Bourgeoius Bonanza

Many days after arriving in that uninspired dump, I was finally granted an escape from Kaza. The road out of the Spiti valley into Lahaul, and thence over another mountain range into civilization was finally cleared of snow (it being pretty near the end of June). I found a jeep full of equally impatient Tibetan people and got the hell out as fast as I could.

After several hours on Spiti's solitary road, we began the ascent of the Kunzum La, which served as a graphic explanation of why nobody lives in Spiti: getting there is just ridiculous. Though the road had supposedly been cleared, its appearance was that of a gouge in the side of the mountain created in an epic battle between a white-furred Godzilla and a Tibetan thunder god. Near the top the road was surfaced not with the usual combination of dust and loose rocks, but breadloaf sized boulders, running rivulets of snowmelt and sheets of permafrost. At the pass itself, a glistening snowfield graced by a handful of immaculate white stupas, we stopped to gawp and I took the oppurtunity to teach the ecstatic children in the jeep how to make proper snowballs and hit their uncles in the back of the head while they're not looking. Descending down the other side into the Lahaul valley, which is supposedly more civilized, it became abundantly clear that the people who say these things must be talking about an entirely different part of the Lahaul valley. The end up near the Kunzum La is a near-arctic wasteland of rocks and ice, with an abundance of pristine blue streams crashing over the rocks in front of the mouths of hulking grey glaciers.

Before we got to the part of Lahaul where people actually live, we took a turnoff for a much more notorious mountain pass: the Rohtang La. Over the Rohtang La lay the Kullu valley, the allegedly-idyllic mountain wonderland that has served as a setting for about 92% of all Bollywood dance scenes. The Kullu valley is the northernmost extension of what is traditionally regarded as India, those regions to the north of it being the domain of Buddhists or mountain-dwelling barbarians, depending on your prejudices. The name "Kullu" is actually a distant derivation of an ancient name meaning roughly "The End Of The Civilized World". This is a great name because it suits the worldview of the people on both sides. The Rohtang pass itself has an even better name; roughly, it means "The Giant Pile Of Corpses", so called because it has terrible weather and it kills people. Believe me, when thinking about the future composition of this post, I was quite certain I was going to make a terrible joke along the lines of "Roh-tang pass ain't nuthin' to fuck with". However, I soon discovered that Rohtang Pass is something you can and definitely should fuck with.

The first hint that something was off was when I saw someone zipping around the snowfiled at the top on a skidoo. "Fair enough," I thought, "someone with a sense of adventure." Then we rounded a bend and I was at a loss to describe what I was looking at.

It was quite possibly the most ridiculous place in all of India.

Around the corner, at the top of the pass on the side facing the Kullu valley, was a middling expanse of snow, and on that snow were about 20,000 Indian people, 19,873 of whom looked incredibly stupid.

Here's the thing about Rohtang: it is quite near Manali (our destination), the most popular domestic tourist hotspot in India; a middle-class wonderland of unbounded absurdity. It also A) has snow, and B) has a road, meaning that it is one of the few places in India where you can get to snow in the Indian vacation season without having to actually walk up a hill. Now, it cannot be said that Indians are lazy. Indeed, you can't help but be stunned by the amount of hard work that goes on in this country. Along any roadside in the area you can find confirmation that India has the world's largest and most active manual rock-breaking industry ("artisan rubble", I like to call it). However, it is true that middle-class Indians as a group are stunningly, jaw-droppingly disinclined to any form of physical exertion, especially non-religious activities that separate them from their Toyotas. So, that's why every Reebok store manager and makeup-rocking housewife in North India are simultaneously failing to fashion snowballs on top of the Giant Pile Of Corpses.

