"How can the mind take hold of such a country? Generations of invaders have tried, but they remain in exile. The important towns they build are only retreats, their quarrels the malaise of men who cannot find their way home. India knows of their trouble. She knows of the whole world's trouble, to its uttermost depth. She calls 'Come' through her hundred mouths, through objects ridiculous and august. But come to what? She has never defined. She is not a promise, only an appeal."
E.M. Forster
I had five more days to play with in Ladakh - what to do?
After the Markha Valley trek I indulged for a day in the vaguely modern conforts of Leh, Ladakh's only town - running water to wash with, a bed rather than a filthy mattress on a stone floor, mineral water rather than iodine-purified mountain stream water, and food that wasn't rice, dal and chapati (oh yes). Next day I took the bus to Likir, another few hours spent wedged against peasants carrying mini vegetable gardens in infinite paper bags (plastic bags are banned in Ladakh). They had all taken day trips to Leh to stock up on stuff they couldn't grow at home. Just after leaving Leh we stopped in a carpenters' yard and around twenty door frames were strapped to the roof. Loosely strapped, evidently - five minutes later they all slid off, just outside the Defence Ministry of High Altitude Research (whatever that may be), nearly decapitating a Ladakhi whose head was leant out the window. One piece splintered in two - oh dear, somebody's door would have to wait a while longer.
It is often said that Indian buses are the best place to bond with locals. Well, that probably has something to do with being shoved in an enclosed space with them for an extended period. They queue up to chat with you, though this 'chat' is usually the standard question and answer question session: "what is your country name; what is your home job; first time you going India?!" Though this happens less in Ladakh, where standards of English rarely exist. But occasionally the questioning develops into an amusing conversation. Weeks back on the bus the Shimla, a cheery local, on learning I was an English student, asked, "Good sir, are you good friend of Mr. William Shakespeare?" Why yes, I answered, I was "good friend" of Mr. William Shakespeare, and had he heard of my other pal, Mr. William Blake? He hadn't.
Likir was a one-yak town, but a one-yak town with a high school. A new development in Ladakh, where previously kids older than eleven had to go far from home to Srinigar or Delhi for further education, a move most Ladakhi families couldn't afford. There's a monstery a few miles up a gorge, the monks being of the Gelupka order (or Yellow Hat sect), a reformed school of Tibetan Buddhism formed in the fifteenth century, and the only order officially led by the Dalai Lama. The kushok in Likir is the present Dalai Lama's younger brother. The monastery is a great towering thing, fortlike from a distance, a reminder of a medieval era when Muslim invaders were ever at the gate, stroking their beards and scimitars, ready to loot and decapitate Buddha statues. But I was received by the monks as a friend and ally, being without a beard or scimitar. They showed me round the many chambers, one of which housed an intricate mandala sculpture inside a glass case. A mandala is a series of concentric circles, often with figures and other frilly bits added, and is an object of meditation as a model of the Universe. But a monk I questioned gave a more charming description: "mandala is best possible Buddha house."
Aside from this there was little else for me to in Likir but sit on my guest house veranda and watch peasants shuffle up and down wheat fields - something I was quite happy to do for half a day. Plus, my guest house was run by an exceptionally beautiful woman, as all guest houses should be - though sadly this is rarely the case. The cheapness by which one can live in this country never ceases to amaze and inspire me. If you're an idler avoiding employment, responsibility and life with a capital L, then look no further. In Likir I was paying 150 rupees (about £1.80) for my own room, plus all my meals besides lunch - a 40 rupee supplement. Score for me.
After a day of intense nothing, I set off next morning on the four hour walk to Yantang. I was joined by an earnest German couple with all the geeky trekking equipment money could buy - ski poles, walking boots you could lose a baby in, a drinking tube extending from the mouth to the depths of the rucksack, jackets that turn into inflatable lifeboats (okay, I made that last one up, but just you wait). This was bleak country, and when I mean bleak I mean BLEAK. No greenery, all rock. And at times it was like wading through a vast sandpit. Yantang came into view as a blob of precious green.
Yantang was another remote outpost, a day's walk from any motorable road. The clock rolled back to the middle ages - the peasants rose at sunrise, gathered crop or tended goats by day, and bedded down at sunset. I lodged at another homestay - not a guest house at all, just a family home where a corner in an upstairs room was cleared for me and a dirty mattress. During the day I sat at a low table in the dining room, watching the housewife chase her giggling kids around the house, before returning to the menial tasks that filled her day - moulding chapatis, churning milk, knitting clothes, and most importantly: endlessly serving me salted tea. No leisure time for these folk - the concept was meaningless. Sitting in a corner and reading a book never felt so decadent.
That evening was to be the wettest of my life. It all started as light rain at seven, but by eight things had gotten torrential. A storm had come, thunder, lighting, the works. Builders and architects are a recent incursion into Ladakh - traditionally the entire village would participate in building a home with the mud and stone to hand. But Ladakhis rarely take rain into account, this being one of the driest places on earth, and my homestay had gaping holes in the roof. The rain poured in, mixing with the mud that formed the roof to send down brown showers. Soon myself, my bag and all my belongings were drenched in muddy water. For nearly two hours I stood with a bucket under a particularly large hole in my bedroom, replacing it every minute and running out to slosh it over the balcony. But there simply weren't enough buckets - the entire house was raining, and dark water was pooling on every floor. There was nothing to do but wait and shiver, nowhere dry to run to and no dry clothes to change into - though the family eventually found me a vaguely dry jacket in some back room, which staved off pneumonia. But I was lucky to be under some kind of shelter - two young English chaps ran in at one point, having just escaped a landslide caused by the swelling of the river Wuleh, which had swept away their tent and all their gear, leaving one of the chaps shivering without shoes or warm clothes in just socks, light trousers and a T-shirt.
But even under these apocalyptic conditions (its not every day your house fills up with muddy water), the housewife managed to knock me up some rice and curried vegetables for dinner, plus some life-restoring tea. A remarkable woman - official winner of Best Housewife of the Year in the much vaunted Ben Dunant Awards. She even manged to find a dry corner of some room for me to curl up in for the night, my original bedroom now being a swamp. That said, the rest of my room still leaked, and I went to sleep to sound of "drip, splash, drip, splash," the room slowly filling up with water.
I awoke next day to a ruined house. It reminded me of the news footage of the recent New Orleans hurricane aftermath. The family quizzed me over breakfast on my plan for the day. "I'm going to head down the gorge to Rizong Monastery" - they emphatically repeated this was "no possible, no possible," without having the English to explain why. I arrogantly shrugged off their warnings and headed down the gorge anyway; it seemed unlikely that they'd actually checked the path themselves. But local wisdom proved true. I followed the path for a good twenty minutes and my hope rose. The soil erosion from last night's rain made the path crumble beneath my feat several times, sending me plunging down towards the Wuleh tokpo (river), though I managed to stall myself and scramble back up every time - yes, I was that good. But on I walked, untill I got to a point where the river had swollen to completely swallow the path, leaving only sheer rock faces either side of the water. So back I trod, and I tried an alternate route - walking for six hours to Temisgam. But the first stage invloved crossing the Wuleh topko just below Yantang, and the swollen river had completely smashed the bridge. There was nothing for it but to backtrack to Sumdo, halfway back to Likir, and from there I walked down a gorge to Saspol on the Leh-Srinigar highway, Ladakh's principal road. Next I pushed on to Alchi, but managed to hitch in a jeep to skip the ninety minute walk - and it was still drizzling. By that time I'd decided that I'd done quite enough walking for 2008.
Alchi monastery was built in the eleventh century, allegedly under the supervision of Rinchen Zangpo, the great translator, who spearheaded a great revival of Buddhism in Tibet and neighbouring lands known as The Second Spreading. He's literally a saint, and an impossible number of monasteries claim to be founded by him, though Alchi Gompa is believed to be the real deal. It's decorated in the Kashmiri rather than the Tibetan tradition, highly unusual for Ladakh, and its murals, still brightly coloured, betray a closer relation to the Hinduism from which Buddhism emerged. There were once many more such Kashmiri style monasteries in Ladakh, but these were largely destroyed by Muslim invaders from Balistan or the Kashmir Valley (don't you just love those guys). Indeed, there are few Gompas now in Ladakh that predate the invasion in the early seventeenth century of Ali Mir and his horde from Balistan. That Alchi Gompa was spared no doubt has much to do with its location, tucked discreetly down by a river rather than towering on one of the ridges favoured by most monasteries.
I took the three hour bus ride back to Leh that evening - another human sandwich. When I returned a Free Tibet march was threading the streets, that being the night of the Olympic opening ceremony in Beijing. A line of Ladakhis sheltering candles in glass jars was weaving its way to Leh's central gompa. It was a beautiful sight in the dark of the evening, utterly peaceful, and many of the armed Ladakhi soldiers keeping watch quietly joined in with the chanting of Buddhist mantras. They eventually all gathered in the courtyard outside the gompa, and speeches were made and quiet applause given. Apparently this was all in defiance of a curfew, but the soldiers obviously saw little trouble in the quiet proceedings. The Ladakhis of course have strong historical and religious links with Tibet, and Leh now shelters many Tibetan rufugees. Unsurprisingly, anti-Chinese sentiment is rife. It's spelt out in the graffiti around Leh, and a poster in the main market that read "Beijing will be the worst Olympic venue in history" was not taken down by the police for the whole month I spent in Ladakh. But then India and China have never been the best of chums.
The night before my flight was sleepless, as the rain and thunder spelt out my worst fears. Flights from Leh are often cancelled due to poor weather, and missing this flight meant I would miss my flight home in two days time - it's thirty-eight hours of continuous bus travel from Leh to Delhi (as opposed to 75 minutes by plane ), not that continuous travel is even possible, meaning you'd have to allow at least three days. But after waking up my panic rose for another reason: the taxi driver wasn't there at his alloted time, 4.30am - five minutes went by, then ten, then fifteen, then thirty. I thundered on the bedroom door of the guest house owner, who then walked down with me and thundered on the door of the room right next to mine, where it turned out my taxi driver was oversleeping. He seemed to think it was hilarious that I was running late, and I greatly enjoyed shouting at him. On the way he assured me with undisguised glee that my flight would definately be cancelled. It certainly looked like it, the sky still black and bruised.
Jammu and Kashmir state has an (understandable) zeal for security, and Leh airport is not untouched. The searching is vigorous - I was felt all over - and after checking in your bag you're later asked to walk on to the tarmac to identify your bag before it can be loaded on the plane. It was a long, fidgety wait at the departure gate. My plane was circling above Leh for two hours, unable to land for the cloud cover. And the plane of another airline, due to arrive just half an hour after mine, was diverted back to Delhi - there seemed no reason why mine shouldn't also. There was actually a cheer as the announcement came: "the Air Deccan flight is now ready for boarding." Honestly, it was this close to being cancelled (the author is holding his thumb and forefinger very close together).
To arrive back in Delhi (just a bump above sea level) from 3500 metres was like being dunked in a warm bath. The air felt used and the smog blurred disitances. I wasn't used to the traffic, and on stepping off the airport bus in Connaught Place I was instantly hit by a scooter. I toppled over and the rider came off his bike, though neither of us was hurt, thankfully - it would have been pretty dire otherwise, what with me being in the middle of Delhi on my own with all my stuff on my back. Afterwards I once again had the pleasure of room-searching in the Paharganj area, which is rather like fishing for left-over food in a sewer. I settled on the less-than-palatial Radhjani Palace. I was shown a number a rooms, but it took a while to find one that didn't spell instant death - on checking out the first room I flicked on the bathroom light, causing a minor explosion. I eventually settled on a nice little room where a cooling system made the noise of a minor aircraft engine. A tranquil night awaited me.
That day I wondered around New Delhi in a daze, fending off ear cleaners and shoe repair men who homed in on my wrecked walking boots. I bought a trunk load of cheap clothes in an underground market, practicing my by now formidable bargaining skills. And that was really about it for that day. The next morning I arrived at Khan Market promptly before ten to meet a certain Vijay Vikram, a fellow St Andrews student and current Delhi-wallah of a highly questionable nationalist political bent. But he was held up for two hours by a bandh (strike) or BJP youth rally - I forget which - near where he lived. Khan Market is an upmarket retail enclave where the westernized Delhi elite can enjoy their cappuccinos or Subways before browsing The Body Shop, Prada and other western retail imports. It was fun to see them in their element.
Afterwards Vijay and I perused the Purana Quila, a sixteenth century Mughal fort allegedly built on the site of the legendary Indraprastha, the capital of the Aryans of 1000BC, immortalised in the great Hindu epic The Mahabharata. The Purana was part of Emperor Humayan's capital, labelled the sixth city of Delhi - historians now consider Delhi a grand pile-up of different historical cities, the British New Delhi being the eigth, Indraprastha the first. It's one of the 'Great Sites' of Delhi but there's little left to the Purana Quila now but a pretty mosque, and the experience was a damp one, literally - the sky truly opened as we entered the gates. The monsoon was not over, yet.
After some aimless wandering we strolled up Rajpath, the grand imperial roadway with India Gate at one end and at the other the exquisite, Edward Lutyens designed Rashtrapati Bhavan, built as the residency of the viceroy but now the home of India's (largley ceremonial) President, the dear old lady Smt. Pratibha Devisingh Patil, whose job it is to have tea all day with important sounding people - rather like our Queen. However, there is no hiding the imperial rhetoric of Lutyens architecture, and one inscription over a large archway reads in sturdy capitals: LIBERTY WILL NOT DESCEND TO A PEOPLE; A PEOPLE MUST RAISE THEMSELVES TO LIBERTY; IT IS A BLESSING WHICH MUST BE EARNED BEFORE IT CAN BE ENJOYED. It's a disturbing sight in modern India, and anyone who still believes in the inherent benevolence of the British Raj should be stood in front of it.
