The Valley Of Old Hats

As I write this (i.e. long before typing this) I am working by candlelight and freezing my balls off in the town of Kaza, with little else to do because I am stuck here. It's the middle of June and thanks to the weather on the Spiti valley's only road, I am snowed in. Let me repeat: I haven't been graced by electricity in three days, and the peak of the astronomical summer is approaching, but I'm sitting on my ass and waiting for a fucking snowplow to push its way over a practically unmotorable, contemptible "highway" used mainly to provide a trickle of palatable foods to the snow-hugging yokels who live here. I thought this was India, not fucking Canada.

I will pass over my multi-day crossing of Himachal Pradesh's reasonably habitable southern hills briefly. There wasn't anything particularly exciting to see, unless you count the falling trees, miscellaneous flying objects, and smashing glass occasioned by a headline-capturing windstorm that kept me very much indoors while I stopped in the town of Mandi. Also, I suppose as an interested observer of the behavior of Indian people in crowds, I could glean some insight from witnessing a mob fleeing from a smoke-filled bus with a flaming engine and mysterious leaking fluids. Upon seeing their response I quickly decided to hide in the corner seat and take my chances with the fire until the locals had stampeded to a safe distance.

After some more arduous (but less combustible) travails on H.P.'s darling road network, the first place of any note I visited was the temple village of Sarahan, on the side of a mountain in the lower reaches of the Kinnaur valley. Kinnaur is one of those magnificently obscure areas that you can't impress people with having visited during cocktail party conversations because it actually is obscure enough that nobody will have heard of it. Scenically, the district is beautiful but could be any one of a hundred such valleys in the western Himalayas. The real draw is the culture. Because the Himalayan regions are just so obnoxiously hard to penetrate, they generally remained outside the massive empires and other forces of history that repeatedly pummeled the lowlands. Each little cluster of valleys created its own unique culture. So far, my wanderings in Uttarakhand hadn't really left that impression on me, as the area's great significance to Hindus kept it under the nosy watch of orthodox brahmins for centuries, and the modern flood of motor-pilgrims has affected the religious practice there with all the subtlety of a fifth-grader with a gong and a sledgehammer. However, once you get out of the yatra-crazed reaches of Garwhal, the Himalayas become what they naturally are: extremely difficult passages and sparsely-scattered clusters of largely backwards villages in ribbons of habitable land amid gigantic snowcapped peaks that even Hindus can't find a reason to come and visit. Being left to modernize on their own terms and without a great deal of outside interference, the Kinnauris are forging a more pleasant way forwards than many of their Indian brethren. The wearing of locally-made wool clothes is near-universal and most adults still sport identical wool caps with a folded-up green brim on one side. Like everyone else, their big new houses with modern amenities are coming up remarkably quickly, but many of them still feature distinctive curving roofs and alternating bands of stone (or cement) and wood construction (this is apparently the traditional Kinnauri way of protecting themselves from earthquakes).

Kinnaur is a sort of transitional area where the humble, very local forms of mountain Hinduism sit side by side with the outermost fringes of Tibetan Buddhism. From the outside there's no obvious clue which religion the temple at Sarahan belongs to, and it could easily be mistaken for some sort of basic mountain castle. Within a series of stone walls stand two square-based wood-and-stone towers with elaborately carved wooden shrines flaring out several stories from the top, like giant rococo perfume boxes perched upon unusually classy upended cinderblocks. In one tower is an important idol of the mountain version of Kali, which ensures that the patient queue of Kinnauri villagers waiting in the upper sanctum is complemented by a minority of Kali-loving Bengalis. The Bengalis, whose life in bustling Kolkata and its rambunctious Durga/Kali worship has not prepared them for the peculiar condition of silence, remedy the painful stillness with neurotic glances at the distance in the queue separating them from the temple bell.

Upon riding back to the main town I checked some information online and saw that the infamous Ladakh passes leading to the final stage of this trip will still be snowed over for some weeks. This meant I had time to kill and could afford my much-desired current detour up into the Spiti valley. From Kinnaur, Spiti can only ne reached by following a series of remote river valleys that pass through the militarized zone on the very edge of the Chinese border. I spent some time getting the customary permits for crossing the Inner Line, the boundary which prevents unregistered persons traveling in either direction from passing the wonderfully-named villages of Pooh and Hurling. I got the permit easily. It was far from the first time "pooh" and "hurling" have failed to impede my progress in this country.

The first stop was the Kinnauri town of Reckong Peo, which isn't reputed for much, but you can't fail to notice the giant gleaming Buddha statue up on the hillside. I set off to visit this monastery, only to rediscover that the street layouts in these steep hillside towns are so inscrutable that you can actually get lost trying to find a 20-foot, bright yellow statue. I ended up on a series of extremely narrow footpaths between stone walls in the woods and stumbled into a little village just above Reckong Peo. It was a lovely place, and one temple in it I recognized from a semi-famous British painting of the area. Despite being no more than two kilometers above the main town, I could find no trace that enyone ever visits this charming locale. There was but one shop, which seemed completely unprepared for any sort of customer other than the local candy-crazed schoolchildren. I tried to determine where I was, and getting nowhere in that inquiry I asked at least where I could find the road to the village. I asked "You have road? Where is car road?" and things of that sort until someone finally pieced together my naive questions and told me "No road".

I tried to find my way back down the winding paths in the woods, knowing only that "downwards" out to be about right. Of course I got very lost, had to hop over vast amounts of cow shit, but at least I made one very important discovery: there are parts of Himachal Pradesh where cannabis just grows everywhere. Vast bushes of ganja sat in the shade beneath the trees. Cows and dogs ambled about between the unmistakable and world-renowned leaves. Attuned to its prevalence, I even noticed that in the towns of H.P., weed literally grows out of the cracks in the sidewalk like, well... weeds. The only problems were that the plants were not budding, and furthermore they are often found near the area's other common weeds, which sting like a motherfucker. So be warned, there is no true stoner Shangri-La. I suppose an enterprising visitor could ford into the leafy depths with a beekeeper's suit, but if I was enterprising I wouldn't be transfixed by large thickets of marijuana.

After going some ten miles up the hill to visit the village of Kalpa, which was a beautiful wooden hamlet with lovely carved temples, quaint houses and dramatic vistas of the sort that traveling in the Himalayas is quickly making me tire of describing in full every time, I finally headed back down and quite accidentally stumbled into the monastery with its giant fucking Buddha. I was idly sitting and watching a monk frustratedly try and pluck all the cannabis out of the monastic garden (they don't approve of intoxicants, and especially don't approve of weeds fucking up their garderns), an old Kinnauri monk waved me over and led me into the prayer hall. He sat me down and began to converse, except I quickly realized he didn't care what I said. His interest laid entirely in making fun of me to relieve the tedium of knitting prayer pouches.

I escaped in the commotion caused by a flock of Bengali tourists who had just arrived. The youngsters were occupied in taking photos mimicking the postures of the Buddhist statues around, while the adults were mostly busy adjusting their sunglasses and poking curiously at the monastery's drums. I was walking down some crummy stairs through the trees near the bus station when I suddenly heard a rustling in the cannabis and out burst... A PUPPY. God damn, this country can be perfect sometimes.