Blockade In The Kaza Strip

[And this is the part where Ghostface Buddha makes lifelong enemies of both PETA and the Jewish Anti-Defamation League in a single stroke]

It had been two days since arriving in Nako, and two things were quite obvious: 1)It gets very cold at night, and 2)There's only so much to do in a village most notable for the dramatic emptiness of its surroundings. I decided it was time to move on to the Spiti valley proper. Waiting for the bus (yes, the one same bus again) I met a rather disconcerting trickle of tourists in jeep convoys coming the other way because the far end of Spiti was snowed over, and the only way to get out was to backtrack for days on the sort of "awe-inspiring" roads that recently tried to knock my bus off the cliff with a mild cascade of rocks and dirt. Mostly because I get bored of backtracking, I chose to press forwards towards the snowed-in end of the valley and hope for the best. Ehhh, I figured, I'll be visiting villages and such for most of a week, and by the time I'm done they'll have finally plowed the snow, it being the middle of June and all. Hooooooo boy. Assumptions can be one's most formidable adversaries.

After a rather serpentine descent of the mountains we reached a point where there is actually a kilometer or so of open ground on either side of the river: the Spiti valley. It looked much the same as the Hanglang valley, but wider, with actual green patches of soon-to-be barley crops at the bottom, and mountainsides composed of about 90% loose scree the color of a Kit Kat bar that's been sitting open in the bottom of a drawer for too long. As the driver of the bus (who had spent all day reaching Nako on the torturous paths described earlier) elated at the sight of straightaways and barelled along the level road at high speeds without any regard for the numerous potholes and rocks that repeatedly launched those of us in the back rows into skull-numbing collisions with the ceiling, we passed the occasional 20-person hamlet and sent showers of pebbles flying in the direction of very alarmed herds of sheep. After a relatively brief time being tossed about on the antiquated seismo-wagon I hopped off in the village of Tabo.

The Israelis I had been travelling with quickly (and not entirely subtly) ditched me, probably because I was crimping their style with my repeated announcements that I was going to do things like "go outside" or "check out the village". I did not particularly mind this development and looked forward to finding some more international company that did not need to be constantly reminded I am unfamiliar with the Phlegmato-semitic languages. I checked into a separate guesthouse and went up to the cafe for dinner. There were 15 Israelis within. Soon they were joined, or rather forced to share the room with, by a group of 15 American medical students, and there was absolutely no crossover whatsoever. I sat aloof from it all and observed the cultural differences on display. The Americans' first order of business was to ask for the delivery of the village's entire supply of beer, while the Israelis quickly filled the entire cafe with chillum smoke. Both groups were extremely loud and monoglot. Eavesdropping on their conversations I noticed that the American medical students talked primarily about 1) beer, 2) themselves, 3) occasions on which they themselves had consumed beer. The Israelis on the other hand... well OK, I don't know what they were talking about because I don't understand their kabbalah moonspeak.

In the morning I woke up early to visit the widely-renowned Tabo monastery, the oldest one in Spiti. There are several monasteries in the Spiti Valley, which is essentially a surgically-removed slice of Tibet. The people are Tibetan-looking, they speak Tibetan, and they worship in temples attached to Tibetan monasteries full of paintings of Tibetan gods and pictures of the Dalai Lama. Not that there are all that many Tibetans here to go around: Spiti subdistrict is, I quote, "One of the most sparsely settled areas on Earth", largely because (I quote again) "[it has] an average altitude above 4500 meters". The few, small villages (and one "town") there are are all lined up along the one narrow valley of the Spiti river and on a handful of tributaries and small nearby plateaus. The vast remainder of Spiti consists of the upper portions of row after row of very steep, hard, and snowy mountains without any habitable interruptions. It's a perfect site for monastic life and retreating from worldly concerns unless you suffer from a pathological interest in rocks.

Tabo in particular, located on the southern end of the valley floor, is known for housing one of the world's most ancient stores of Buddhist art. The paintings within the monastery temple date back to the 10th century, the very dawn of Tibetan Buddhism. Luckily, the American students had a trekking expedition scheduled in a side-valley and the Israelis were occupied all day exploring the mystical secrets of the cafe balcony, so I had this ancient treasure all to myself. I got to the monastery and started searching for the main temple. The whitewashed Tibetan buildings I gravitated to turned out to be the monks' quarters and a community center. A monk directed across the plaza and around a corner and pointed the building out to me. Well, I never would have guessed. The temple was ancient all right. I was standing in an enclosure of yellow mud shrines of vaguely cubic form with a few wooden posts sticking out here and there and ladders strewn indifferently about. All in all it looked like something out of "City Dwellings of Bronze-Age Sumer", not a Buddhist monastery. I went inside the largest of these, and though I had been warned (by a weird American retiree dwelling in Tabo, no less), I was not prepared for the atmosphere. It was seriously Dark and Mystical and Ancient, with light filtering in from a small skylight to illuminate just the centermost aisle of the eery prayer hall, leaving its flamboyantly-colored idols hanging off the elaborately-painted walls in haunting shadows on every side. In non-awed moments my thoughts were something like "Damn, they've got this sitting in this pile of mud?". In my more awed moments my thoughts were occasional flashes reminding me to close my hanging jaw.