Quite aside from the fact that there were thousands of them, everyone there also looked utterly ludicrous. Snow, in the Indian mind, is basically a more romantic form of liquid nitrogen, requiring incredible precautions to venture into safely lest one's limbs be shattered into icy shards while making snow angels and then carried off into the wilds by leopards, leaving their former owners to stumble through the icy death-fields on a single leg all the way from the cotton-candy mixer to the chai stall. You could probably see the crowd on top of Rohtang La from space, not because the area is all that large, but because they are all wearing heavy-duty snowsuits the color of an industrial accident at the Froot Loops factory. Not only was everyone walking around in one-piece sealed jumpsuits as if they were going to climb Mount fucking Everest rather than munching roast corn and riding ponies that were being led around by local men in t-shirts, but these jumpsuits were also just outrageously hideous, a true horror of outlandish patterns. Vanilla Ice wouldn't be caught in one of those outfits if he was freezing to death on planet Hoth. In America, it would be illegal to wear these things outdoors in turkey season, because hunters would spot you instantly and then shoot you on purpose. Even worse than the jumpsuits were the minority of visitors who tried to class things up by arriving at the pass in fur coats. These fur coats were not actually fur, and looked rather more like bathrobes, or the product of a tragic time-travel/teleportation accident involving a Labrador retriever, a New Jersey carpet dealership, and Czar Ivan IV's court.

Manali was almost as ridiculous.

Manali, as I've mentioned, is a maelstrom of middle class; a sensory bombardment of bourgeois. I got out of New Manali as quickly as I could, for fear that my constant laughter would make me choke on my food. Beyond New Manali is of course Old Manali and a handful of other villages, where not a single Indian person stays, partially because there are no Punjabi restaurants, and partially because they are overrun by stoned people who think they're hippies and can't help entering into uninvited conversations with Indian newlyweds about the flaws of arranged marriage. The Kullu valley, by the way, is reputed to be the source of the world's best hashish, and has been one of the universe's focal points of loungeabout backpackerdom for decades. Between the Indian nouveau-riche and the Western psuedo-non-riche, few venture into the others' territory save for the odd inconveniently located temple or bus station. The exception to this are the local Pahari villagers who still amble about in traditional dress and drive tractors in the streets apparently unawares that their town has expanded hundredfold and most of the old fields are now covered by Kashmiri-run souvenir emporia, and for some reason the women walk around carrying extremely fat, fluffy bunnies. I, however, crossed the trench lines with impunity, and let me tell you, it was worth it.

Now, I may have just developed a peculiar sense of humor that makes me actually enjoy being in the company of hordes of Indian people being ridiiculous, but I cannot speak too highly of some of the adventures you can have on the periphery of Manali. Best of all was the Hadimba temple. Actually, the Hadimba temple was a mediocrity, but if you go there you are likely to stumble into what I consider the real attraction: the Hadimba Adventure Park. The Hadimba Adventure Park is a small clearing in the forest with a variety of fun-park type activities such as you would find at a crappy American county fair, made infinitely superior by the peculiar local activities on offer. For instance, I discovered that the reason Pahari women carry fat, fluffy bunnies around is because they go to Hadimba Adventure Park and pose with their fat, fluffy bunnies in family photographs for small change. Pure economic genius. I have never seen anyone make such as money as being paid to sit around with a soft, adorable animal that is too obese to run away. The star attraction, however, were the yak rides. Yup, yak rides. I stayed at the Adventure Park for an unusually long time, which in the United States would probably have earned me a place on the paedophile registry, just because I was having such a great time watching fat, turbaned Sikhs and their fat Sikh children wobble around in circles on huge, confused-looking yaks.

Eventually I tired even of this and returned to Old Manali, through a gauntlet of the world's least motivated drug dealers and that ubiquitous feature of all Western haunts in India; 15-year old boys selling saffron in little jars out of a messenger bag. What the fuck is it with saffron? Why is everyone trying to sell it to me? Does anyone ever actually buy the shit, and then what do they do with it? I mean seriously, I can't think of a single use I would have for a little jar of saffron on my vacation unless somehow I got lost and wandered into the forest hideaway of a tribe of tantra-practising Amazon warrior princesses with an uncontrolled craving for saffron. [Note: since drafting this post I have learned that most of India's saffron is grown in Kashmir, which explains everything. Every product originating in Kashmir is ultimately destined to somehow annoy the hell out of people.]

Finally, even Old Manali wore me down. I've determined I can overhear only a finite number of jam sessions before I'm driven to move across state lines. Himachal Pradesh has been surveyed by Ghostface Buddha, the contours of its mountains mapped and the fuzziness of its goats adjudged. Only one state remains on Ghostface Buddha's tour of India: Jamma & Kashmir. It's gonna Blow Up.

Actually, since it's Jammu & Kashmir, let's hope it doesn't.