Vijay and I capped off a wonderfully laguid day - yes, contrary to backpacker mythology, it is possible to have a relaxing time in Delhi - with a visit to the Gymkhana club, a colonial relic, a beautiful white bungalow with an imaculate lawn. Formerly Indians weren't allowed to join, and a club joke runs that a sign once read 'Strictly no Indians or Dogs.' Inside are the furnishings you'd expect - chandeliers, portraits of former colonial patrons (plus one of King George V), oak armchairs and polished wooden floors. Attached was the 'Lady Willingdon Swimming Club' - it was almost too good to be true. But like any former colonial club, it was an attempt to keep India at bay, to escape to land far far away, a land which never really existed. Leaving its gates I had the impression of re-entering India. And it was then that I bade a sad farewell to Vijay and India, and rickshawed back to Paharganj to gather my things and head to Indira Gandhi Airport.
The Indians' Edwardian handling of the English language (where "just bung you coat down there" and "what is your good name?" are common phrases) flourishes in the strangest of places. For instance, a woman announced through the airport speakers that a Mr. Somethingrather was holding a plane up, and she implored that this Mr. Somethingrather proceed through security "in a jiffy." Yes, my ears did not deceive me. But that was all the interest my journey home afforded. Everything went seamlessly and Heathrow loomed before I knew it. The cool air was welcoming - honestly, say what you like about the British weather, but compared to the Indian plains we live in a luxurious climate. Just you try Delhi in June.
It's nice to be back in London. But then it's always nice to be back in London. To walk again among familiar objects, if not familiar faces. But something bothered me at first, something missing from day-to-day interactions. It was that quality of difference, which comes to define you as a traveller, born in the manner locals acknowledge you, in lingering stares and earnest questioning. To arrive home is to be lost in the crowd. You are no longer that exotic specimen, the representative of a brighter world where money trickles from sky-scrapers and death happens only very nicely. It is to become distressingly ordinary.
I will return to India, many times. I know it for sure. But what is it that calls me back? I'll put it down to a dark fascination - yes, that sounds suitably profound. India is a puzzle that only deepens, its cultural layers ever-receding. I've learnt a great deal, but I feel little closer to understanding India and Indians. Perhaps I never shall, but I'm happy to keep on chasing a ghost. I am fond of India, but there is so much that disturbs me, things beyond the obvious, the more disquieting for being beyond language. It would be wrong to say that I love India - that would imply an intimacy I cannot share. More than anything, travel - especially solo travel - teaches you quite how much you are a product of your own culture, ultimately irreconcilable to the visited culture. That is the point: you play the role of the visitor; the country is to be visited, not lived in. The pyjama clad hippies that still clutter India kid themselves they have an intimacy. But they stop short where the Hindu starts - they do not share his belief that desperation is the simple lot of man and that the world is a cruel illusion. Buddhism shares this nihilism - "all life is suffering," teaches the Buddha. These are philosophies of defeat, of retreat into a cosy darkness. While the Christian or Muslim conceives heaven as a Kingdom of Light, Nirvana is simply oblivion. Above all Eastern religions teach a calm acceptance of the world - it is their goal. For me this is too much like death. It is as if the Human Spirit - which should never 'accept' the world and always seek to shape it - has thrown in the towel.
I am not an Indian, I am an Englishman. But I shall once again be an Englishman in India.
Ben Dunant
(India 27th June-14th August 2008)
Saturday, 16 August 2008
Wednesday, 6 August 2008
Ben treads deeper into The Land of High Passes
"Above all do not lose your desire to walk. Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts and know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it." Gautama Buddha
Now, where was I?
Food poisoning. At the close of the last post I declared my recovery - a false recovery. My trips to the toilet become more disconcerting. I could hardly eat a thing for three days. I attempted brief, abortive walks in Leh's nearby villages. I sat in my guest house room and felt sorry for myself. I waited.
On day four I took a day trip to Phyang Monastery in Phyang village, to gauge my recovery. Another delightful bus journey where the bus broke down half way. But Phyang was the picturesque Ladakhi stone village I'd become accustomed to: bursting flowerbeds surrounded by rock, and filthy, smiling kids asking for "one pen, one pen." It's the chant of village children throughout India. They rarely ask for money, sometimes demand "cho-co-late," but pens are clearly the ultimate commodity. Forget water or food shortages, India is clearly suffering from a chronic pen drought. There are no doubt fierce debates in parliament about it, with much Indian theatrical arm waving.
Above the white houses soars Phyang monastery - monasteries always seem to find some commanding mound or other to soar on. In the courtyard the resident monks, teenagers to the elderly, were practicing for a masked Cham dance the next day, the day I'd start the Markha Valley trek - damn, bad timing, but I'd seen a Cham dance last year in Rumste monastery in Sikkim, and this in Phyang was a near dress rehearsal. A Cham dance is something like a religious pantomime, where monks dress up as Tibetan saints, gods and demons, and dance out Tibetan legends and saintly deeds. Well, it's not so much dancing as vaguely coordinated wobbling. Buddhist monks are certainly not trained dancers, but it would be hard for anyone to move gracefully under those heavy embroidered robes and giant (and often terrifying) masks. The stress is on visual spectacle. And these two day events are extremely auspicious to witness, the faithful gathering from miles around. Good karma and all that.
I took a lighter approach to my next trek, seven days through the isolated Markha Valley - I simply hired a guide and stayed in "homestays" in passing villages. Well, not physically lighter - here I was "backpacking," carrying all my gear on my back, the favoured approach in the West and Nepal. But Ladakh is a far higher kettle of fish. The passes are frequently in excess of five thousand metres and the trails often go uphill for days at a time. At this altitude it was like giving Gordon Brown a piggy back, all day. And backpacks have this mysterious capacity to grow heavier as the day goes on, as if a gremlin were gradually piling it with bricks. This was tough trekking, I kid you not. At least I can now look down at the wimps that mince round Nepal each year.
I took the bare minimum with me, including a sleeping bag. But my guide's bag was a third of the size of mine. Enter Tenzing, the guide who I met in Leh, a man of few words and even fewer needs - he could apparently do without a sleeping bag and warm clothes for the evening. He didn't appear to need sleep either. He was the same age as me (twenty!), had been a guide for two years and was previously in the army in Assam (North East India) for three years before a medical discharge. He beautifully summed up the whole military experience as "good fun but hard on the back." Quite. A child of two Tibetan refugees who had literally walked away from Chinese oppression, Tenzing lived in the summer in a refugee camp on the outskirts of Leh, moving for winter to another Tibetan refugee camp (India has quite a few) way down in Bangalore, Karnataka. Most of my time on the trek was spent trying to keep him in view as he sped on ahead unawares, expecting me to catch up. On day four his haste was justified - we had to make a river crossing before the afternoon, the Markha river piling up with glacial melt water as the day goes on. There was more treacherous (and icy) knee-deep wading to be had on the same river the next day, boots over the shoulder etc. The fun never stopped.
The homestays were as charming as they were rustic - all you got was a filthy mattress slung on a stone floor. I'm not sure I'm into the whole camping thing - under a tent you could be anywhere. But it is inside the village homes that Ladakh feels closest. They were wonderful ramshackle stone structures, half collapsed and coated in peeling whitewash. The roofs were lined with prayer flags and were occasionally (and rather disturbingly) decorated with severed bull's heads - a tantic gesture no doubt, a reminder of mortality, like the severed horns that dot the trails on raised platforms.
Inside the houses are little rooms centred round a grand dining hall cum sitting room, supported by carved wooden pillars. Here you sit on carpets and eat or sip chai on low painted tables. The finest ornaments are displayed on shelves with carved niches, beautiful brass pots too shiny for regular use. These overlook the traditional Ladakhi stove, heavily decorated in brass Tibetan characters and fueled with animal dung. These dining halls are statements of grandeur amid poverty, the visible wealth of a family. But it is also centre stage for the life of the household. In a dark corner sits some elderly grandparent in heavy red robes, spinning a prayer wheel, having earned the right to silence after a life's hard toil. In the foreground there's usually some heated activity over some arcane tool. An example I witnessed was the milk churner - milk is placed in a wooden bucket, a paddle is placed in the milk and cloth is wrapped around the paddle, to be pulled back and forth, back and forth, churning the milk to curd and cheese. I watched a housewife man this primitive rowing machine - she just went on and on and on and on, and on, and on. And on. And. On.
In the bitter winters the entire extended family beds down in these dining halls. Now during the summer I met only a fraction of the family in the houses, the rest staying away in shepherd huts on high pastures or off assisting trekkers as ponymen. The men were largely absent, but not invariably. As in Tibet, it is a custom that a woman keep several husbands at once, usually brothers. This is due to the nomadic lifestyle of the men, off traversing the mountains on errands for many months of the year, and ideally the system ensures there is always a man to command the household. This leaves children calling several men "daddy" and all the adults of the village "uncle" or "aunty." There were often numerous children lolling around the houses I stayed in, and it was unclear whom they all belonged to.
The villages I stayed in were often simply a couple of houses around a few acres of wheat. They were without telephones or even a postal service - messages had to be trusted to ponymen who wander from village to village. Electricity was often set up but failed to work. But there were a few odds and sods of the twenty-first century visible, comically thrown into relief. Examples were isolated items of clothing - the housewife of my first homestay was traditionally dressed in dark robes and bangles, but topped it all with a baseball cap - wait for it - turned backwards. The children also wore odd, ill-fitting items of Western clothing, most of which looked as if it had been salvaged from a dustbin. But it would be wrong to call these villages poor - they lived a scaled down lifestyle where needs are easily met. The real poverty here is water poverty. This is one of the driest places on earth. The houses are without taps; clothes and crockery are taken down to the river, however far, to be washed. When I wished to wash myself I had to fill a bucket from an ice-cold mountain stream, take it to quiet place and pour it over my shivering self. That or bathe in the stream itself. I'm still unsure whether it was worth risking hypothermia for cleanliness.
But it's the loos that deserve special mention. "Dry" loos. It involves squatting over a hole and unloading into a chamber below, then shoveling some earth down over your deed. The accumulated poo is later collected to fertilize the fields, animal waste being reserved for fuel. A problem in Leh is the introduction of flush toilets in hotels to please tourists. This has put huge strain on Leh's scanty water supplies, especially as the town expands. And poorly maintained septic tanks have polluted streams essential for the life of surrounding villages.
It's hard to imagine anything dramatic happening among these quiet people. But on arrival at Markha - the valley's largest village, a beast of two hundred people - I witnessed two Ladakhi woman in combat. They were possessed, tearing at each other, and they began to pick up stones... Somehow is fizzled out and a meeting was called in the village's grandest residence - my homestay. The dining hall was packed with uncharacteristically animated Ladakhis, everyone shouting, nobody listening. The matter was eventually settled over lashings of Chang, a local beer which each household brews for itself from excess wheat. It resembles off milk and is mixed curiously with tsampa (flour), but it has a rich, fruity flavour- rather tasty. It was often offered to me in the cold evenings. It's certainly preferable to the local commercial larger, Godfather ("the golden water of Kashmir"), a noxious, fizzy liquid where a creepy Father Christmas figure leers at you from the label. Booze has an ambiguous status in Jammu and Kahmir state: it's never listed on restaurant menus but is often served, though the bottle must remain discreetly under the table during the meal. In some places alcohol is served out of teapots into teacups - very 1920s America.
Along the trekking paths the Ladakhis have left a devotional presence. In some of the remotest corners prayer wheels have been erected, so trekkers can generate their own good karma - as long as they spin them clockwise. Prayer flags flutter at the tops of high passes. Mani walls divide the paths and must be passed to the left - hip-height walls of gathered rock topped with smooth tablets on which mantras have been carved, mostly reading "om mani padme hum" (the jewel is in the lotus), the great mantra of Avalokiteshvara (or Chenresig, to give his Tibetan name), the bodhisattva of compassion of whom the Dalai Lama is an incarnation. Another random feature along the trails are the "parachute cafes," where enterprising locals serve weary trekkers tea and over-priced bottles of 7up cooled in mountain-stream water. These cafes are sheltered by discarded military cargo parachutes, hence the name. Military activity has littered Ladakh with army junk, now being put to inventive use, as well as cluttering the markets of Leh.
As I've said before, Ladakh is one dry place. And before recently summers would see no rain at all. But climate change is fixing that. Since I've been in Ladakh it's already drizzled a fair few times. But it was while settling down at Nimaling - a high altitude pasture (4700 metres) used by shepherds from the lower Markha Valley in summer - on the sixth night of the trek that the sky really opened. It was borderline apocalyptic - even the goats looked startled. Nimaling is reputably cold at the best of times, but that damp night in that damp tent - this was the only night of the trek without a homestay option, but I managed to rent a tent off an entrepreneurial shepherd - was among the coldest my life. It was right up there with the night I spent last year in the ashram at the foot of the Gomukh glacier, the sacred source of the river Ganges, also in the Indian Himalaya. The rain persisted all the next day, the last day of the trek, making for a treacherously slippy descent from the Gomgmaru pass (5100 metres). I'd almost forgotten what it was like to feel permanently damp. It was like a homecoming.
The Markha Valley trek is confined within Hemis National Park, "the Snow Leopard capital of the world." I saw many a Blue Sheep (not actually blue, tragically) and golden Marmot (which allows you to get very close before squealing loudly and disappearing down its burrow) but alas no Snow Leopard. But as there are only 50-70 of them kicking about the national park, this was no surprise. No wolves sighted either, though Markha village had a wolf trap at its outskirts - the wolf walks in, can't escape and is collectively stoned to death by the villagers, thereby circumventing individual responsibility for its death in this devoutly Buddhist village. Buddhists excuse themselves for eating meat in a similar manner - it is the butcher who is the sinner, while they are simply purchasing a dead animal. Consequently Ladakh's butchers are practically all Muslim.
