Oh Let The Sun Beat Down On Some Other Bastard's Face

When wandering the world for extended periods, one occasionally runs into conflicting motives, such as "Should I spend the better part of the week travelling on foot between remote Dard villages, or should I bum around Leh doing nothing so that I can watch the final stages of the World Cup?" I found this quandary simple to resolve. I have been a lifelong fan of the Netherlands football team, while I can't say that I like yak milk and barley porridge all that much. In this time, I managed to accomplish extraordinary amounts of fuck-all. One day I was encouraged to go to the nearby Tibetan refugee town for a celebration of the Dalai Lama's birthday, but decided to sleep in when I heard there was no shade and no snacks. This decision became irrevocable when it was announced that His Holiness was flying in to attend in person. Ghostface Buddha and the Dalai Lama should simply not be in the same place at the same time, for the same reason that Bruce Willis and Vladimir Putin should never be left in a crowded room: a brutal clash of raw charisma, numerous civilian casualties, and at least one person staked through the heart by a billowing, bullet-ridden flag.

My stay in Leh, however, had reached that point where I had been there so long that every huckster on the street knew my face and was beginning to take it as a personal insult that I ignored their thinly veiled entreaties to have a cup of tea and discuss the retail price of hashish day after day. It was time to leave, so I set my sights down the mountains to the west, to the (in)famous Vale of Kashmir. Despite the inconvenience of travelling around a virtual police state covered in barbed wire, where you don't walk the streets at night because the darkness makes it too hard to see which way the hand grenades are bouncing, I was prepared to go. I even reconciled myself to the guaranteed ubiquity of Kashmiri hustlers, the most obnoxious and gratingly loquacious class of people this side of the Moroccan silver bazaars. Then, the very morning I was to leave for the waystation town of Kargil (a place best known for being the fulcrum of 1999's inane but potentially calamitous Indo-Pak mountain war), the police in the Kashmiri capital of Srinagar shot and killed a number of young street protesters, and half the state was immediately placed under 24-hour lockdown. This was an unnaceptable problem for me, not because I was concerned with confronting the police (indeed, the Amsterdam Police Department, the Romanian Immigration Police, the municipal police of Sofia [Bulgaria], the US Department of Homeland Security, the Grand Ducal Police of Luxembourg, and the Guatemalan and Turkish armies have all tried to lock me up without success), but because I needed unrestricted access to a pub where I could watch the World Cup Final.

Speaking of which, the solution to another of my problems would have been to send that nimble goal-scoring bastard Andres Iniesta to Kashmir in my stead. But let us speak no more of that match.

Anyways, that I why Ghostface Buddha did not go to the fabled Kashmir valley. The sun will not, as Led Zeppelin rather vaguely suggest, beat down upon my face, and there won't be any stars to fill my dream. That's what hallucinogens are for. "But Ghostface? You said Jammu & Kashmir was the last state you were going to visit, and if you aren't seeing any more of it, does that mean this journey is...over?"

No. J&K may be the last Indian state I visit, but I never said anything about Union Territories!

4:20 Abuse Semantics Every Day. PEACE