Fear And Loathing In Ladakh

Another depraved day dawns... I'm holed up in a Ladakhi family's guest room with a moaning South Indian engineering graduate named Sandeep, and I've just learned the Telugu words for "My god, I'm about to vom' something the size of a papaya", or possibly "Fuck the parademics. I'm flipping this stew pot in Hell."

I'll never forget the look on that saddhu jackass's face when he left the bar last night. Oh, and just what is a Hindu holy man doing walking out of a Tibetan pub in those dogfight-behowled hours of the darkness? Being a self-worshiping rat-fucker, that's what. It's almost a bad joke -a tourist, a drunk, and a saddhu walk into a bar... We're watching the World Cup, by the way. This is a subject on which the locals are keen to offer chestnuts of footballing wisdom after glimpsing a fluff piece on David Beckham on E! News India. That such a program exists is only further proof that this entire planet will be destroyed in a massive crisis of socio-moral neglect long before the first Chinese nuke hits Tokyo (Japan gets it again. Life's a bitch). Visions of nuclear holocaust and subsequent Godzilla vs. Mutant Hello Kitties of spectacular post-apocalyptic futility aside, I had the more immediate gripe of a smug baba on my hands, itching at me like those lifeforms that lay their eggs in plates of village-saloon chowmein. The game's about to start, and despite the fact that it involves the Slovaks (a most redundant variety of the Slavs if there ever was one -have you ever heard the term "Slovak exceptionalism"?- I thought not), it at least gave me the chance to root against the Italian team and spit a little in my beer at the sight of Fabio Cannavarro's troll-distressingly ugly head. So, getting back to the main track of things, in comes this baba who looks like he hasn't seen anything but the undersides of the floorboards in an opium-dealing snow leopard's stash cave in the last half decade. He sits down, looks at the pub TV for about five seconds and announces "Slovakia will beat Italy 3-2", a rather specific and unlikely prospect. Then, he sanctimoniously orders a chai from the bartender and shuffled on his bench to a spot behind a pillar with an Avril Lavigne poster on it, and proceeds not to watch a moment of the damn game.

Slovakia beat Italy 3-2.

This, I felt, was a twinkling of hope in the oppressively deterministic world our planet is becoming. But then this motherfucker, this baba, rises up like an overly-content gerbil lying on a baking pastry in the oven and says "Slovakia 3; Italy 2" and leaves, and just then I remember there actually is no justice on this Earth since the birth of the human beast, and ahahaha guess what? right now somebody's probably busy raping the Congo.

This is the spirit in which I awoke to my puking roommate, and the spirit in which I was preparing to embark on another day, visiting indices Ba.-Ch. of the Ladakh Encyclopaedia Of Indistinguishable Buddhist Monasteries. In a cruel twist of destiny, Sandeep was as masochistically into monastery-hopping as I am. I forget which monastery we were going to that day. But then again I forget a lot of things now, like the reason I ever came to a country where Cruelle and Numerous Gods forbid you from eating beef, and for how many days I've been wearing the same pair of tamarind-encrusted boxer shorts (that by itself being a wretched tale too devoid of virtue for the telling).

So we left for this monastery -which one matters about as much as which side of the bed Hugh Hefner decided to shit on this morning- and we no doubt admired it greatly while at the same time mentioning to eachother in very tentative language that we despised our selves. I don't think it was Shey monastery. Shey monastery was the least pleasant and most unedifying of the bunch. This was partly because Sandeep and I had to walk five miles across a shimmering desert road in a desolate, arid mountain wasteland to a hopeless village that looked like it would have been full of strip malls and sand wholesalers if the entire populace hadn't blinked at the crucial moment when some Promethean, Asian god poofed into materiality by the roadside and said "One, two, three, I show you... Commerce!". Shey monastery is a nondescript, whitewashed Tibetan pile with a second-rate giant Buddha inside, and is surrounded by Ladakh's biggest stupa field. This merely means a large concentration of extra-crumbly iterations of those same ubiquitous, highly unfascinating displays of devotion that dot the Ladakhi landscape the way that ill-painted crosses dot South Carolina. The funny thing about the cross is that until Jesus got his carpenter self nailed up there, the structure had no more religious significance than Chapter 1 of Woodworking For Dunces. Imagine if Jesus was condemned to be nailed onto existing religious iconography and they pinned him to a 20-foot Buddha in the "Have No Fear" pose. Now that would have been something.