I also missed out on the giant ants spotted by Herodotus, the first European visitor to Ladakh. He described (in the words of Reeve Heber and Kathleen Heber) "a land of wonderful ants, who in burrowing out their homes in the earth threw up gold. These ants are said to be nearly as large as dogs, and still more ferocious, with a keen sense of smell and great fleetness of foot. This made it very difficult for the Indians who wanted to obtain the gold, and the only method found possible was to fetch the gold day by day when the ants slept, and bear it away on swift horses." But the Ladakhis had evidently dealt with this ant menace before I arrived.
I write from Leh, safe and sound. I have about a week left in Ladakh, The Land of High Passes. I dread the flight back to Delhi on the 12th. Methinks I'll explore some of the villages in Ladakh's North West, such as Likir, Yantang and Alchi. But for now I'll continue to potter around this not-so-bustling metropolis (the home of the world's highest tennis court), looking tired and far from home.
All the best,
Ben x
Now, where was I?
Food poisoning. At the close of the last post I declared my recovery - a false recovery. My trips to the toilet become more disconcerting. I could hardly eat a thing for three days. I attempted brief, abortive walks in Leh's nearby villages. I sat in my guest house room and felt sorry for myself. I waited.
On day four I took a day trip to Phyang Monastery in Phyang village, to gauge my recovery. Another delightful bus journey where the bus broke down half way. But Phyang was the picturesque Ladakhi stone village I'd become accustomed to: bursting flowerbeds surrounded by rock, and filthy, smiling kids asking for "one pen, one pen." It's the chant of village children throughout India. They rarely ask for money, sometimes demand "cho-co-late," but pens are clearly the ultimate commodity. Forget water or food shortages, India is clearly suffering from a chronic pen drought. There are no doubt fierce debates in parliament about it, with much Indian theatrical arm waving.
Above the white houses soars Phyang monastery - monasteries always seem to find some commanding mound or other to soar on. In the courtyard the resident monks, teenagers to the elderly, were practicing for a masked Cham dance the next day, the day I'd start the Markha Valley trek - damn, bad timing, but I'd seen a Cham dance last year in Rumste monastery in Sikkim, and this in Phyang was a near dress rehearsal. A Cham dance is something like a religious pantomime, where monks dress up as Tibetan saints, gods and demons, and dance out Tibetan legends and saintly deeds. Well, it's not so much dancing as vaguely coordinated wobbling. Buddhist monks are certainly not trained dancers, but it would be hard for anyone to move gracefully under those heavy embroidered robes and giant (and often terrifying) masks. The stress is on visual spectacle. And these two day events are extremely auspicious to witness, the faithful gathering from miles around. Good karma and all that.
I took a lighter approach to my next trek, seven days through the isolated Markha Valley - I simply hired a guide and stayed in "homestays" in passing villages. Well, not physically lighter - here I was "backpacking," carrying all my gear on my back, the favoured approach in the West and Nepal. But Ladakh is a far higher kettle of fish. The passes are frequently in excess of five thousand metres and the trails often go uphill for days at a time. At this altitude it was like giving Gordon Brown a piggy back, all day. And backpacks have this mysterious capacity to grow heavier as the day goes on, as if a gremlin were gradually piling it with bricks. This was tough trekking, I kid you not. At least I can now look down at the wimps that mince round Nepal each year.
I took the bare minimum with me, including a sleeping bag. But my guide's bag was a third of the size of mine. Enter Tenzing, the guide who I met in Leh, a man of few words and even fewer needs - he could apparently do without a sleeping bag and warm clothes for the evening. He didn't appear to need sleep either. He was the same age as me (twenty!), had been a guide for two years and was previously in the army in Assam (North East India) for three years before a medical discharge. He beautifully summed up the whole military experience as "good fun but hard on the back." Quite. A child of two Tibetan refugees who had literally walked away from Chinese oppression, Tenzing lived in the summer in a refugee camp on the outskirts of Leh, moving for winter to another Tibetan refugee camp (India has quite a few) way down in Bangalore, Karnataka. Most of my time on the trek was spent trying to keep him in view as he sped on ahead unawares, expecting me to catch up. On day four his haste was justified - we had to make a river crossing before the afternoon, the Markha river piling up with glacial melt water as the day goes on. There was more treacherous (and icy) knee-deep wading to be had on the same river the next day, boots over the shoulder etc. The fun never stopped.
The homestays were as charming as they were rustic - all you got was a filthy mattress slung on a stone floor. I'm not sure I'm into the whole camping thing - under a tent you could be anywhere. But it is inside the village homes that Ladakh feels closest. They were wonderful ramshackle stone structures, half collapsed and coated in peeling whitewash. The roofs were lined with prayer flags and were occasionally (and rather disturbingly) decorated with severed bull's heads - a tantic gesture no doubt, a reminder of mortality, like the severed horns that dot the trails on raised platforms.
Inside the houses are little rooms centred round a grand dining hall cum sitting room, supported by carved wooden pillars. Here you sit on carpets and eat or sip chai on low painted tables. The finest ornaments are displayed on shelves with carved niches, beautiful brass pots too shiny for regular use. These overlook the traditional Ladakhi stove, heavily decorated in brass Tibetan characters and fueled with animal dung. These dining halls are statements of grandeur amid poverty, the visible wealth of a family. But it is also centre stage for the life of the household. In a dark corner sits some elderly grandparent in heavy red robes, spinning a prayer wheel, having earned the right to silence after a life's hard toil. In the foreground there's usually some heated activity over some arcane tool. An example I witnessed was the milk churner - milk is placed in a wooden bucket, a paddle is placed in the milk and cloth is wrapped around the paddle, to be pulled back and forth, back and forth, churning the milk to curd and cheese. I watched a housewife man this primitive rowing machine - she just went on and on and on and on, and on, and on. And on. And. On.
In the bitter winters the entire extended family beds down in these dining halls. Now during the summer I met only a fraction of the family in the houses, the rest staying away in shepherd huts on high pastures or off assisting trekkers as ponymen. The men were largely absent, but not invariably. As in Tibet, it is a custom that a woman keep several husbands at once, usually brothers. This is due to the nomadic lifestyle of the men, off traversing the mountains on errands for many months of the year, and ideally the system ensures there is always a man to command the household. This leaves children calling several men "daddy" and all the adults of the village "uncle" or "aunty." There were often numerous children lolling around the houses I stayed in, and it was unclear whom they all belonged to.
The villages I stayed in were often simply a couple of houses around a few acres of wheat. They were without telephones or even a postal service - messages had to be trusted to ponymen who wander from village to village. Electricity was often set up but failed to work. But there were a few odds and sods of the twenty-first century visible, comically thrown into relief. Examples were isolated items of clothing - the housewife of my first homestay was traditionally dressed in dark robes and bangles, but topped it all with a baseball cap - wait for it - turned backwards. The children also wore odd, ill-fitting items of Western clothing, most of which looked as if it had been salvaged from a dustbin. But it would be wrong to call these villages poor - they lived a scaled down lifestyle where needs are easily met. The real poverty here is water poverty. This is one of the driest places on earth. The houses are without taps; clothes and crockery are taken down to the river, however far, to be washed. When I wished to wash myself I had to fill a bucket from an ice-cold mountain stream, take it to quiet place and pour it over my shivering self. That or bathe in the stream itself. I'm still unsure whether it was worth risking hypothermia for cleanliness.
But it's the loos that deserve special mention. "Dry" loos. It involves squatting over a hole and unloading into a chamber below, then shoveling some earth down over your deed. The accumulated poo is later collected to fertilize the fields, animal waste being reserved for fuel. A problem in Leh is the introduction of flush toilets in hotels to please tourists. This has put huge strain on Leh's scanty water supplies, especially as the town expands. And poorly maintained septic tanks have polluted streams essential for the life of surrounding villages.
It's hard to imagine anything dramatic happening among these quiet people. But on arrival at Markha - the valley's largest village, a beast of two hundred people - I witnessed two Ladakhi woman in combat. They were possessed, tearing at each other, and they began to pick up stones... Somehow is fizzled out and a meeting was called in the village's grandest residence - my homestay. The dining hall was packed with uncharacteristically animated Ladakhis, everyone shouting, nobody listening. The matter was eventually settled over lashings of Chang, a local beer which each household brews for itself from excess wheat. It resembles off milk and is mixed curiously with tsampa (flour), but it has a rich, fruity flavour- rather tasty. It was often offered to me in the cold evenings. It's certainly preferable to the local commercial larger, Godfather ("the golden water of Kashmir"), a noxious, fizzy liquid where a creepy Father Christmas figure leers at you from the label. Booze has an ambiguous status in Jammu and Kahmir state: it's never listed on restaurant menus but is often served, though the bottle must remain discreetly under the table during the meal. In some places alcohol is served out of teapots into teacups - very 1920s America.
Along the trekking paths the Ladakhis have left a devotional presence. In some of the remotest corners prayer wheels have been erected, so trekkers can generate their own good karma - as long as they spin them clockwise. Prayer flags flutter at the tops of high passes. Mani walls divide the paths and must be passed to the left - hip-height walls of gathered rock topped with smooth tablets on which mantras have been carved, mostly reading "om mani padme hum" (the jewel is in the lotus), the great mantra of Avalokiteshvara (or Chenresig, to give his Tibetan name), the bodhisattva of compassion of whom the Dalai Lama is an incarnation. Another random feature along the trails are the "parachute cafes," where enterprising locals serve weary trekkers tea and over-priced bottles of 7up cooled in mountain-stream water. These cafes are sheltered by discarded military cargo parachutes, hence the name. Military activity has littered Ladakh with army junk, now being put to inventive use, as well as cluttering the markets of Leh.
As I've said before, Ladakh is one dry place. And before recently summers would see no rain at all. But climate change is fixing that. Since I've been in Ladakh it's already drizzled a fair few times. But it was while settling down at Nimaling - a high altitude pasture (4700 metres) used by shepherds from the lower Markha Valley in summer - on the sixth night of the trek that the sky really opened. It was borderline apocalyptic - even the goats looked startled. Nimaling is reputably cold at the best of times, but that damp night in that damp tent - this was the only night of the trek without a homestay option, but I managed to rent a tent off an entrepreneurial shepherd - was among the coldest my life. It was right up there with the night I spent last year in the ashram at the foot of the Gomukh glacier, the sacred source of the river Ganges, also in the Indian Himalaya. The rain persisted all the next day, the last day of the trek, making for a treacherously slippy descent from the Gomgmaru pass (5100 metres). I'd almost forgotten what it was like to feel permanently damp. It was like a homecoming.
The Markha Valley trek is confined within Hemis National Park, "the Snow Leopard capital of the world." I saw many a Blue Sheep (not actually blue, tragically) and golden Marmot (which allows you to get very close before squealing loudly and disappearing down its burrow) but alas no Snow Leopard. But as there are only 50-70 of them kicking about the national park, this was no surprise. No wolves sighted either, though Markha village had a wolf trap at its outskirts - the wolf walks in, can't escape and is collectively stoned to death by the villagers, thereby circumventing individual responsibility for its death in this devoutly Buddhist village. Buddhists excuse themselves for eating meat in a similar manner - it is the butcher who is the sinner, while they are simply purchasing a dead animal. Consequently Ladakh's butchers are practically all Muslim.
I also missed out on the giant ants spotted by Herodotus, the first European visitor to Ladakh. He described (in the words of Reeve Heber and Kathleen Heber) "a land of wonderful ants, who in burrowing out their homes in the earth threw up gold. These ants are said to be nearly as large as dogs, and still more ferocious, with a keen sense of smell and great fleetness of foot. This made it very difficult for the Indians who wanted to obtain the gold, and the only method found possible was to fetch the gold day by day when the ants slept, and bear it away on swift horses." But the Ladakhis had evidently dealt with this ant menace before I arrived.
I write from Leh, safe and sound. I have about a week left in Ladakh, The Land of High Passes. I dread the flight back to Delhi on the 12th. Methinks I'll explore some of the villages in Ladakh's North West, such as Likir, Yantang and Alchi. But for now I'll continue to potter around this not-so-bustling metropolis (the home of the world's highest tennis court), looking tired and far from home.
All the best,
Ben x
Saturday, 26 July 2008
In the Indus Valley
"If a valley is reached by a high pass, only the best of friends or greatest of enemies are its visitors." Tibetan proverb
Leh has become a Mecca for two types: earnest (and possibly German) middle aged men in desinger trekking gear, and bangle and sarong sporting Euro-Israeli-American youth. The former are attracted by some of the highest, wildest and certainly most arduous trekking in the world. The latter by the peaced-out vibe (not my words), abundance of cheap and powerful Kashmiri charas (hashish), and that whole fashionable Tibetan Buddhism thing. Neither are disappointed. Me, I'm not sure which bracket I fall into - I vainly consider myself a high-brow cultural observer, a pilgrim of the intellect, one who not only answers the call of the East but gives it a thoughtful reply. At least this is how I reassure myself as I wonder around looking lost and smelly.
Leh's old town looks the part - a tangled mess of white-washed, stone-walled houses, decorated with Mani stones (devotional tablets inscribed with Tibetan characters). It has often been compared to Lhasa pre the Chinese invasion - there's even an imitation Potatala Palace, though smaller and empty after the the Royal family's move a few hundred years ago to the nearby village of Stok, where they still live. But outside the old town Leh becomes a mess of cultures, especially now during the two warm months of Ladakh's tourist season - the Manali-Leh road is snowed over but from late June till early September. You can still fly in during winter, when Leh returns to the Ladakhis, but you may have to face parky temperatures reaching minus forty degrees centigrade. But come late June this town of 25, 000 is colonised by Kashmiri carpet sellers, Delhi-ite tour operators and Western trekkers, replacing the Turkmen, Afgan and Tibetan traders of time's past, when due to its position at the foot of the Kardang pass Leh was the gateway to trade in Yarkhand, Turkestan. (At the closure of China's trade routes after the revolution, Ladakh lost all its trade capital and had to return to subsistence farming.) But this contemporary invasion is similar to the situation of the Sikkimese I witnessed last year in Gantok - during the summer months the Ladakhis appear to become a minority in their own capital.
