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