La La La La 2

2 Much La

Rebuffed in my plans to visit Kashmir by Orwellian forces intent on bringing all movement in the Kashmir valley to a standstill simply because of a few riots and murders, I was faced with an ugly truth: the only other way out of Ladakh was to repeat the long slog over the mountains back to Manali. Another ugly truth was that violence between the power of the State and its abused citizenry is both cyclical and futile for all concerned, but really, if you've seen the condition of the highway on the way to Manali you'd know which is the greater injustice.

So I booked a ticket on a van going back over the 475km of high passes and barren wilderness, but at least I knew what to expect, and knew how to prepare so the ride would be more comfortable.

2 hours before beginning what was supposed to be the 19-hour journey over already-nausea-inducing altitudes, I began my monthly schedule of unprovoked vomiting. This, clearly, was not going to be good. So it was that at 2 in the morning I found myself boarding a van to drive up the Indus River in the dead of night, at least with the good fortune of having the front seat, which is very useful for suddenly bailing out and puking. The front seat, however, comes with responsibilities, the most important of which is staying awake to keep an eye on the driver and make sure that he also remains conscious. Furthermore, you have to act as a kind of co-pilot, attending to all the driver's needs so as to preserve as much of his physical and mental stability as possible while your lives are in his hands. This, I discovered, includes acting as a foster mother to the driver's endless chain of cigarettes, not only lighting them but giving them the requisite starter tokes for a satisfying burn. After the seventh or so cigarette I partially smoked for this guy, I could tell it was not going to reduce the rate of pukage, which was becoming a constant inconvenience. I can't say it was all bad. Curling on your hands and knees, pathetically prostrating yourself while you disgorge a plethora of colorful fluids into a pile of sand at 16,000 feet can even be a learning experience. For instance, until about 8 that morning I had no idea that the pea curry I consumed the night before had contained solid pieces of red pepper.

Here is a brief summary of events at the four major passes between Kullu and Ladakh:

Tanglang La (~5300m): Vomit
Lachulung La (~5000m): Vomit
Baralacha La (~4700m): No vomit, but ohhhhhhh boy, read on
Rohtang La (~3900m): No vomit, but again, read on

Despite my (and others') frequent emergency stopping of the vehicle, we were making pretty good time, mostly because our 16-year-old driver was apparently determined to be the first Ladakhi to achieve powered flight in a MaxiCab. By midday, things started getting a lot uglier. First, as we approached the Lachulung La, we stopped at an army camp for a break, during which one Israeli passenger felt like she had to collapse and stupidly decided to take a nap in the middle of the road and was almost forcibly evacuated on an army convoy. At the same time a fellow American passenger developed intense altitude sickness requiring medical intervention, while I wandered off and discovered the second-worst toilet in all of India.

Coming as it does so near the end of my journey, this assessment carries some serious weight. The worst toilet in India, which is in a class of its own, is a public facility near the Taj Mahal, and cannot even be safely approached because it is surrounded by about an acre of festering human and animal faeces and islands of swarming maggots, whose crunchy bodies serve as the only stepping-stones across the putrid morass of festering shit. The toilet in question here at the Pang army camp by contrast looks like a harmless if utterly basic tin shack on the sand from afar, but when approached reveals itself to be a horrific entrance into a terrible new world, like the titular garment-holder in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, but smaller and more rancid. The world this toilet leads to is a perverse mirror-reality where people dig holes in outhouses to throw rubbish into, and then shit in precise, strategic patterns around the periphery of the revolting cavity. This forces the unfortunate visitor to treat the floor of the shack as a balance-challenging, extremely high-stakes Twister mat. In C.S. Lewis's world, when the children return from their exploits as heroes of Narnia, they find that they haven't grown a day older. Returning through the dimensional warp-barrier at the edge of the Pang gentlemen's outhouse, one instead finds that he has been aged by many years.

After convincing the army that our unconscious Israeli companion lying corpse-like under a sheet in the highway was neither a security threat nor a medical emergency, we tore ass across the most remote reaches of the highway in the trans-Himalayan wilderness as we rushed to get our actual medical emergency case to the oxygen machines at the military camp on the other side. When we arrived hours later, our American friend was in what looked like serious misery and got whisked directly into a green aluminum hospital shed. I apparently looked like hell too because the soldiers in charge were giving me the look-over as well, but I reassured them that my case was one I had to resolve on my own, and promptly vomited just outside the door to the Officer's Mess. Heh.