But the most conspicuous intruder of all is the Indian army. It's not unusual to see machine-gun and khaki clad soldiers strolling nonchalantly through the streets. They have cute little sewn-on name badges, most bearing the Sikh surname "Singh" (meaning lion) - Sikhs after all refer to themselves as "the chosen race of warrior men." My guest house was right next to an Officer's Mess, and the guards outside, obviously shit-bored, kept trying to chat with me. It was the case of the usual Indian questions: what is good name sir, what is your country name, what is your father's job, how much do you earn in England, first time India? The Edwardian turn of phrase among Indians ("old chap" and "tip-top" are not uncommon), stuck in a pre-Independence time-warp, is the most charming legacy of the British Raj, particularly among the thickly-moustached military.
Conversations with Indians can be frustratingly circular, and often resembles a check-list of standard questions. Afterwards you realise you've discovered nothing about them, but they've discovered a lot about you. Indians are reluctant to reveal their individuality to strangers, and resort to standardised, comformist opinions when you quiz them on contraversial topics. For India, like much of Asia, is a collectivist culture where the individual most play second fiddle to the will of the community. It's hard to relate to coming from an our opposing, individualist culture. I also believe this explains why the Novel, the fullest artistic expression of individuality, is a phenomenon of the West, Indian novels being an apdaptation of the Western model. But one topic Indians really open up on is domestic politics. They hate and distrust their politicians more than we do. An eloquent Benares University student I met last year on a train through West Bengal had this to say: "In our India the politicians and gundas (gangsters) are interchangeable. Many state governers are awaiting sentences for mass murder and rape. This is India"
I stayed in Changspa, the backyard of Leh, which has managed to retain a rural feel, all green fields, paved alleyways and meandering goats. There's not a great deal to do in Leh - that's rather the point. Much of my time was spent drinking apricot juice (Ladakh's great export), munching on buttered Kashmiri bread and being pensive in a gompa (Buddhist monastery). I discovered Leh to be a more divided community than it first seemed. Much of the Kashmiri population are permanent settlers, and the large and beautiful Friday Mosque (built by a King of Leh in the sixteenth century under pressure from Kashmiri invaders) is a reminder that 45% of Ladakh is (largely Sunni) Muslim. Its call to prayer plays a main role in Leh's soundtrack. The ninties sall communal violence between Leh's Buddhists and Muslims, but things appear pretty stable now, perhaps due to the oppressive military prescence. However, Ladakh still resents being part of a Jammu and Kashmir state, administered from Srinagar by Muslims who have little sympathy for their Buddhist culture. Such cultural imperialism is seen in how Ladakhi primary school children are taught in Urdu (and later English), instilling in their young minds that their own language is a backward peasant tounge. Their educational system is a bastardised take on the Western model, and they are taught nothing of their own culture or history, further entrenching an inferiority complex. For years Ladakh has been lobbying the government to become a union territory, administered directly from Delhi. An effort Delhi has done its utmost to ignore.
Much is made of Leh's path to modernity, and environmentalists have made it a cause. Ladakh's harsh, dry climate and traditional lifestyle requires the most sensitive developmental approach possible. But the changes over the past decade have bewildered the locals. Traffic has increased tenfold, as has litter, beggars (many of whom travel up from the Indian plains for the tourist season), power cuts and water shortages. Legions of Ladakhiss have migrated from their traditonal rural lifestyle to Leh to join the money economy. The beauty and peace that attracts tourists is set to disappear. And these changes are being egged on by the Indian governement, which considers Ladakh a backwater that needs to participate in India's economic rise. But this economic rise is not the happy-clappy party celebrated by the Western press.
It's worth conisdering that the same hope was lavished on Indonesia during President Suharto's first decade in the 1970s. The country was frequently hailed as an "economic miracle" by Western journalists. And what happened to that miracle?
But I must confess, before my first visit to India last year I believed the hype about the "economic miracle that is India." Some British journalists even went so far as to describe a "golden age." I was geared up to witness a brave new country. But I learnt that figures - economic growth rates, mobile phone ownerships, foreign investement - don't tell a partial story, but no story at all. It's hard to believe these journalists have even been to India, or at least not to the medieval countryside beyond the major cities, where the majority of Indians still live. Sure, a metropolis like Mumbai has an awesome and growing ability to create wealth, and some of the highest office rents in the world. But the logic that this new wealth will "trickle down" to the rural power - the arguement of free-market puritans - is laughable. Prices will simply rise - as they are doing at the moment, uncontrollably - and the lot of the small-hold famer, who comprises the majority of Indian agriculture, will the stay the same. He will become unable to support his family and most likely join one of the peasant-communist groups now practicing terrorism in Andra Pradesh, Chattisgarh and Bihar. India already has enough rebels on its plate, not least in the tribal North-East (formerly Assam), but numbers look only set to increase.
But even India's cities are harsh places of cruel contrast, where emaciated beggars sprawl on pavements outside diet clinics. Mass migration to cities have seen rapid growth (exciting economists), so very speedy that transport, sewage systems, rubbish disposal or any other facet of infrastructure has been unable to catch up. Such an insupportable explosion is already taking place in Leh, where a plague of concrete suburbs is creeping its way down the Indus valley. Rows of crude concrete boxes, like much of India's new architecture, useless in heat or cold, cramped spaces where communal violence flares easily. The inhabitants are removed from their traditional environment, and are dependent for their rations of water on trucks that pass daily. Since Independence Indians have built like people without an architectural tradition - comparison with classic Mughal architecture is too depressing to bear. Modern architecture has become one the of the Great Indian Tragedies.
Leh's local buses are over-crowded, unreliable and generally just crap. I enquired about times in the station office. The chap behind the desk pointed to a board behind, listing only the first and last buses of the day to each destination. He pulled a profound smile, as if this board displayed the the meaning of life, the universe and everything. I pressed on: "but what about the buses in between?" He employed the strangely effective Indian strategy for dealing with confrontation: the dead face, which effectively says, "COMMUNICATION HAS BEEN TERMINATED INDEFINATELY."
So I took the save-the-planted approach of renting a battered bicycle to visit the nearby monasteries of the Indus valley, of which I managed only Shey and Rumste. Tibetan Buddhism is far removed from the teachings of Gautama Siddhartha. The Lumbini prince pleaded that he should not be idolised after death, but Tibetan Buddhist monasteries are crammed with Buddha statues, before which the faithfull leave offerings ranging from flowers, packaged foods and half-empty whisky bottles. Add to this numerous depictions of Boddhivistas (enlightened beings who have chosen to forgoe Nirvana to instruct the living), various Demons of the Sky and Earth, and an impenetrable symbolic system. The old pagan Bon religion of Tibet was not wiped out but given a new, more sophisticated home. The loud, clanging rituals of their pujas (collective prayers) certainly has the hysteria and theatre of pagan ritual. Borrowings from Hindu Tantricism (the funky belief that sex and drugs aid communion with the divine - a grossly simplified but fun definition) are seen in the statuettes of Boddhivistas straddled by naked women, the psychedelic wax sculptures before the altars and the murals of flayed skins, both animal and human, found in (often locked) side chambers.
High altitude (Leh sits at 3,500 metres) robs you of oxygen, and has the effect of halving your fitness. The cycle uphill back to Leh almost destroyed me. Yet two days later I was back on a bicycle, but undertook a less strenous expedition. Some other travellers and I were taken by jeep to the top of the Kardung pass, the peak of allegedly the highest motorable road in the world (5, 600 metres - it was freezing in just a T-shirt), and we were left to cycle back down to Leh on loose gravel, trying not to die. Before we left, the bike shop owner shared a few pearls of wisom: "when you go sharp corner, break before turn, not during turn, please. Otherwise you skid and go off cliff. This is big problem for me."
A couple of days later I clubbed together with three Franks for a five day trek from Lamaryu to Chilling. An agency provided us with a guide cum cook, some donkeys to bear our luggage, and some charming inbred donkey men, whose job was to egg their animals along - namely walk behind them, shout and beat them with large sticks. Yes, we were entirely incapable of fending for ourselves in the Ladakhi wilderness, a barren place of few villages. On the jeep ride ro Lamaryu we passed many dark-skinned Bihari labourers, looking lost and cold in these Himalayan climes. They are drawn far from their villages to maintain Ladakh's roads for 80 rupees (one British pound) per day. It's dangerous work, and stone memorials by the roadside commemorate the unlucky. Such is the state of Bihar.
After exploring Lamaryu Gompa and exchanging many a "Julay" (Ladakhi greeting) with cheery peasants, the donkeys were loaded and we set off. Our guide cum cook was an interesting mongrel called Rahoul, of Tibetan and Bengali parentage, but born and bred in Dharamsala (Himachal Pradesh), that large-scale Tibetan refugee camp turned backpacker magnet (where Westerners can look and point at Tibetans in their cute clothes and bangles - oh dear). The food he managed to knock up out of rusty pans in a cramped tent was some of the best I've had in India. It ranged from Punjabi to Bengali to Tibetan to Italian. But Rahoul's persistent cheerfulness began to wear on me - surely no one has the right to smile like that all the time? Ok, sorry, I musn't let my misanthropy rear its ugly head again.
After so much solo travel, moving in a group felt claustrophobic. And I disliked being "guided." Furthermore my French trekkers partners, agreable as they were, were unfit, uninterested and demanded stops every half an hour. We even cut short most of the last day's trekking, forgoeing a high pass, because the dear Franks couldn't take it anymore. We diverted to a nearby road to wait for a jeep back to Leh. In the long evenings my trekking partners held lengthy conversations, in French, me nodding inanely at the side. But all things considered, the trek was an incredible experience with stunning scenery, and allowed access to Ladakh at its most traditional and picturesque, remote from any motorable road. There was one alarming incident. On the last night we idiotically set up camp next to a slope piled with loose rock. During supper large stones began to tumble down towards us. One sharp bastard hit me hard on the foot. After moving our tents behind a clump of trees we felt safer. Marginally.
Immediately after arriving back in Leh I fell to food poisoing - possibly a boilded egg in that day's packed lunch, which smelt fine but looked a little fluffy (but by that time I felt industructable). I spent a sleepless night groaning and making messy trips to the toilet. That was last night, but I've almost recovered now. I'm already planning my next trek, eight days in the Markha valley, this time just hiring a guide and sleeping in villages. Can't wait.
All the best to those in Blighty and elsewhere,
Ben x
Leh has become a Mecca for two types: earnest (and possibly German) middle aged men in desinger trekking gear, and bangle and sarong sporting Euro-Israeli-American youth. The former are attracted by some of the highest, wildest and certainly most arduous trekking in the world. The latter by the peaced-out vibe (not my words), abundance of cheap and powerful Kashmiri charas (hashish), and that whole fashionable Tibetan Buddhism thing. Neither are disappointed. Me, I'm not sure which bracket I fall into - I vainly consider myself a high-brow cultural observer, a pilgrim of the intellect, one who not only answers the call of the East but gives it a thoughtful reply. At least this is how I reassure myself as I wonder around looking lost and smelly.
Leh's old town looks the part - a tangled mess of white-washed, stone-walled houses, decorated with Mani stones (devotional tablets inscribed with Tibetan characters). It has often been compared to Lhasa pre the Chinese invasion - there's even an imitation Potatala Palace, though smaller and empty after the the Royal family's move a few hundred years ago to the nearby village of Stok, where they still live. But outside the old town Leh becomes a mess of cultures, especially now during the two warm months of Ladakh's tourist season - the Manali-Leh road is snowed over but from late June till early September. You can still fly in during winter, when Leh returns to the Ladakhis, but you may have to face parky temperatures reaching minus forty degrees centigrade. But come late June this town of 25, 000 is colonised by Kashmiri carpet sellers, Delhi-ite tour operators and Western trekkers, replacing the Turkmen, Afgan and Tibetan traders of time's past, when due to its position at the foot of the Kardang pass Leh was the gateway to trade in Yarkhand, Turkestan. (At the closure of China's trade routes after the revolution, Ladakh lost all its trade capital and had to return to subsistence farming.) But this contemporary invasion is similar to the situation of the Sikkimese I witnessed last year in Gantok - during the summer months the Ladakhis appear to become a minority in their own capital.
But the most conspicuous intruder of all is the Indian army. It's not unusual to see machine-gun and khaki clad soldiers strolling nonchalantly through the streets. They have cute little sewn-on name badges, most bearing the Sikh surname "Singh" (meaning lion) - Sikhs after all refer to themselves as "the chosen race of warrior men." My guest house was right next to an Officer's Mess, and the guards outside, obviously shit-bored, kept trying to chat with me. It was the case of the usual Indian questions: what is good name sir, what is your country name, what is your father's job, how much do you earn in England, first time India? The Edwardian turn of phrase among Indians ("old chap" and "tip-top" are not uncommon), stuck in a pre-Independence time-warp, is the most charming legacy of the British Raj, particularly among the thickly-moustached military.
