Butter Tea at 4,200 Metres

The kitchen is dark except for one window, and through it the Himalaya fills the frame like a painting someone keeps adjusting. Ama-le does not look at it. She has seen it seventy years. She is watching the butter tea.

She churns it the old way, in a wooden dongmo, the salt and butter emulsifying into something between soup and ceremony. Our group of ten sits knee to knee on the carpet, holding cups with both hands the way she showed us, because at 4,200 metres even tea demands respect.

'Drink,' she says. 'Mountains outside. Warm inside.'

We came to Spiti for the monasteries and the moon lake, and they were everything the photographs promised. But a month later, what I tell people about is this kitchen. The bread baked in the morning. The apricot oil she pressed into my chapped hands. The way travel stops being sightseeing and becomes, briefly, belonging.

This is why we build our journeys around family homes. Not because the beds are better — they aren't, always. But because a place only really opens when someone who loves it lets you in.