The monk who runs a guesthouse at Thiksey.

Thiksey at six in the morning is the photograph everyone has seen: twelve storeys of whitewash and ochre stacked up a hill, the Indus valley behind it, the light doing the thing the light does there. What the photograph does not tell you is that about forty metres below the lowest wall there is a flat-roofed building with six rooms, a kitchen, and a laundry line, and that it is run by a monk called Lobzang who is forty-four and has been at the monastery since he was nine.

It is not a monastery guesthouse in the sense of a retreat. There is no programme. Nobody will teach you to meditate and nobody will mind if you do. It is six rooms with hot water and very good blankets, at a rate that is roughly a third of what the hotels down in Choglamsar charge, and the money goes to the monastery's school. Lobzang runs it because somebody had to and he was, by his own account, the one who was bad at getting out of things.

He keeps the ledger in the same book as the prayer schedule, and does not see why that would be strange.

He keeps one notebook. In it, in the same hand and often on the same page, are the guest bookings, the amounts paid, the diesel for the generator, and the prayer schedule for the week. I made the mistake of remarking on this. He looked at the notebook, then at me, with polite incomprehension. Both are things that happen at fixed times and have to be written down. The suggestion that they belonged in different books struck him as a piece of foreign accounting.

Guests can go up for the morning puja at half past six, which many do once and fewer do twice, because it is genuinely cold and it is genuinely long. I went four times. The first time I was a visitor watching an unfamiliar ritual. By the fourth I had stopped trying to follow the shape of it and was simply sitting in a very old room while about sixty people, half of them children, made an extraordinary amount of low noise. The young monks are children. This is the thing that reorganises the experience for most people. They fidget, they elbow each other, one of them spent the entirety of one morning trying to make another laugh, and an older monk moved through the rows with a stick he never actually used.

Lobzang cooks breakfast himself: tsampa if you want it, otherwise eggs and Ladakhi bread with apricot jam from Nubra. Lunch and dinner are optional and both are dal, rice and a vegetable, prepared without any concession to a visitor's palate, which after a week in Leh restaurants doing seven cuisines badly was a considerable relief. He eats with whoever is there. He asks questions and is markedly less interested in answering them.

I asked, near the end, whether having guests interfered with being a monk. He said the guesthouse was fifteen years old and the school was ninety and the monastery was five hundred and fifty, and that in that order of magnitude the guesthouse was a small thing that paid for a large thing. Then he said the school takes sixty boys and about half of them are from families in villages that cannot pay, and that this is the number he thinks about. It was the only moment in six days that he said anything that sounded like a pitch, and he did not seem to notice he had made one.

You book it by calling a phone that is answered when someone happens to be near it, which is not always. If nobody answers, call again the next morning. This is not a system anyone designed. It is just what a monastery with six rooms below it has ended up with, and it has the incidental effect of filtering for people who actually want to be there.