Conversations with Indians can be frustratingly circular, and often resembles a check-list of standard questions. Afterwards you realise you've discovered nothing about them, but they've discovered a lot about you. Indians are reluctant to reveal their individuality to strangers, and resort to standardised, comformist opinions when you quiz them on contraversial topics. For India, like much of Asia, is a collectivist culture where the individual most play second fiddle to the will of the community. It's hard to relate to coming from an our opposing, individualist culture. I also believe this explains why the Novel, the fullest artistic expression of individuality, is a phenomenon of the West, Indian novels being an apdaptation of the Western model. But one topic Indians really open up on is domestic politics. They hate and distrust their politicians more than we do. An eloquent Benares University student I met last year on a train through West Bengal had this to say: "In our India the politicians and gundas (gangsters) are interchangeable. Many state governers are awaiting sentences for mass murder and rape. This is India"
I stayed in Changspa, the backyard of Leh, which has managed to retain a rural feel, all green fields, paved alleyways and meandering goats. There's not a great deal to do in Leh - that's rather the point. Much of my time was spent drinking apricot juice (Ladakh's great export), munching on buttered Kashmiri bread and being pensive in a gompa (Buddhist monastery). I discovered Leh to be a more divided community than it first seemed. Much of the Kashmiri population are permanent settlers, and the large and beautiful Friday Mosque (built by a King of Leh in the sixteenth century under pressure from Kashmiri invaders) is a reminder that 45% of Ladakh is (largely Sunni) Muslim. Its call to prayer plays a main role in Leh's soundtrack. The ninties sall communal violence between Leh's Buddhists and Muslims, but things appear pretty stable now, perhaps due to the oppressive military prescence. However, Ladakh still resents being part of a Jammu and Kashmir state, administered from Srinagar by Muslims who have little sympathy for their Buddhist culture. Such cultural imperialism is seen in how Ladakhi primary school children are taught in Urdu (and later English), instilling in their young minds that their own language is a backward peasant tounge. Their educational system is a bastardised take on the Western model, and they are taught nothing of their own culture or history, further entrenching an inferiority complex. For years Ladakh has been lobbying the government to become a union territory, administered directly from Delhi. An effort Delhi has done its utmost to ignore.
Much is made of Leh's path to modernity, and environmentalists have made it a cause. Ladakh's harsh, dry climate and traditional lifestyle requires the most sensitive developmental approach possible. But the changes over the past decade have bewildered the locals. Traffic has increased tenfold, as has litter, beggars (many of whom travel up from the Indian plains for the tourist season), power cuts and water shortages. Legions of Ladakhiss have migrated from their traditonal rural lifestyle to Leh to join the money economy. The beauty and peace that attracts tourists is set to disappear. And these changes are being egged on by the Indian governement, which considers Ladakh a backwater that needs to participate in India's economic rise. But this economic rise is not the happy-clappy party celebrated by the Western press.
It's worth conisdering that the same hope was lavished on Indonesia during President Suharto's first decade in the 1970s. The country was frequently hailed as an "economic miracle" by Western journalists. And what happened to that miracle?
But I must confess, before my first visit to India last year I believed the hype about the "economic miracle that is India." Some British journalists even went so far as to describe a "golden age." I was geared up to witness a brave new country. But I learnt that figures - economic growth rates, mobile phone ownerships, foreign investement - don't tell a partial story, but no story at all. It's hard to believe these journalists have even been to India, or at least not to the medieval countryside beyond the major cities, where the majority of Indians still live. Sure, a metropolis like Mumbai has an awesome and growing ability to create wealth, and some of the highest office rents in the world. But the logic that this new wealth will "trickle down" to the rural power - the arguement of free-market puritans - is laughable. Prices will simply rise - as they are doing at the moment, uncontrollably - and the lot of the small-hold famer, who comprises the majority of Indian agriculture, will the stay the same. He will become unable to support his family and most likely join one of the peasant-communist groups now practicing terrorism in Andra Pradesh, Chattisgarh and Bihar. India already has enough rebels on its plate, not least in the tribal North-East (formerly Assam), but numbers look only set to increase.
But even India's cities are harsh places of cruel contrast, where emaciated beggars sprawl on pavements outside diet clinics. Mass migration to cities have seen rapid growth (exciting economists), so very speedy that transport, sewage systems, rubbish disposal or any other facet of infrastructure has been unable to catch up. Such an insupportable explosion is already taking place in Leh, where a plague of concrete suburbs is creeping its way down the Indus valley. Rows of crude concrete boxes, like much of India's new architecture, useless in heat or cold, cramped spaces where communal violence flares easily. The inhabitants are removed from their traditional environment, and are dependent for their rations of water on trucks that pass daily. Since Independence Indians have built like people without an architectural tradition - comparison with classic Mughal architecture is too depressing to bear. Modern architecture has become one the of the Great Indian Tragedies.
Leh's local buses are over-crowded, unreliable and generally just crap. I enquired about times in the station office. The chap behind the desk pointed to a board behind, listing only the first and last buses of the day to each destination. He pulled a profound smile, as if this board displayed the the meaning of life, the universe and everything. I pressed on: "but what about the buses in between?" He employed the strangely effective Indian strategy for dealing with confrontation: the dead face, which effectively says, "COMMUNICATION HAS BEEN TERMINATED INDEFINATELY."
So I took the save-the-planted approach of renting a battered bicycle to visit the nearby monasteries of the Indus valley, of which I managed only Shey and Rumste. Tibetan Buddhism is far removed from the teachings of Gautama Siddhartha. The Lumbini prince pleaded that he should not be idolised after death, but Tibetan Buddhist monasteries are crammed with Buddha statues, before which the faithfull leave offerings ranging from flowers, packaged foods and half-empty whisky bottles. Add to this numerous depictions of Boddhivistas (enlightened beings who have chosen to forgoe Nirvana to instruct the living), various Demons of the Sky and Earth, and an impenetrable symbolic system. The old pagan Bon religion of Tibet was not wiped out but given a new, more sophisticated home. The loud, clanging rituals of their pujas (collective prayers) certainly has the hysteria and theatre of pagan ritual. Borrowings from Hindu Tantricism (the funky belief that sex and drugs aid communion with the divine - a grossly simplified but fun definition) are seen in the statuettes of Boddhivistas straddled by naked women, the psychedelic wax sculptures before the altars and the murals of flayed skins, both animal and human, found in (often locked) side chambers.
High altitude (Leh sits at 3,500 metres) robs you of oxygen, and has the effect of halving your fitness. The cycle uphill back to Leh almost destroyed me. Yet two days later I was back on a bicycle, but undertook a less strenous expedition. Some other travellers and I were taken by jeep to the top of the Kardung pass, the peak of allegedly the highest motorable road in the world (5, 600 metres - it was freezing in just a T-shirt), and we were left to cycle back down to Leh on loose gravel, trying not to die. Before we left, the bike shop owner shared a few pearls of wisom: "when you go sharp corner, break before turn, not during turn, please. Otherwise you skid and go off cliff. This is big problem for me."
A couple of days later I clubbed together with three Franks for a five day trek from Lamaryu to Chilling. An agency provided us with a guide cum cook, some donkeys to bear our luggage, and some charming inbred donkey men, whose job was to egg their animals along - namely walk behind them, shout and beat them with large sticks. Yes, we were entirely incapable of fending for ourselves in the Ladakhi wilderness, a barren place of few villages. On the jeep ride ro Lamaryu we passed many dark-skinned Bihari labourers, looking lost and cold in these Himalayan climes. They are drawn far from their villages to maintain Ladakh's roads for 80 rupees (one British pound) per day. It's dangerous work, and stone memorials by the roadside commemorate the unlucky. Such is the state of Bihar.
After exploring Lamaryu Gompa and exchanging many a "Julay" (Ladakhi greeting) with cheery peasants, the donkeys were loaded and we set off. Our guide cum cook was an interesting mongrel called Rahoul, of Tibetan and Bengali parentage, but born and bred in Dharamsala (Himachal Pradesh), that large-scale Tibetan refugee camp turned backpacker magnet (where Westerners can look and point at Tibetans in their cute clothes and bangles - oh dear). The food he managed to knock up out of rusty pans in a cramped tent was some of the best I've had in India. It ranged from Punjabi to Bengali to Tibetan to Italian. But Rahoul's persistent cheerfulness began to wear on me - surely no one has the right to smile like that all the time? Ok, sorry, I musn't let my misanthropy rear its ugly head again.
After so much solo travel, moving in a group felt claustrophobic. And I disliked being "guided." Furthermore my French trekkers partners, agreable as they were, were unfit, uninterested and demanded stops every half an hour. We even cut short most of the last day's trekking, forgoeing a high pass, because the dear Franks couldn't take it anymore. We diverted to a nearby road to wait for a jeep back to Leh. In the long evenings my trekking partners held lengthy conversations, in French, me nodding inanely at the side. But all things considered, the trek was an incredible experience with stunning scenery, and allowed access to Ladakh at its most traditional and picturesque, remote from any motorable road. There was one alarming incident. On the last night we idiotically set up camp next to a slope piled with loose rock. During supper large stones began to tumble down towards us. One sharp bastard hit me hard on the foot. After moving our tents behind a clump of trees we felt safer. Marginally.
Immediately after arriving back in Leh I fell to food poisoing - possibly a boilded egg in that day's packed lunch, which smelt fine but looked a little fluffy (but by that time I felt industructable). I spent a sleepless night groaning and making messy trips to the toilet. That was last night, but I've almost recovered now. I'm already planning my next trek, eight days in the Markha valley, this time just hiring a guide and sleeping in villages. Can't wait.
All the best to those in Blighty and elsewhere,
Ben x
Wednesday, 16 July 2008
Kinnaur, Spiti, Lahaul
"Was is fanciful to think of these Himalayas, so well charted and perhaps once better known, as the Indian symbol of loss, mountains to which, on their burning plains, they looked back with yearning, and to which they could now return only in pilgrimages, legends and pictures?"
V.S Naipaul
I checked out of the YMCA, whose flower pots and quaint Christian motivational wall inscriptions are entirely in keeping with Shimla. It was the 6.45 bus to Kalpa. Almost all India is awake by this time. It was to be the first of my epic bus journeys. A sweet 12 hours.
State bus rides are a staple of the Indian experience. The buses themselves beggar belief: how can a machine that battered still function? Well, the word 'function' is open to interpretation. As we turned the mountain corners the seats slid from side to side, wires popped out from the dials next to the steering wheel - the driver divided his attention between equally between shoving them back in again on the actual road before him. A wheel had to replaced half way through. Every part of the bus rattled, but the din was clearly not enough - the driver cranked up hindi pop music on blown out speakers. A troop of school kids sang along, loudly.
The condition of Indian buses is an example of a commendable cultural trait stretched too far. Indian abhor waste, and everything is to be squeezed until all its use is exhausted. A charpoy is lounged on until it snaps, a building is refurbished only when the roof caves in. And a bus is driven until its wheels spin off in the road.
As always, there was lots of stopping. Chai stops, lunch stops, temple stops, driver-shares-a-cigarette-with-an-old-friend-in-a-random-village stops. This driver seemed aquainted with half of Himachal Pradesh. All sorts hopped on and off; costumes changed. Men appeard in woolen waistcoats and short cylindrical hats, the women in headscarves and pantaloons. The saris had vanished. An old man in traditional Kinnauri dress sat behind me, coughing into my neck. It grew worse; he started to gargle and soon passed out, snot and spittle coursing down his chin. The bus stopped at a police station and a burly policeman marched in and brutally dragged him out by the shoulders, the old man glazed. We left him propped against the railings outside the station.
But Kalpa is worth 12 hours of almost anything. Allegedly the winter home of Shiva - the village's beautiful wood-carved Shiva temples (complete with phallic lingams) hinge of this legend. Kalpa falls gently down the side of a mountain, thin streams threading through fields of cannabis, past stone-walled slate-roofed farm houses. The snow-capped peaks of the Kinnaur-Kailish range rose on the other side of the valley - from my guest house balcony I felt I could almost touch them. It was a place of stillness - the locals themselves seem scarcely to budge. My will to do anything curled up and died. I ate, ambled, read, wrote and dreamed. Each performed in managable segments - relaxation as a mechanical process. The Indian plains felt far away - it was spelt out in the people themselves, heavily featured and heavily jewelled. Not a dhoti in sight. Their Hinduism has an animistic edge; on one ramble I came across a village exorcism, a couple kneeling while a draped idol was swayed on a palaquin above their heads and a pandit mumbled. But some locals were of a more recognisable type - a bandana and bling clad tea shop owner kept tyring to sell me his 'very very good price' cannabis, and also seemed to think that endlessly listening to Shakira was in keeping with his gansta credentials. I shared Kalpa with a few other travellers, all Israeli, all permenantly stoned, mostly on bikes. They call this the 'Humus Trail.'
On the bus to Nako I entered the Spiti valley, and left behind the trees and flowers. Nothing but towering rock and dust, a mountain desert. But these words do little justice to the austere beauty of the place. A lunar landscape, no place for man. If gods exist anywhere, they'd certainly be kicking around here.
This branch of the Indo-Tibetan highway is described by the Lonely Planet as the most terrifying road in India. The road was barely wide enough for our bus, and every meeting with an oncomiing bus was followed by a wiggly dance gracing the edge of a precipice. We passed a village called Pooh, which felt very far from A Hundred Acre Wood. Before Nako the bus stopped at one of the many military checkpoints in Spiti, where an impressively moustached soldier checked that my Inner-Line permit was pukka, as well as jotting down the usual information concerning me. It is strange to be defined by your age, nationality, passport and visa number; other than these you offically don't matter.
Spotted from far away Nako was an oasis of rippling green. The villages of Spiti most appear as these bright mirages, chanelling the Spiti river off into fields of crop, their green the more intense against the brown rock slopes that rise either side. And as with many of the other villages of Spiti, Nako was solar powered. Commendable, but the electricity suffered from Hamlet syndrome: to be or not to be. Come the evenings it would spring to life, shine for ten minutes, cut off for twenty, flicker back for ten. And so on.
