking photos.

It was Day 3 when we reached Wari-La, and to their own shock, the girls realised that they didn’t miss their phones at all. This was no small declaration. For them, as for us, the phone is an extension of the self: map, calendar, camera, wallet, communicator, therapist. Yet, here we were, blissfully cut off. But it had been quite a journey to this point.

On Day 1, as we stood at Moljoks Heritage House in Saspol, just outside Leh, I felt phantom vibrations and often reached into my pocket for the phone. Moljoks House is located on the banks of the Indus, and every morning, we would read, have khambir, that delicious Ladakhi bread, walk to the river, and try not to scratch that compulsive itch to reach for the phone.

On Day 2, as we stood beside the green, fast-flowing waters, my younger daughter Malini asked, “Where does the Indus originate from?” We glanced at one another, used to instant answers via Google. Now we had no choice but to ask the staff at Moljoks. Along with the answer, we got riverine stories based on folk tales in Ladakh.

This is what happens, I realised, when you lose the arrow-like focus your smartphone demands. It is like looking for a word’s meaning in a dictionary instead of online, or when you read the newspaper instead of thumbing through your online feed. You stumble into adjacent worlds, take detours, and acquire collateral knowledge that often has nothing to do with what you sought.

After lunch at Wari-La, we headed to Stonehedge in the heart of Nubra Valley, where we had two full days of hikes and monastery visits planned. Hunder Dok, a tiny village of 95 people, was the destination of our hike. It was a hard trek through rocky trails and across mountains. Along the way, Malini and I began fighting and arguing. As usual, it was about something trivial but it spiralled.

Halfway through the fight and the trek, I realised the value of being always attached to a smartphone. When things get ugly, you can retreat into it. Without it, there is nothing, just a diffused anxiety you have to sit with when hostilities pause. Thankfully, there was the beauty of the landscape: untouched meadows, no plastic, no people, no horns, just silence and the mountains all around us.

We were exhausted by the time we got to the village. A homestay gave us a simple Ladakhi lunch and a welcome swig of chang, the locally brewed liquor. We hiked back to Stonehedge, and our guide, also an Amchi or traditional Tibetan healer in the hotel, told us about the medicinal value of wildflowers. We sat in a stunning wildflower meadow and had Ladakhi butter tea.

Picnics are at the heart of the Ladakhi family experience, said Stanzin Tsephel, the owner of Stonehedge, when we met him during a traditional Ladakhi dinner that night. Tsephel, who locals call Ka Tsephel, or Big Brother Tsephel, said his family would herd yaks to higher pastures, and there was always a picnic. “We would carry dried meat, noodles, and forage for herbs and mushrooms wherever we were. Then the elders would make a fire, heat up water and we would mix it all together into a thukpa. For us kids, it was heaven.”

The next day, still not talking to each other, Malini and I headed out to the desert dunes nearby for an outdoor picnic. The sun was setting as we sat facing the Karakoram. Right after a sundowner, I blurted out that growing up in a conservative middle-class family in Chennai in the 1980s was not easy for a rebellious teenage girl. There were the comments, the insistence that you follow arcane rules, and sarcasm and finger-pointing when you didn’t. “Maybe that’s why I am so conservative about some things,” I mumbled to my daughters. “It has given me these triggers I cannot seem to overcome.” Their eyes widened and they began asking questions. My husband watched, uncomfortable with the whole conversation. But with no phone at hand, he had nowhere to hide. An hour later, we all sat together, holding hands, anger forgotten.

Psychologists say you need to give the body and mind time to process emotions, that distracting yourself with a device is harmful long-term because it pushes painful emotions into a painful shoulder or back. In Ladakh, we were all able to—indeed, forced to—sit with discomfort, like Buddhist monks told us to.

Wangchok Namgail, the general manager of Stonehedge, came to pick us up. He told us about the rituals around chang in Ladakhi culture, the special vessels to pour it, the custom to keep pouring it during weddings till the cup is turned over. “In Ladakh, we say that the taste of chang depends on the hands of the woman who makes it,” he said. Chang interests me because women brew it, much like in the North-East where women are at the heart of brewing liquor. In Ladakh, chang is had in tiny cups with a bit of butter on the side, like salt in a margarita.

That night, I went to my daughters’ room with a bottle of chang. We spoke for 4 hours, finally saying everything we’ve needed to say for years. We argued about expectations, about parents refusing to realise that their daughters are adults, and about daughters who both adored and were constrained by their mothers. We cried, apologised and finally slept.

We like to think we use our phones intentionally, but often reach for it as a reflex. A smartphone is integral to daily life and smoothes out the wrinkles of our routine, but it has also become a screen behind which we hide when we don’t want to face harsh truths—or look at the world around us. In Ladakh, we had no way out. For nine days, we had slipped away from the clutches of a device that runs (and perhaps ruins) our life, and as hard as it was to give it up, being without it led to conversations that transformed our relationships.

Geography, they say, changes history. For our family, Ladakh’s magnificent landscapes will be forever etched with memories of what it means to be a family, with all the beauty and messiness that goes along with such intimate relationships. One thing is certain: we want to return to Ladakh, either together or by ourselves. But whether with or without our phones, we’re still undecided.

Shoba Narayan is an independent writer based in Bengaluru and a long-time contributor to Mint.