After seeing the monastery and spending quite a lot of time there I moved on from Tabo that very afternoon, as my list of cultural interests does not include Tabo's other feature, screes. I hopped on that day's incarnation of The Spiti Valley Bus and traveled up the valley to Kaza.

And I got fucking stuck there.

Kaza was thronging with tourists, not because it is the slightest bit interesting or enjoyable, but because the Kunzum Pass which leads over into Lahaul and from there to the Kullu "Hippie Paradise" Valley and the rest of the reasonable-altitude world was still covered in several feet of snow. In the other direction, the long and uncomfortable journey was apparently being interrupted by numerous landslides. In effect, I was snowbound in Spiti, in motherfucking June. There was naught to do but sit and wait.

And sit and wait I did. For the duration of my stay in Kaza, there was not a single moment of working electricity, and food supplies were dwindling. Well, if I wanted food consisting of goat or barley, that could be obtained, but even the menus of three-choice-offering dhabas became a mockery for lack of ingredients. On the third day in Kaza, a group of 12 distraught Israeli motorcyclists was informed that Kaza was running out of petrol, and if they wanted any to escape to the south, they could apply for a petrol reserve permit at the Subdistrict Collector's office. Kaza was under blockade.

Kaza did however have one saving grace, and he called himself "Jamaica." Jamaica proved himself the most enterprising man in all of Spiti by renting a shitty little generator that could chug along on kerosene and cooking oil, which combined with satellite TV and a chalkboard reading "FIFA World Cup 2010 LIVE", made his place the jumpingest in town. I was dying to see the World Cup, and despaired of missing key games for my teams while I wandered the mountains. Fortunately, because my alpine peregrinations take me so close to their mountain abodes, the gods thought it wise to throw me a bone. However, knowing the outcome of games between such contestants as South Korea and Greece had only a modest dampening effect on my passions for deicide.

The main problem with this otherwise wonderful arrangement was, as it was literally the only place for miles with any form of entertainment and also served pretty decent Israeli cuisine, all 38 of my snowbound fellow-travelers also converged on the spot, 36 of them being Israeli pseudo-hippie backpackers, who are (as you may have been gathering from the fixation of this post), objectively, the worst tourists on the face of the goddamn earth. And that's before the whiskey bottles join the chillum rotation. I soon found myself being treated to a great amount of food and favors on the house, for no other reason than I was nice to the owner, behaved civilly, and didn't make an ass of myself. On the other hand, several Israelis also got food on the house by running out on the bill. This (and my monthly spell of digestive ailment) went on for days.

On the fifth day in Kaza --well, I wasn't counting the days any more because they all seemed about the same, but I think Cameroon played against Japan that day-- we were told that the government was helping traders get supplies to Kaza. A petrol truck was on its way, though delayed by rockslides, and rumor spread that several more trucks were creeping their way up, one containing live chickens. Rays of hope shone through the chickenless clouds of despair.

Excavators cleared the Kinnaur road again on the sixth day and a three-truck convoy trudged along the road towards the Kaza Strip. The Israelis heard the blockade had been broken and swarmed upon the cargo as soon as it arrived.

When all was said and done, dozens of chickens had been interned in cages and five had been killed.

"We vere seahrching for contraband eggs."
"Wvhen our inspectors reached the truck, the chickens revealed claws."
"Whven the chickens threatened us, we had to take action."
"Some even used beaks."
"We will not bow to criticism from the biased Avian Bloc."
"Only those cheeckens which posed a zreat to theah embargo on poultry-less lafa and salat were harmed."
"I think theah chillooom is empty."
"We responded ehw-vith appropriate force."
"No, ze remains of thees *burp* chickens must remain secret for reasons of state *burp* security."
"Do you have some mayoneshsh?"
"Vee demand the continued internment of thees cheeckans."
"And an order of fry potatoes, and one order of taina."
"We remain committed to the Two Side-Dish Solution."
"FVORTY RUPEES FOR TAINA?!?!"
"Who has theh chilloom?"

Will man and fowl ever live in peace? One can dream, one can dream...