Nako was a medieval cluster of stone-walled Tibetan houses, fluttering Buddhist prayer flags splitting the roofline like TV ariels. It overlooked a lake, crisscrossed with strings of futher prayer flags. There was no reminder of India, natural or human. The people had adopted mongoloid features, and in place of of the village Hindu temple stood a Tibetan Buddhist Gompa, decked with grinning photos of the Dalai lama. Spiti is a micro-culture, an amputated toe of
Tibet. That it should have found itself in India is strange but lucky - India has persued no cutural revolution to date. Instead, India has spent millions of rehabilitating Tibetan refugees, largely in Dharamsala and a northern suburb of Old Delhi. It is surprising India hasn't flaunted this humanitarian trump card more, to prove itself to the West as a cuddlier ally than China could ever be.
The bus from to Tabo was where the real fun started. A landslide had fallen a mile on from Nako. We had to hop out the bus, walk a mile, pick our way over the fresh scree, wet our socks in a stream, then wait for almost three hours for the connecting bus. There was another case of bonding-in-mutual-suffering, this time with an American college graduate, Dave, with whom I'd end up travelling for the next week. He'd just finished a years internship for some company in Chandigargh, where he'd been helping them phrase things the 'American way.' One wonders how long, as India rises and the US Empire fades, before American companies start interning young Indians for the opposite reason.
After another tedious military checkpoint, Tabo emerged as another pool of green wedged between steep brown slopes. David and I stayed in the newer monastery, next to the older World Heritage Monastery. Staying in the monasteries of numerous religions is one of the great possibilities of Indian travel. On my last trip I stayed in Hindu, Jain, Hindu Tantric and Tibetan Buddhist monasteries. But on this jaunt I'm confined to the latter. The conditions are usually basic - in Tabo monastery a rat scuttled over the ceiling above my head all night - but always worth it for the atmosphere. In 1996 Tabo's older monastery celebrated its one thousanth birthday. The Dalai Lama rocked up for the occasion, to cast his spells, smile at cameras and spout the old World Peace message. Providing you find a monk milling around, he can escort you inside the monastery, shine a weak torch at beautiful murals and even provide a simple commentary: "look, here Buddha! Yes yes, very very old! Look, again, Buddha!"
We befriended two American girls, Chemi and Tori, who were volunteering to educate the little brats in the Tabo primary school. Chemi's knowledge of the Spiti language and familiarity with the locals led to several invitations to tea in local houses. We explored hermit caves in the nearby hillside, now hermitless, and the next day took a day hike to visit a genuine hermit monk, who chemi was somehow related to. He knocked the four of us up some rice, subje (curried veg) and tea. Salted tea, the Tibetan way - try to think of it as soup and you just may stomach it. We exchanged nobs, smiles and some basic Spiti words, then left him to his Deep Thoughts. He is probably right now spinning his prayer wheel in his crumbling monastery half way up a mountain.
The Himachal Pradesh governenment clearly regards Spiti as a backwater, not worth of comprehensive bus service. In the largest of villages there's only two buses a day in either direction, which all show contempt for their scheduled timetable. The ninety minute delay for the bus to Kaza was wholly expected.
Kaza is the capital of Spiti, but it wouldn't dwarf a Sussex village. It was hemmed in by the usual steep rocky slopes, up which monks had impossibly scrambled to scrawl devotional graffiti in giant, multicoloured Tibetan characters, visible from miles off. Lines off prayer flags were pitted at equally dizzy heights; on one scramble up a slope I got caught in several lines of them, eventually ripping them down - bad karma.
The bus dropped us off at the path that led steeply up to Dhankar, an isolated village wedged in the armpit of a mountain. Another millenium old monastery still stands, and another smiling, nodding monk is eager to point out the Buddhas for you. This monastery sat spectaculary on top of a high verge overlooking the confluence of the Pin and Spiti rivers. An equally ancient fort is set on a rock even higher than this. We stayed at the newer monaster nearby.
It was getting back to Kaza that the wobbly Spiti bus timetable hit us the hardest. Before we took the long scramble down to the village of Sichling by the road, a monk in Dhankar assured us that a bus left there as 11am. But the good people of Sichling had this to say: "Sorry friend, first bus go 9.30am, next bus 6pm." Sadly, crap information from locals is a fact of Indian travel. But it is rarely a case of crafy locals out to annoy locals - mostly simply wish to appear helpfull, and hide their ignorance through fictional answers.
Right, so hitching it was. But though we sat by Spiti's main highway, a vehicle farted along only about once every twenty minutes. None stopped for us. We tried every tactic, xeven standing in front of the path of oncoming vehicles. So we waited; I ploughed through V.S Naipaul's (excellent) 'An Area of Darkness' and David read an historical account of the American war of independence; clouds bunched and shredded above us. Three hours passed; a jeep eventually conceded to stop for us.
Next, Kaza to Kibber. Kibber once claimed to be the highest village in world; now it must settle for the highest village with a motorable road and electricity. Still, at 4200 metres it felt pretty lofty - you all looked tiny from there. On the bus ride there we stopped at what claimed to be the 'Highest Petrol Station in the World' (probably a rather easy claim to get away with). David and I tried walking higher. The altitude set in. We reached a breaking point, where every step winded us, and catching one's breath was a matter of five minutes. It renewned my sympathy for athsmatics, which begs the question: could inhalers be sold as trekking accessories?
The bus ride from Kaza to Keylong (crossing from Spiti to Lahaul) was another twelve hour joy, with a change in rainy Gramphu, where I bade a sad farewell to David as he continued down to Manali (which I decided to skip - one can have too many long-haired, stoner Israelis). But to up the fun factor of the trip, the bus was fully booked from Kaza, meaning I had to stand most of the seven hours to Gramphu, being thrown from one side of the bus to the other on the mountain bends, swearing in front of a variety of old Indian ladies. Thankfully the scenery was sublime.
Keylong derives its existence mostly as a stop-over between Manali and Leh, but it was pleasant enough. And a shock too: here was India again, saris and bindis and moustaches. Trees were growing naturally again too. I bussed sideways into the Pangi valley, to a village called Mudgargh, rapturously recommend by an American medical student I met on the bus from Kaza, who had spent the summer shadowing an Indian country doctor in Spiti and Lahaul. It certainly was pretty, but there was nowhere to stay, so I had to trek back down the valley to the tiny town on Udaipur (a far remove from its Rajastani namesake), where an army of toothless peasants took turns to stare at me.
The bus ride from Keylong to Leh, crossing from Himachal Pradesh to Jammu and Kashmir state and a whole lot of nothing, is a rite of passage for India backpackers. I can't imagine a more excruciating but beautiful 16 hours. There was literaly not a shred of civilization the whole way. And landscape was not of this earth, more like the fifth moon of Jupiter. Only the odd goffer popped out of the dry earth.
On these mountain roads, vehicles have an all too frequent habit of tumbling off the cliffs at sharp corners. You read about it in the Indian newspapers all the time. This is a problem. But the Indian Government has a solution: erecting witty signposts. "After whisky, driving risky." "Are you driving to a party? Then why drive so dirty?" "Drive safely, be home for safe-tea." "If you love her, please divorce speed." "Better Mr Late than a late Mr." And that's just a handfull of them. Yet surprisingly, vehicles still keep tumbling off cliffs. Wittier singposts needed, evidently. But the drivers have their own solution: placing garlanded plastic idols of their favourite Hindu gods (mostly Shiva) on their dashboard, to keep a divine eye on the road for them. What could possibly go wrong?
This now being Jammu and Kashmir state, the Indian military have set up shop in every available corner. I have never seen anything like it - they have created a barrack metropolis on the approach to Leh, with row upon row of bored looking sikhs cradling sub-machine guns.
So, that wraps it up for this epic session. So, how is Leh then Ben? you may well ask. For that answer my friends, you shall have to wait till next post. Coming soon.....(honest)
Love Ben x
V.S Naipaul
I checked out of the YMCA, whose flower pots and quaint Christian motivational wall inscriptions are entirely in keeping with Shimla. It was the 6.45 bus to Kalpa. Almost all India is awake by this time. It was to be the first of my epic bus journeys. A sweet 12 hours.
State bus rides are a staple of the Indian experience. The buses themselves beggar belief: how can a machine that battered still function? Well, the word 'function' is open to interpretation. As we turned the mountain corners the seats slid from side to side, wires popped out from the dials next to the steering wheel - the driver divided his attention between equally between shoving them back in again on the actual road before him. A wheel had to replaced half way through. Every part of the bus rattled, but the din was clearly not enough - the driver cranked up hindi pop music on blown out speakers. A troop of school kids sang along, loudly.
The condition of Indian buses is an example of a commendable cultural trait stretched too far. Indian abhor waste, and everything is to be squeezed until all its use is exhausted. A charpoy is lounged on until it snaps, a building is refurbished only when the roof caves in. And a bus is driven until its wheels spin off in the road.
As always, there was lots of stopping. Chai stops, lunch stops, temple stops, driver-shares-a-cigarette-with-an-old-friend-in-a-random-village stops. This driver seemed aquainted with half of Himachal Pradesh. All sorts hopped on and off; costumes changed. Men appeard in woolen waistcoats and short cylindrical hats, the women in headscarves and pantaloons. The saris had vanished. An old man in traditional Kinnauri dress sat behind me, coughing into my neck. It grew worse; he started to gargle and soon passed out, snot and spittle coursing down his chin. The bus stopped at a police station and a burly policeman marched in and brutally dragged him out by the shoulders, the old man glazed. We left him propped against the railings outside the station.
But Kalpa is worth 12 hours of almost anything. Allegedly the winter home of Shiva - the village's beautiful wood-carved Shiva temples (complete with phallic lingams) hinge of this legend. Kalpa falls gently down the side of a mountain, thin streams threading through fields of cannabis, past stone-walled slate-roofed farm houses. The snow-capped peaks of the Kinnaur-Kailish range rose on the other side of the valley - from my guest house balcony I felt I could almost touch them. It was a place of stillness - the locals themselves seem scarcely to budge. My will to do anything curled up and died. I ate, ambled, read, wrote and dreamed. Each performed in managable segments - relaxation as a mechanical process. The Indian plains felt far away - it was spelt out in the people themselves, heavily featured and heavily jewelled. Not a dhoti in sight. Their Hinduism has an animistic edge; on one ramble I came across a village exorcism, a couple kneeling while a draped idol was swayed on a palaquin above their heads and a pandit mumbled. But some locals were of a more recognisable type - a bandana and bling clad tea shop owner kept tyring to sell me his 'very very good price' cannabis, and also seemed to think that endlessly listening to Shakira was in keeping with his gansta credentials. I shared Kalpa with a few other travellers, all Israeli, all permenantly stoned, mostly on bikes. They call this the 'Humus Trail.'
On the bus to Nako I entered the Spiti valley, and left behind the trees and flowers. Nothing but towering rock and dust, a mountain desert. But these words do little justice to the austere beauty of the place. A lunar landscape, no place for man. If gods exist anywhere, they'd certainly be kicking around here.
This branch of the Indo-Tibetan highway is described by the Lonely Planet as the most terrifying road in India. The road was barely wide enough for our bus, and every meeting with an oncomiing bus was followed by a wiggly dance gracing the edge of a precipice. We passed a village called Pooh, which felt very far from A Hundred Acre Wood. Before Nako the bus stopped at one of the many military checkpoints in Spiti, where an impressively moustached soldier checked that my Inner-Line permit was pukka, as well as jotting down the usual information concerning me. It is strange to be defined by your age, nationality, passport and visa number; other than these you offically don't matter.
Spotted from far away Nako was an oasis of rippling green. The villages of Spiti most appear as these bright mirages, chanelling the Spiti river off into fields of crop, their green the more intense against the brown rock slopes that rise either side. And as with many of the other villages of Spiti, Nako was solar powered. Commendable, but the electricity suffered from Hamlet syndrome: to be or not to be. Come the evenings it would spring to life, shine for ten minutes, cut off for twenty, flicker back for ten. And so on.
Nako was a medieval cluster of stone-walled Tibetan houses, fluttering Buddhist prayer flags splitting the roofline like TV ariels. It overlooked a lake, crisscrossed with strings of futher prayer flags. There was no reminder of India, natural or human. The people had adopted mongoloid features, and in place of of the village Hindu temple stood a Tibetan Buddhist Gompa, decked with grinning photos of the Dalai lama. Spiti is a micro-culture, an amputated toe of
Tibet. That it should have found itself in India is strange but lucky - India has persued no cutural revolution to date. Instead, India has spent millions of rehabilitating Tibetan refugees, largely in Dharamsala and a northern suburb of Old Delhi. It is surprising India hasn't flaunted this humanitarian trump card more, to prove itself to the West as a cuddlier ally than China could ever be.
The bus from to Tabo was where the real fun started. A landslide had fallen a mile on from Nako. We had to hop out the bus, walk a mile, pick our way over the fresh scree, wet our socks in a stream, then wait for almost three hours for the connecting bus. There was another case of bonding-in-mutual-suffering, this time with an American college graduate, Dave, with whom I'd end up travelling for the next week. He'd just finished a years internship for some company in Chandigargh, where he'd been helping them phrase things the 'American way.' One wonders how long, as India rises and the US Empire fades, before American companies start interning young Indians for the opposite reason.
