Exeunt Santoosh

By six in the morning we saw the most unusual thing we would witness all day: a naked Jain monk walking down the highway from Joshimath with his sacred whisk swishing through the air and his middle-aged buttcheeks jiggling with the rhythmic motion of a long walk down the mountains. Girlface, Santoosh, and several of Santoosh's relatives who were all squeezed into the car stared in disbelief, for although they are Indians they do not spend all their time in India seeking out the strangest people (and, wow, how strange they are) that this country has to offer.

We dropped off the relatives after a few hours in the district town which had such amenities as doctors and a hospital, and we continued on our way to Chopta. Descending from the inner mountains of Garwhal, we passed first through a series of terraced canyons and sleepy hill-towns and from there into a thick forest on a little-used road. We arrived in Chopta, an unlikely scene for a momentous occasion. Chopta can hardly be called a village; it is actually a string of about eight open-air rice'n'dal joints where the proprietors sleep on blankets in rocky nooks at the back of their stalls, and a single 'hotel' with enough solar-powered electricity to keep one light bulb flickering in each room. It was here in Chopta that Girlface and I said our goodbyes to Santoosh, as he was dropping us here and returning to Joshimath to prepare for the impending peak tourism season. I can't say I was greatly shattered at the time, but over the next few weeks I deeply began to miss having a vehicle on hand along with somebody who actually has a clue what the hell he's talking about. So, farewell Santoosh; your company and ability to give us information not diametrically opposed to reality will be missed.

Having settled at our pad in Chopta (a process which involved nothing more than observing that our room did indeed have four walls), Girlface and I got down to the business we came here for: climbing another goddamn mountain. Chopta is somewhere on the side of Chandrashila mountain, a 'modest' 3900-meter peak which we were visiting for two reasons. 1) The Tungnath temple is near the top. 2) Santoosh told us not to try traveling from Joshimath to our actual next stop in one day.

It was a three-kilometer walk to the temple; this we knew. What we did not know is that the walk was to be damn near vertical for much of its length. We labored up the switch-backed trail, taking numerous breaks to admire the scenery and temporarily remove our pulsing lungs from chests. I heartily reccomend that anyone who travel in the Himalayas first have cybernetic augmentations installed in and around their cardiovascular systems. You may weary of the rust-proofing and occasional hard-coded urges to kill all humans, but the respiratory benefits are well worth it.

We reached the temple above the treeline in a rather desolate-looking village at a height of a little over 3600 meters. The high priest came out of his quarters wearing military fatigue trousers and a heavy jacket. Almost immediately he boasted that Tungnath temple is the highest of all the noteworthy shrines of Garwhal. I thought that if he wanted people to know this fact so soon, he should put up a sign announcing the same at the battom of the trail, so that curious visitors might read it and declare "Well, well, that is pretty high. All in favor of staying down here and eating cold lentils instead, say 'aye'"

The temple is dedicated to Shiva, and is up there because of some rock that is apparently what was left of Shiva's arms after he dove into the ground in whilst evading the heroes of the Mahabharata for some reason in the form of a bull. There are five such temples in this area of Garwhal, and they mark the remains of Shiva's hair, arms, and so on. The most important is Kedarnath, the hallowed site of Shiva's ass. Whatever the story, the Tungnath temple is definitely something to see. It's not very big, but its lonely, windswept perch is memorable enough and the temple and its lilting neighbor shrines have perhaps the most ancient-looking aura of any shrine I've seen in India. It's an almost crude but powerful little structure of rocks obviously gathered from now more than a few yards away on this very mountaintop, and though the trail down the mountain isn't that long it has a distinct feeling of wondrous isolation. I asked the priest about these things, as I had no information about when it was built. "Oh, more than a thousand years ago..." he said. I examined the temple and that seemed quite plausible. "It was built in the ancient times by Arjuna, Bhima, and Krishna." Oh, that kind of 'more than a thousand years'. Never ask a priest about archaeology, unless you really want to have your 'answer' followed by a lengthy dissertation on cosmic cycles, the divinity of scripture, and the precise respective ages of planet Earth and the universe.

It was late afternoon again, and as always the storm clouds seemed to be nearing so we began hurrying back down the trail. A local shepherd stopped for conversation. After some talking there came a moment when he became personally upset that we had come all the way to his village from across the world and had not taken in the full experience by continuing to the peak of Chandrashila mountain while we were there. I explained there was no way we were hiking ourselves the last stretch up that steep mountain with a storm impending, particularly since we couldn't see its fabled vistas through the clouds anyways. "Oh, please," the shepherd said, "then wake up early morning and climb up see Chandrashila, and you can go down before afternoon jeep leave Chopta." To which, I thought, FUCK THAT. There is a profound difference in mentality between people born in the mountains and lowland-lubbers like myself. Hell, when I was a child I lived near the ocean in a house six feet below sea level. If it wasn't for the massive Dutch sand dunes, my family would have included half a dozen pet flounder. What the shepherd couldn't fathom, and I had no way of sensitively explaining, is that both Girlface and I were reared on level ground, and therefore there is no way in hell we were climbing up most of the same damn mountain twice for any reason short of a neo-Biblical deluge.

And speaking of neo-Biblical deluges, the mountain custom of serving your drinking water hot makes you feel even better when it's going in as it does going out. Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.