Korzok Gustor Festival – Ladakh

On the morning of July 4th, there was a visible excitement outside Korzok Monastery. People moved back forth in anticipation of an exciting day. The place was full of people who had come from pastures located near the village. Women moved around in excitement, wearing best of their traditional attire and jewelry and excitedly talking to old friends whom they were meeting after a long time. The lamas walked back and forth or worked on the last touches for the festival day. Some were getting the costumes out, some were preparing the masks and a few were taking out the musical instruments. It promised to be an exciting day.

korzok monastery

Korzok Monastery and the mountain slopes of changthang

It was the day of Korzok Gustor Festival at the most popular monastery in Changthang region. The monastery’s affiliation was not limited to Korzok Village alone but extended to many changspa nomadic groups who wandered the plateau looking for grasslands to feed their animals. It was a day when most of these nomads would come together to witness the celebrations.

korzok gustor festival

Getting ready..

The festival perhaps begins early in the morning as lamas perform long rituals in the prayer hall. I had been hoping to catch these rituals but despite asking many people including a few lamas, it seemed impossible to get the schedule of activities during the two-day festival. I would get a different answer each time I asked someone, and worse, I would get different answers when we asked the same person second time. What was left for us was to hang out at the monastery the whole day and hope not to miss anything.

korzok gustor festival

watching the performance

We did miss the prayers but not the cham-dances, the most attended and perhaps the most important part of the two day festival. The whole village and the nomad population squeezes itself to the tennis-court sized courtyard to watch the lamas dance. In the past decade or so, addition of an equal number of tourists coming in to witness the show meant you had to arrive really early to look for a good place to watch the happenings without any obstructions.

dung chen

Dung chen, the long trumpets

The festival began with a sudden eruption of sound from dung-chens (very long trumpets) as the head lama walked into the courtyard and conducted a short ritual. Lamas came out one after the other and performed the slow cham-dances synchronized to the sound of drilbu (bells) and nga (drums).

dung chen

korzok gustor festival

cham dance

cham dance performance

On the second day, the celebration began by bringing in a few animals to the monastery. The pack included two horses and several goats, later joined by a well fed yak that instantly gained my respect, thanks to its size. It was time to worship these animals that had worked hard through the year to help the Ladahis make their living. The animals were cheered by changspa men as well as the lamas. Lamas applied butter on their forehead and threw a maroon paste on their body. This is a land where perhaps everything is sacred, not just animals but even beer. So it was time to shake a beer bottle and sprinkle on the animals.  Shaken by the cold and scared by the noise, the horses got jumpy and the goats were shivering. The horses tried to run and then started fighting between each other, but the lamas quickly herded them out of the monastery and ended their agony. However, no one tried to mess up with the lone giant yak later; it had a size the automatically gets everyone’s obeisance.

korzok gustor festival

It was time for the cham-dances. The monks danced without the masks on the first day and repeated the performance wearing masks on day two. The masks came in various shapes – of demons, of strange creatures like cows with canines and of forms that can beat anyone’s imagination. The dances began slow and easy as the monks took deliberate steps circling around the flagpole at the center of the courtyard. The pace improved slowly with the progress in the dance and concluded with sudden and swift moves that were more suitable to the wild demon-like cover on their faces.

cham dance

cham dance

cham dance performance

While all this serious work with calculated beats and synchronized steps went on at the center of the courtyard, there was a masked man walking around with a whip scaring children and anyone who was likely to get scared. Some people laughed at him and pushed him away while he managed to push a few himself. He went to a corner full or tourists, showed the whip, shook his head and demanded them to part with money. A few obliged with small bills and others let out a nervous laughter. He tried the same with a Ladakhi girl later and got beaten up by her in response. These people of Ladakh never take anything seriously, not even the religious rituals. At the same time, Ladakhis are deeply religious and Buddhism defines a great deal of their everyday life.

korzok gustor festival

That evening, we were walking on the lake shore enjoying the quiet, cloudy evening, watching small waves hit the grassy shoreline. Tso Moriri’s shore is among the most beautiful places I have seen in Ladakh. To one side of me was a vast blue lake flanked by tall peaks with just a little bit of snow dotting their tips. On this side of the lake was a green stretch of grassland, a spectacle rarely seen in the barren landscape of Ladakh. The scale and grandeur of the lake and mountains seemed to have an ability calm the mind and instill peace, letting the million things that haunt in the head disappear for a moment.

tso moriri

Tso Moriri Lake

As we walked slowly along the shore letting the cool breeze of the cloudy day caress us, I heard some voices coming from the village. A small procession had begun from the monastery, with a lama holding a fire leading the way and the entire village walking behind him. We joined them quickly as they gathered just outside the village. A mask—the kind that is used during the cham dances—was put on fire as the villagers stood in a circle and watched the smoke go up. It marked the end of the festival, symbolizing burning of all evil that had accumulated in the past one year.