After another tedious military checkpoint, Tabo emerged as another pool of green wedged between steep brown slopes. David and I stayed in the newer monastery, next to the older World Heritage Monastery. Staying in the monasteries of numerous religions is one of the great possibilities of Indian travel. On my last trip I stayed in Hindu, Jain, Hindu Tantric and Tibetan Buddhist monasteries. But on this jaunt I'm confined to the latter. The conditions are usually basic - in Tabo monastery a rat scuttled over the ceiling above my head all night - but always worth it for the atmosphere. In 1996 Tabo's older monastery celebrated its one thousanth birthday. The Dalai Lama rocked up for the occasion, to cast his spells, smile at cameras and spout the old World Peace message. Providing you find a monk milling around, he can escort you inside the monastery, shine a weak torch at beautiful murals and even provide a simple commentary: "look, here Buddha! Yes yes, very very old! Look, again, Buddha!"
We befriended two American girls, Chemi and Tori, who were volunteering to educate the little brats in the Tabo primary school. Chemi's knowledge of the Spiti language and familiarity with the locals led to several invitations to tea in local houses. We explored hermit caves in the nearby hillside, now hermitless, and the next day took a day hike to visit a genuine hermit monk, who chemi was somehow related to. He knocked the four of us up some rice, subje (curried veg) and tea. Salted tea, the Tibetan way - try to think of it as soup and you just may stomach it. We exchanged nobs, smiles and some basic Spiti words, then left him to his Deep Thoughts. He is probably right now spinning his prayer wheel in his crumbling monastery half way up a mountain.
The Himachal Pradesh governenment clearly regards Spiti as a backwater, not worth of comprehensive bus service. In the largest of villages there's only two buses a day in either direction, which all show contempt for their scheduled timetable. The ninety minute delay for the bus to Kaza was wholly expected.
Kaza is the capital of Spiti, but it wouldn't dwarf a Sussex village. It was hemmed in by the usual steep rocky slopes, up which monks had impossibly scrambled to scrawl devotional graffiti in giant, multicoloured Tibetan characters, visible from miles off. Lines off prayer flags were pitted at equally dizzy heights; on one scramble up a slope I got caught in several lines of them, eventually ripping them down - bad karma.
The bus dropped us off at the path that led steeply up to Dhankar, an isolated village wedged in the armpit of a mountain. Another millenium old monastery still stands, and another smiling, nodding monk is eager to point out the Buddhas for you. This monastery sat spectaculary on top of a high verge overlooking the confluence of the Pin and Spiti rivers. An equally ancient fort is set on a rock even higher than this. We stayed at the newer monaster nearby.
It was getting back to Kaza that the wobbly Spiti bus timetable hit us the hardest. Before we took the long scramble down to the village of Sichling by the road, a monk in Dhankar assured us that a bus left there as 11am. But the good people of Sichling had this to say: "Sorry friend, first bus go 9.30am, next bus 6pm." Sadly, crap information from locals is a fact of Indian travel. But it is rarely a case of crafy locals out to annoy locals - mostly simply wish to appear helpfull, and hide their ignorance through fictional answers.
Right, so hitching it was. But though we sat by Spiti's main highway, a vehicle farted along only about once every twenty minutes. None stopped for us. We tried every tactic, xeven standing in front of the path of oncoming vehicles. So we waited; I ploughed through V.S Naipaul's (excellent) 'An Area of Darkness' and David read an historical account of the American war of independence; clouds bunched and shredded above us. Three hours passed; a jeep eventually conceded to stop for us.
Next, Kaza to Kibber. Kibber once claimed to be the highest village in world; now it must settle for the highest village with a motorable road and electricity. Still, at 4200 metres it felt pretty lofty - you all looked tiny from there. On the bus ride there we stopped at what claimed to be the 'Highest Petrol Station in the World' (probably a rather easy claim to get away with). David and I tried walking higher. The altitude set in. We reached a breaking point, where every step winded us, and catching one's breath was a matter of five minutes. It renewned my sympathy for athsmatics, which begs the question: could inhalers be sold as trekking accessories?
The bus ride from Kaza to Keylong (crossing from Spiti to Lahaul) was another twelve hour joy, with a change in rainy Gramphu, where I bade a sad farewell to David as he continued down to Manali (which I decided to skip - one can have too many long-haired, stoner Israelis). But to up the fun factor of the trip, the bus was fully booked from Kaza, meaning I had to stand most of the seven hours to Gramphu, being thrown from one side of the bus to the other on the mountain bends, swearing in front of a variety of old Indian ladies. Thankfully the scenery was sublime.
Keylong derives its existence mostly as a stop-over between Manali and Leh, but it was pleasant enough. And a shock too: here was India again, saris and bindis and moustaches. Trees were growing naturally again too. I bussed sideways into the Pangi valley, to a village called Mudgargh, rapturously recommend by an American medical student I met on the bus from Kaza, who had spent the summer shadowing an Indian country doctor in Spiti and Lahaul. It certainly was pretty, but there was nowhere to stay, so I had to trek back down the valley to the tiny town on Udaipur (a far remove from its Rajastani namesake), where an army of toothless peasants took turns to stare at me.
The bus ride from Keylong to Leh, crossing from Himachal Pradesh to Jammu and Kashmir state and a whole lot of nothing, is a rite of passage for India backpackers. I can't imagine a more excruciating but beautiful 16 hours. There was literaly not a shred of civilization the whole way. And landscape was not of this earth, more like the fifth moon of Jupiter. Only the odd goffer popped out of the dry earth.
On these mountain roads, vehicles have an all too frequent habit of tumbling off the cliffs at sharp corners. You read about it in the Indian newspapers all the time. This is a problem. But the Indian Government has a solution: erecting witty signposts. "After whisky, driving risky." "Are you driving to a party? Then why drive so dirty?" "Drive safely, be home for safe-tea." "If you love her, please divorce speed." "Better Mr Late than a late Mr." And that's just a handfull of them. Yet surprisingly, vehicles still keep tumbling off cliffs. Wittier singposts needed, evidently. But the drivers have their own solution: placing garlanded plastic idols of their favourite Hindu gods (mostly Shiva) on their dashboard, to keep a divine eye on the road for them. What could possibly go wrong?
This now being Jammu and Kashmir state, the Indian military have set up shop in every available corner. I have never seen anything like it - they have created a barrack metropolis on the approach to Leh, with row upon row of bored looking sikhs cradling sub-machine guns.
So, that wraps it up for this epic session. So, how is Leh then Ben? you may well ask. For that answer my friends, you shall have to wait till next post. Coming soon.....(honest)
Love Ben x
Sunday, 29 June 2008
Delhi, through the Punjab and up to Shimla
"Well, India is a country of nonsense."
Mahatma Gandhi
The flight was a cheapie - 350 pounds - with a stop-over in Amsterdam. Not too painful, I told myself. But what mischief did the Royal Dutch airlines have up their sleeve for the second leg? 'Sorry, but your flight is overbooked.' I waited till the last minute, as a stream of turbans flowed into the plane. But no seat. 'We've booked you in for a later flight, but with another stop-over at Abu Dhabi.' KLM gave me 600 euros in compensation, just to show how very sorry they were. It was so very touching; I stifled a 'fuck yes.' An Anglo-Indian from Birmingham and I bonded in suffering. His speech was of the charming Asian gansta variety: KLM's slovenly conduct was 'bang out of order, man.' On reaching Abu Dhabi airport he tactfully shouted 'dude, look at all these Muslims.' It was a sad parting at Delhi airport.
The bus from Delhi from the airport threads through a majestic concrete sprawl, enlivened by abandoned industrial estates heaped with upturned earth. A dismal approach. But preferable to that from Mumbai airport, which escorts you on a grand tour of the largest slum in Asia, and would make a grotesque game of I spy: 'daddy, I spy with my little eye...an old man whose arms are rotting with polio, a woman sifting through discarded raw meet with her bare hands, three kids shitting on the road just outside our taxi.' But such a grotesque game could be practiced equally in the suburbs of Delhi, and too a lesser extent in the centre.
Delhi is awash with con artists. As a foreigner, anyone who approaches you, however friendly and wholesome they may appear, should be considered trouble. The most popular scam is too lure lost tourists to the many fake government tourist offices, where they are cajoled into booking hugely over-priced accomodation or fake train, bus or plane tickets. But I stumbled accross a rather elaborate one. After the bus from the airport dumped me in Connaught Place, I headed to a nearby hostel reccomended by my guide book. Outside was a man who claimed to be the owner. He regretted that 'his' guest house was full but he recommended I head to the 'main market' (which I assumed to be Paharganj, the tourist hotel hub) for cheap accomodation. He called over a rickshaw driver (a crony) to take me there at a cheap price. But this rickshaw-wallah proceeded to take me somewhere far from the centre (where I was initially), while insisting that this random suburb was 'very very central.' He stopped outside a basic hotel, took me inside and the hotel owner announced that his room prices started at 100 US dollars, and that this was a reasonable price for Delhi (they would normally cost about 5 US dollars). At this I flew into a rage, probably rather comical, and marched out in search of another rickshaw-wallah to take me to Paharganj. While the first few exclaimed that Paharganj was closed because of a riot/festival/metro construction project (the lie varies), but that they knew of a 'very very good guest house for cheap price' nearby (one which payed them commision), I eventually found an honest driver. Now, every major city has its tourist ghetto. Bangkok has its Khao San Road, Jakarta has its Jalan Jaksa, Calcutta has its Sudder Street. But Delhi is the proud owner of Paharganj, where you can take your pick of a smogsmahord of stuffy shoe-box guest houses to sweat the night away in, often with such inspired names as 'Guest House Very Good,' or 'Hotel Fun Fun.'
Delhi is like a juicy orange with a rank, putrid skin. And there is much tasty juice to had, and once tapped into it doesn't stop flowing. Wandering through the mess of old Delhi, dodging people, motorbikes, carts and cows, you'll stumble accross an exquisite haveli (city mansion) or Mughal mosque, almost buried in the clutter. Plus it has some of the finest monumental buildings in the world. Though the Red Fort is a tad decrepit and sad, the Jama Masjid (Friday Mosque) is awe-inspiring, and Luytens parliamentary complex is perhaps the finest building the British have ever erected, anywhere. Delhi just needs a little peeling.
One thing I had forgotten since my last trip to India is the extent and pervasiveness of its filth. Plastic waste overspills from gutters, the side of railway tracks are strewn with human excretement, cow pat smothers pavements. The stench is overpowering. But the filth of India can not be explained by its under-funded infrastructure: its lack of dustbins, and few street cleaners or rubbish collectors. The answer is largely cultural. The general filthiness of Indian toilets for instance, is rooted in the Hindu caste system and its varying degrees of purity and pollution. To maintain one's toilet is to associate oneself with the latrine cleaner, down there with the leather tanners at the bottom of the caste hierarchy. It is to pollute oneself. And so it is beneath the consideration of any dignified Hindu. This fear of contamination also explains their preference for squatting and horror of the toilet seat, and further the habit of men to simply piss against a building in the open street without embarrasment. For why fear shame when Indian passers-by simply choose not to see the act, when to do so would be to degrade themselves?
I'd seen the Red Fort on my last visit, so this time in Delhi - as well as much aimless rambling around Delhi Old and New - I re-visited the Jama Masjid, explored Raj Ghat with the memorial site of Mahatma Gandhi and its eternal flame, as well as the memorials for Nehru and Rajiv Gandhi (if you haven't heard of them, please slap yourself), then re-visited the excellent National museum. It was hot, very hot, the sort of muggy humid heat that makes you want to have a shower ten minutes after just having one. I had to head to the cool of the mountains. So before long I boarded the Himalayan Queen to Kalka at 5.55 am, day three. We passed through hours of the Punjab: fertile fields of intense green, interspersed with scruffy concrete townships in which people appeared to do nothing, lounging in charpoys (string beds), smoking bidis, occasionally rising to defecate in the middle of a field. This time at Kalka I decided against the Toy Train to Shimla. Constructed in the early twentieth century, the train track remains a marvel of engineering, elegantly bending and looping from the Punjab plains up to Shimla at 2, 000 metres. But the train takes forever to make the clime; a beaten up bus for me, uncomfortable but quick, making alarming work of the hair-pin mountain bends. The cool as we rose was an immediate relief.
Constructed by the British largely in the late nineteenth century, Shimla (formerly Simla) was an attempt the re-create the English village in the Himalayan foothills, in a temperate climate comparable to Britain. The capital of the Raj during the summer months, it is now almost impossible to imagine that here, in this twee hill-station, the British once lorded over one fifth of humanity. Mock-tudor houses still line the ridge, and the old men of Shimla still stoll along the mall of an evening in stipy v-neck pullovers, neat moustaches, puffing on pipes and greating old friends with a 'how do you do.' But India has largely reclaimed Shimla. Though the main drag may be a garish hoarding of Dominos Pizzas and cappacino houses catering for fat Punjabi tourits, the real gem if the 'middle market', which falls in tiers down the hillside, connected by near vertical steps. In the narrow steep lanes are all types, Kashmiris, Nepalis, Tibetans, Kullus, selling spices, shawls, pirate bollywood movies, everyting. I did little in Shimla except take the odd stroll in the hills and visit the 'Monkey Temple' on a hill above town, where Shimla's monkeys (possibly the most vicious in the subcontinent) frequently fight a pitched battle with Indian tourists. They even sell sticks on the way up to beat them off with. I can personally attest to the vileness of these critters: on my last visit one crept up behind me and ripped a banana out of my hand. My only great exertion was to obtain a permit for entry into Spiti, a restricted area due to its proximity to Tibet. So I once again had the pleausre of suffering Indian bureacracy, as I was bounced from one bespectacled clerk to another, a flustered English pinball, collecting a farcical amount of stamps on my paperwork before the permit was mine.
Now finally, a note of reflection....
On paper any Indian journey reads like an epic of sustained suffering, relieved only by the odd exquisite palace, temple or masala dosa. There's the overcrowding, the filth, the stench, the poverty, the stubborn refusal of any bus or train to leave on time. Indian budget travel would certainly appeal to the masochist. But India reveals its beauty in the smaller moments: the tea stops in ramshakle dhabas, the instant friendships on train journeys, the clanging evening puja in a Hindu temple. There's a profound quotation by Leonard Woolf (publisher, India-hand and wife of Virginnia Woolf): 'India, oh how you hate it. But oh how you love it.'