Before Shey we had been in Tikse. To that extent, Tikse is to blame for luring us into close proximity with Shey, Shey's only restaurant, and Shey's only restaurant's gallingly rustic two-storey latrine. You read that correctly. Tikse on its own merits, however, is at least a dozen times better than Shey because it contains friendly monks, several large and rich prayer halls, fantastic views across the Indus valley, and a gargantuan bejeweled Maitreya Buddha that is literally the face of Ladakh's tourism promotion efforts. Perhaps the reason the monks are so friendly has to do with what Sandeep and I found on the roof: a box of broken glass, in particular, broken liquor bottles. To a shard -this would be far too inane a joke to bother concocting from thin air- the broken glass belonged to discarded bottles of Old Monk rum.

Let's see...so one day we also went to Thak Thog monastery. What a letdown. We get there on this obscure little road, having already misdirected ourselves on every half-visible cowpath in the Chemrey valley to see this Thak Thog because it has a special Buddhist cave. Then we get there, and the cave joint is closed. It was about to open in a week when the monks make their much-celebrated annual return to monastic duties. "Yuppp, I'm a monk, just gonna open the crib for spring worship...in July". Good fucking gracious, no wonder the Theravada school of Buddhism argues it takes millions of lifetimes to attain Enlightenment. They must have been observing these guys. These Mahayana-branch monks on the other hand are clearly striving for Truth on the assumption that it leaves time for deep-sea fishing. Incidentally, while at Thak Thog I also had to relieve myself next to some horrible desert plant that must be Tibet's answer to the saguaro cactus. So now you know.

Chemrey monastery is in the Chemrey valley too, though rumor is that they actually had to secretly change the name and burn the old records because in context being called the Lower Hudson monastery just sounded fucking stupid. It's got a great hill-perch, great views, a little museum with some fabulous cloth paintings. You should go there, if only because I've wasted my life visiting obscure Asian worship venues and I want someone to talk to.

Ohhh, and Alchi monastery, what fine memories I have of you. Alchi is famed for containing "some of the greatest art treasures in Asia", and fondly recalled for doing nothing superfluously awful to me. Also -and I mean this as a compliment, Alchi, in a way- never before have I seen a place so perfectly encapsulated by its Wikipedia page.

Hemis monastery, that's the famous one. It's apparently the place to be if you're the type to pore over calendars and show up at monasteries on the dates of traditional dancing festivals to get Rich, Vibrant Photographs with a hundred SLR-toting, L.L. Bean Brigade members scratching their cellulite in the background of every shot. We, however, did not arrive on such a day, which was for the best because that day the whiskey-hashish dialectic was really revealing the shocking and sordid material history of Buddhism in a vivid way. Really talking to a motherfucker, right through the vindictive seismic anomaly in the sonofabitch's cranium, y'know? Hemis has the largest (and probably most interesting) monastic museum of them all, but it was the "largest" aspect that directly concerned me as I painfully shuffled back towards the water closet by the entrance, desperate to forestall the spontaneous disintegration of my physical being by expelling the contents of my neutron-emitting stomach in an as-yet-to-be-determined direction up or down my digestive tract (it was up).

Then, finally there was Likkir monastery. We perused a collection of Tibetan tantra paraphernalia. There was one bowl made out of a polished fucking human skull. I looked at this for a moment, then pulled out my guitar, shredded a death metal solo in like five different time signatures, and rode a fuck-train all over the summoned Valkyries while the local lamas pounded gongs until the moment of climax.

Everything except that last sentence is absolutely true- the deranged and aimless wanderings of a man for some reason trying to rationally categorize a bunch of monasteries in one lost corner of this deranged and aimless world.