Not long after this emergency stop, our oxygen-infused companion now feeling much better, we stopped for food at a tent camp just below the snows of the Baralacha La. Finally I felt I had purged myself enough to tempt fate and down a few biscuits and some chai, huddling with some other passengers in a yurt-like dhaba. We hear some sort of commotion in the distance. What could it be? Shepherds pursuing spooked goats? An obscure dispute among nomads? No. Our driver suddenly burst into our yet and began excitedly narrating something in Hindi. I pieced together the core of it, which was "Our American girl just [did X] right in the middle of the other dhaba!" The next minutes would reveal that my guessing was correct, and "[X]" was "...dropped her jeans and took a shit all over the floor..." Poking my head out of the tent, I could see that the entire community had mobbed around our van and were making good their threat that we would be going absolutely nowhere until we attended to cleaning the outrage. I believe the peak of surreality for the day was achieved about the time we parted the picket line to escort the offender back to the other yurt with a plastic shovel and a fuel can full of ice water in her hands as if we were scabs breaking a strike at the Indo-Tibetan Sewage Workers' Union.

After that, there were no great biological disasters on the trip. Indeed, from that point forward the only impersonal scientific phenomena that antagonized us were of a purely geological nature.

We crossed the snowbound Baralacha La without incident and entered into the state of Himachal Pradesh and the Lahaul valley. Lahaul, which I had largely missed out on the last time due to sleepiness, was as stunningly alpine as anywhere deeper into the mountains. As the final valley beneath the spine of the Great Himalayas, it gets pretty much all of the rain and snowfall that somehow manages to get past the rain shadows of the more southerly mountain ranges. The result is that though it also lacks much in the way of major plants, the incredibly steep sides of the valley are lush by comparison with Ladakh, covered in glistening wet grass and punctuated with tumbling waterfalls and narrow glaciers hanging to the rock face disconcertingly like frozen snot on a shivering brat waiting for a midwinter school bus. Paradoxically, the closer the road got to ‘civilization’ (meaning the bulk of India), the worse surface conditions became, as we drove deeper into the fringes of the Subcontinent that was now being battered and muddied by the monsoon. By the time we were ascending the final pass, the infamously foul-weathered Rohtang La that traditionally serves as the cut-off point not only of the summer rains but also of Indian civilization, the highway had deteriorated into a sloppy, mud-spattering quagmire. We crossed the pass as dusk crept over the verdant, forested mountains of the Kullu valley and cheered that the trip was finally coming to an end and we would soon be all effortlessly sitting on pillowed benches listening to reggae and “Indian fusion” techno in Old Manali pizzerias. That is, we would have been, if a 300-meter length of road hadn’t just fallen right off the side of the mountain.

We found ourselves stalled in the darkness, our second night aboard the godforsaken van, getting shouted at by army engineers telling us where to back up and park for the night so that the excavators and bulldozers could get through and open some sort of pedestrian opening in the morning. There was no question of driving to Manali: the road wasn’t just blocked, it was fucking gone, and there wouldn’t be any way for vehicles to pass for days. (Little did we know, this same landslide was causing havoc for a scheduled Aishwarya Rai film shooting team trapped on the other side…oh Aishwarya, how the stars have crossed us again…). The Army announced that in the morning, when it would be light enough to begin dynamiting (because you need visibility to flee boulders being loosened from unexpected angles), they would try and force open a passage for people to cross on foot so that they could be picked up by vehicles on the other side and taken into the valley. Until then, well, we could sleep, again, in the fucking van.

Dawn broke around five, several hours after most of the passengers’ fragile composures had done the same. We got out to make our inquiries among the breakfasting platoons of soldiers, and it became clear that we were going nowhere soon. In the course of the night, several more minor landslides had occurred (luckily, none on our MaxiCab), meaning that the work was likely to be more delicate than expected, and we could expect a laborious but doable foot-crossing of the slide area (so they claimed) shortly before nightfall. We evaluated the prospect of spending an entire day sitting at the pass with nothing but expeditions to the summit for noodle-shops to while away the hours and the unacknowledged likelihood that we would actually be spending a third night about the goddamn van. Unanimously, we declared “Fuck. That.”, and began gathering out luggage for a hike, not across the slide zone, but directly down the side of the damn mountain, not stopping until we would again make contact with the road and somehow get a vehicle up there to come get us the hell off of Rohtang mountain. We made rather humorous figures as we tromped, slipped, and tumbled down the edge of the mountain. I merely had half a bag full of hardcover books I had intended to sell in Manali weighing me down. On the other hand, the incredibly stereotypical troupe of California backpackers accompanying me on the scramble down the rain-slickened boulders were attempting to make the descent with guitars, bongo drums, dream catchers, a poorly disguised bong, finger-cymbals, and a five-foot didgeridoo swaying from their luggage, making their pratfalls are the more frequent and melodious.

Finally we reached a loop in the highway on the mountainside near the village of Marhi, and had nothing but praise for the vulture opportunism of the Indian jeep-wallahs who were so enterprisingly waiting for people to clamber down the mountain. We arrived in Manali by mid-morning, a full 33 hours after leaving Leh, and I immediately found my much needed respite in the company of some exuberantly orange-clad Dutch girls, an uncertain quantity of beer, and some bitchin’ pizza.

My trip through the Himalayas was over, and though this made me a little sad, I have other places to go, and I was sure I had seen enough of mountain passes for quite a while. G'z up, La’z down while you motherfuckers bounce to this.