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Ladakh – Korzok Gustor Festival – Busy Monks

It was time of the annual Korzok Gustor Festival when I visited Korzok Village on the bank of Tso Moriri Lake. Whole village and nomadic people from surrounding areas were gathered at the monastery to see the masked dance of the lamas (monks). The lamas themselves were busy getting ready, preparing materials needed for the rituals and slipping into costumes. A few of them were in the prayer hall helping each other with the masks, while others would come and go or sometimes stand at the door asking others for help. I used this opportunity to wait at the prayer hall door and click the faces peering out from the curtains.

ladakhi monk

ladakhi monks

ladakhi monks

ladakhi monks

ladakhi monks


Tso Moriri Lake I – Leh to Korzok

“Where is the bathroom?” I asked the girl who showed me a room in her guesthouse. She had a beautiful room with lot of space and a thick bed with colourful sheets on it. The insides were sparsely furnished, but whatever existed was tastefully decorated with a dash of traditional Ladakhi paintings. I loved the place and would have been happy to stay there for the next five days of my stay at Korzok Village. But her face fell the moment when I asked her about bathroom. “No bathroom,” she said and led me down the stairs. Pointing to a steel basin and a vessel full of water on the ground, she helpfully indicated that we can wash our hands and face there, but there aren’t any bathrooms.

I wasn’t exactly ready to stay in a room with no bathing facilities, but had anticipated for guesthouses to not have bathrooms. At Pangong Lake only a few days ago, a home-stay owner had shrugged when we asked for a bathroom and pointed in the direction of the lake. We were finally lucky to find a place with a bath at Pangong. But here in Korzok Village deeper inside Changthang Plateau, where our options of accommodation were a choice of expensive luxury tents and basic guesthouses, I wasn’t sure if there was something of a compromise between the two that offered a place to wash ourselves.

korzok village

Korzok Village

Changspa (chanspa, chang pa), the people of Changthang, do not exactly think freshening up everyday is one of their priorities. The winter here is so harsh that temperatures dip below -30C, while summer is a terribly busy season when they spend every second of waking time busy working. In a place where there is no plumbing, no running water and no electricity, a bath is a great effort and doesn’t figure high in the list of things to do. And when you have a 12,000 hectare deep blue lake only a stone’s throw away from where you live, you don’t really need a bathroom for that once-in-a-while bathing ceremony.

But spending four days without bath was not exactly something I fancied. Every other house in Korzok has a ‘home-stay’ sign hanging in front of it, but not too many of them came with bathrooms. We must have spent a good thirty minutes before finding one that fit the bill – a simple room with a washroom.

Earlier in the day, we had started from Leh early in the morning, making the long and monotonous journey upstream Indus to Tso Moriri. Passing through now-familiar road that took us till Upshi, where a road deviated towards Manali, we drove further upstream where the river becomes narrow and swift, while the mountain slopes became steeper. Good roads allowed us to cover the distance quickly as we passed through barren landscapes and occasional villages with a dash of greenery around them. Stopping at Chumathang briefly for a cup of tea we did not want to drink next to a hot-spring that we did not want to see, we continued towards Mahe Bridge, where the road cuts across Indus and enters the Changthang Plateau.

Passing through Tso Kiagar, a small lake that we see an hour before, we arrived at Tso Moriri at 2pm to see a large expanse of superb blue colours of the lake, its other end far enough to be not visible. Our road skirted the lake shore, where a bar headed geese drifted gently in the waters, tailed by its five inquisitive chicks. Korzok Village was visible a few kilometers away, located on a slope just above the lake.

tso kiagar lake

Tso Kiagar Lake

Korzok is a small village with perhaps fifty families living on the bank of Tso Moriri. As in every Ldakhi Village, a monastery and a bunch of haphazard chortens higher up the slopes dominated the village. The place looked like work-in-progress, akin to our larger cities, with lot of construction in progress either to modernize their dwellings or to build more accommodation for tourists. At 225km from Leh, Korzok is far from any large town and is yet to see modern facilities like electricity and regular public transport. The approach to the village is getting better by the years and a tarmac road now ends just half an hour before the village. It would be a matter of few years before the village gets to inhale the first smell of tarmac.

I spent the first day at Korzok lazing in the room and staring at the lake from my window for a few hours and then sauntering in the village in the evening hours. The next few days were to be spent exploring the village, watching a monastic festival and visiting the nomad herders of changthang plateau.

+ Also see: Drive from Leh to Tso Moriri and conversations with driver Rigchen

+ Map of Korzok Village and places on the way from Leh to Tso Moriri.


View Leh to Tso Moriri in a larger map