Anyhow, I'm leaving Shimla tomorrow for Kalpa in the Kinnaur valley. Look it up on google maps if you can be arsed. From there I shall press up into the lonely mountain desert of Spiti.
I'm missing you all. Toodle pip!
Ben x (wayfaring student)
P.S. As I typed this I was being audibly assaulted by a Bollywood film soundtack, and some Indian teenage boy kept staring into my screen. His fascination is understandable.
Mahatma Gandhi
The flight was a cheapie - 350 pounds - with a stop-over in Amsterdam. Not too painful, I told myself. But what mischief did the Royal Dutch airlines have up their sleeve for the second leg? 'Sorry, but your flight is overbooked.' I waited till the last minute, as a stream of turbans flowed into the plane. But no seat. 'We've booked you in for a later flight, but with another stop-over at Abu Dhabi.' KLM gave me 600 euros in compensation, just to show how very sorry they were. It was so very touching; I stifled a 'fuck yes.' An Anglo-Indian from Birmingham and I bonded in suffering. His speech was of the charming Asian gansta variety: KLM's slovenly conduct was 'bang out of order, man.' On reaching Abu Dhabi airport he tactfully shouted 'dude, look at all these Muslims.' It was a sad parting at Delhi airport.
The bus from Delhi from the airport threads through a majestic concrete sprawl, enlivened by abandoned industrial estates heaped with upturned earth. A dismal approach. But preferable to that from Mumbai airport, which escorts you on a grand tour of the largest slum in Asia, and would make a grotesque game of I spy: 'daddy, I spy with my little eye...an old man whose arms are rotting with polio, a woman sifting through discarded raw meet with her bare hands, three kids shitting on the road just outside our taxi.' But such a grotesque game could be practiced equally in the suburbs of Delhi, and too a lesser extent in the centre.
Delhi is awash with con artists. As a foreigner, anyone who approaches you, however friendly and wholesome they may appear, should be considered trouble. The most popular scam is too lure lost tourists to the many fake government tourist offices, where they are cajoled into booking hugely over-priced accomodation or fake train, bus or plane tickets. But I stumbled accross a rather elaborate one. After the bus from the airport dumped me in Connaught Place, I headed to a nearby hostel reccomended by my guide book. Outside was a man who claimed to be the owner. He regretted that 'his' guest house was full but he recommended I head to the 'main market' (which I assumed to be Paharganj, the tourist hotel hub) for cheap accomodation. He called over a rickshaw driver (a crony) to take me there at a cheap price. But this rickshaw-wallah proceeded to take me somewhere far from the centre (where I was initially), while insisting that this random suburb was 'very very central.' He stopped outside a basic hotel, took me inside and the hotel owner announced that his room prices started at 100 US dollars, and that this was a reasonable price for Delhi (they would normally cost about 5 US dollars). At this I flew into a rage, probably rather comical, and marched out in search of another rickshaw-wallah to take me to Paharganj. While the first few exclaimed that Paharganj was closed because of a riot/festival/metro construction project (the lie varies), but that they knew of a 'very very good guest house for cheap price' nearby (one which payed them commision), I eventually found an honest driver. Now, every major city has its tourist ghetto. Bangkok has its Khao San Road, Jakarta has its Jalan Jaksa, Calcutta has its Sudder Street. But Delhi is the proud owner of Paharganj, where you can take your pick of a smogsmahord of stuffy shoe-box guest houses to sweat the night away in, often with such inspired names as 'Guest House Very Good,' or 'Hotel Fun Fun.'
Delhi is like a juicy orange with a rank, putrid skin. And there is much tasty juice to had, and once tapped into it doesn't stop flowing. Wandering through the mess of old Delhi, dodging people, motorbikes, carts and cows, you'll stumble accross an exquisite haveli (city mansion) or Mughal mosque, almost buried in the clutter. Plus it has some of the finest monumental buildings in the world. Though the Red Fort is a tad decrepit and sad, the Jama Masjid (Friday Mosque) is awe-inspiring, and Luytens parliamentary complex is perhaps the finest building the British have ever erected, anywhere. Delhi just needs a little peeling.
One thing I had forgotten since my last trip to India is the extent and pervasiveness of its filth. Plastic waste overspills from gutters, the side of railway tracks are strewn with human excretement, cow pat smothers pavements. The stench is overpowering. But the filth of India can not be explained by its under-funded infrastructure: its lack of dustbins, and few street cleaners or rubbish collectors. The answer is largely cultural. The general filthiness of Indian toilets for instance, is rooted in the Hindu caste system and its varying degrees of purity and pollution. To maintain one's toilet is to associate oneself with the latrine cleaner, down there with the leather tanners at the bottom of the caste hierarchy. It is to pollute oneself. And so it is beneath the consideration of any dignified Hindu. This fear of contamination also explains their preference for squatting and horror of the toilet seat, and further the habit of men to simply piss against a building in the open street without embarrasment. For why fear shame when Indian passers-by simply choose not to see the act, when to do so would be to degrade themselves?
I'd seen the Red Fort on my last visit, so this time in Delhi - as well as much aimless rambling around Delhi Old and New - I re-visited the Jama Masjid, explored Raj Ghat with the memorial site of Mahatma Gandhi and its eternal flame, as well as the memorials for Nehru and Rajiv Gandhi (if you haven't heard of them, please slap yourself), then re-visited the excellent National museum. It was hot, very hot, the sort of muggy humid heat that makes you want to have a shower ten minutes after just having one. I had to head to the cool of the mountains. So before long I boarded the Himalayan Queen to Kalka at 5.55 am, day three. We passed through hours of the Punjab: fertile fields of intense green, interspersed with scruffy concrete townships in which people appeared to do nothing, lounging in charpoys (string beds), smoking bidis, occasionally rising to defecate in the middle of a field. This time at Kalka I decided against the Toy Train to Shimla. Constructed in the early twentieth century, the train track remains a marvel of engineering, elegantly bending and looping from the Punjab plains up to Shimla at 2, 000 metres. But the train takes forever to make the clime; a beaten up bus for me, uncomfortable but quick, making alarming work of the hair-pin mountain bends. The cool as we rose was an immediate relief.
Constructed by the British largely in the late nineteenth century, Shimla (formerly Simla) was an attempt the re-create the English village in the Himalayan foothills, in a temperate climate comparable to Britain. The capital of the Raj during the summer months, it is now almost impossible to imagine that here, in this twee hill-station, the British once lorded over one fifth of humanity. Mock-tudor houses still line the ridge, and the old men of Shimla still stoll along the mall of an evening in stipy v-neck pullovers, neat moustaches, puffing on pipes and greating old friends with a 'how do you do.' But India has largely reclaimed Shimla. Though the main drag may be a garish hoarding of Dominos Pizzas and cappacino houses catering for fat Punjabi tourits, the real gem if the 'middle market', which falls in tiers down the hillside, connected by near vertical steps. In the narrow steep lanes are all types, Kashmiris, Nepalis, Tibetans, Kullus, selling spices, shawls, pirate bollywood movies, everyting. I did little in Shimla except take the odd stroll in the hills and visit the 'Monkey Temple' on a hill above town, where Shimla's monkeys (possibly the most vicious in the subcontinent) frequently fight a pitched battle with Indian tourists. They even sell sticks on the way up to beat them off with. I can personally attest to the vileness of these critters: on my last visit one crept up behind me and ripped a banana out of my hand. My only great exertion was to obtain a permit for entry into Spiti, a restricted area due to its proximity to Tibet. So I once again had the pleausre of suffering Indian bureacracy, as I was bounced from one bespectacled clerk to another, a flustered English pinball, collecting a farcical amount of stamps on my paperwork before the permit was mine.
Now finally, a note of reflection....
On paper any Indian journey reads like an epic of sustained suffering, relieved only by the odd exquisite palace, temple or masala dosa. There's the overcrowding, the filth, the stench, the poverty, the stubborn refusal of any bus or train to leave on time. Indian budget travel would certainly appeal to the masochist. But India reveals its beauty in the smaller moments: the tea stops in ramshakle dhabas, the instant friendships on train journeys, the clanging evening puja in a Hindu temple. There's a profound quotation by Leonard Woolf (publisher, India-hand and wife of Virginnia Woolf): 'India, oh how you hate it. But oh how you love it.'
Anyhow, I'm leaving Shimla tomorrow for Kalpa in the Kinnaur valley. Look it up on google maps if you can be arsed. From there I shall press up into the lonely mountain desert of Spiti.
I'm missing you all. Toodle pip!
Ben x (wayfaring student)
P.S. As I typed this I was being audibly assaulted by a Bollywood film soundtack, and some Indian teenage boy kept staring into my screen. His fascination is understandable.
Monday, 23 June 2008
Quest Briefing
Firstly, apologies to all those who followed my previous gap year blog, which was terminated early in its life due to unforeseen laziness on the author's part. The complaints were thick and passionate, and I now write with a renewed dedication and all-consuming love towards my readership. I shall not let you down this time, so keep f*****g checking this blog and leave flattering comments below.
Now, I regret to inform you that all the gap year cliches are true. In 2007 I really did "find myself" in India. But unfortunately I didn't take myself back to the UK. Hence this current trip back to India, where I must find myself, again. Such is the dilemma of the travel bug.
Roughly sketched, my plan is to start in Delhi, leave for Shimla, then bus it into the Kinnaur valley, up through the Spiti valley, sideways into Lauhaul, onto Manali, upwards into Ladakh, possibly a side trip into Zanskar, then finally a flight back from Leh to Delhi, where I shall buy vast spoils of useless crap before flying back to London. Now, for some of you these names may as well be referring to Siberian mining towns. But simply put, I shall be pushing far up into the northern reaches of the Indian Himalaya, mostly within Jammu and Kashmir state - but not in the Kashmir Valley (Srinigar and thereabouts) where nasty bombs like to go "bang" rather a lot. I shall never knowingly step out of India, despite often being a yak's spit away from the Tibetan (/Chinese - take your pick according to political bent) border.
The lure for me is not only the high altitude scenery - barren moonscapes a la Afganistan - but also the well-preserved tantric buddhist culture harboured in Spiti and Ladakh, possibly more Tibetan than Tibet itself, considering that Chinese soldiers haven't been scampering around trashing the monasteries and slapping up the monks (though a chunk of Ladakh is currently occupied by China). Indeed, the cultural links between Ladakh and India proper are tenuous, and its inclusion in the Indian Union was due to its former status as a British protectorate, just like the easterly Himalayan state of Sikkim (I've been there too - not boasting).
In the course of my seven week quest (26 June till 14 August) I shall suffer endless excruciating bus rides on less-than-perfect roads (some among the highest in the world), brutal heat (Delhi), bitter cold, an absurd amount of chai and extreme isolation. Much of my time will hopefully be spent trekking - the plan is to gang up with other travelers in Leh (I'm traveling solo), hire a peasant and pony to guide us, and head up yonder mountains.
My blog posts may well be a tad erratic, as rural Ladakh is hardly dotted with internet cafes. But never despair - your hero shall do his utmost to keep you posted. Who knows, he may even inspire you to head to Ladakh yourself. All the best, see you in a little while.
Love Ben (wayfaring student) xxx
P.S. There shall be no pictures of me sat on elephants. Ok? Get over it.
Now, I regret to inform you that all the gap year cliches are true. In 2007 I really did "find myself" in India. But unfortunately I didn't take myself back to the UK. Hence this current trip back to India, where I must find myself, again. Such is the dilemma of the travel bug.
Roughly sketched, my plan is to start in Delhi, leave for Shimla, then bus it into the Kinnaur valley, up through the Spiti valley, sideways into Lauhaul, onto Manali, upwards into Ladakh, possibly a side trip into Zanskar, then finally a flight back from Leh to Delhi, where I shall buy vast spoils of useless crap before flying back to London. Now, for some of you these names may as well be referring to Siberian mining towns. But simply put, I shall be pushing far up into the northern reaches of the Indian Himalaya, mostly within Jammu and Kashmir state - but not in the Kashmir Valley (Srinigar and thereabouts) where nasty bombs like to go "bang" rather a lot. I shall never knowingly step out of India, despite often being a yak's spit away from the Tibetan (/Chinese - take your pick according to political bent) border.
The lure for me is not only the high altitude scenery - barren moonscapes a la Afganistan - but also the well-preserved tantric buddhist culture harboured in Spiti and Ladakh, possibly more Tibetan than Tibet itself, considering that Chinese soldiers haven't been scampering around trashing the monasteries and slapping up the monks (though a chunk of Ladakh is currently occupied by China). Indeed, the cultural links between Ladakh and India proper are tenuous, and its inclusion in the Indian Union was due to its former status as a British protectorate, just like the easterly Himalayan state of Sikkim (I've been there too - not boasting).
In the course of my seven week quest (26 June till 14 August) I shall suffer endless excruciating bus rides on less-than-perfect roads (some among the highest in the world), brutal heat (Delhi), bitter cold, an absurd amount of chai and extreme isolation. Much of my time will hopefully be spent trekking - the plan is to gang up with other travelers in Leh (I'm traveling solo), hire a peasant and pony to guide us, and head up yonder mountains.
My blog posts may well be a tad erratic, as rural Ladakh is hardly dotted with internet cafes. But never despair - your hero shall do his utmost to keep you posted. Who knows, he may even inspire you to head to Ladakh yourself. All the best, see you in a little while.
Love Ben (wayfaring student) xxx
P.S. There shall be no pictures of me sat on elephants. Ok? Get over it.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
