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.

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.

Only Built 4 Tibetan Linx...

After being ejected from a monastery, even in very polite and Buddhist fashion, one might think there is a period of introspection that follows. "What have I done to offend? Or what have I not done to deserve remaining?" you might ask. Not I. Rarely tormented by notions such as the possibility that I may have done something wrong, the manically squawking ensemble of discordant practical voices in my head drowned out the lone chirping cricket of self-evaluation. I turned the full attentions of my mind to the question "Well, what now?" First, you have to establish a goal, and lure the disparate strains of thought towards that common point. In this case, it was like tossing a pile of situational-awareness birdseed in front of a raucous aviary of independently-minded birds of different species. The voice of Reason, in my head, can be like an old man in waders and glasses, who bears a strong resemblance to Sean Connery's appearance in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, tossing seeds for much the same reason (crashing Nazi fighter planes). I offer some tasty logical morsels such as "OK, there's no bus for the rest of the day", "OK, I know I am precisely 6.25 kilometers downhill from a village with proper accomodation", "I suppose the thing to do would be to start walking now, on the road leading east, which is in the opposite direction from the afternoon sun", and so on. The problem is, a great number of the metaphorical birds in my head are not, say, pigeons and warblers, but loud-ass parrots and the like who don't want any damn birdseed and flap off in search of mangoes. "Nahh, let's just stay here until we can get a picture of a monk at an unfortunate visual angle to a shitting mule", they'll say, or "SQUAWK I WANT MOMOS." The most annoying of these birds is the pouty ostrich who usually says something like "Well, it's FUCKING COLD like always, why don't we spare ourselves the trouble and JUST DIE, since laying these fucking ginormous eggs is killing me anyways?"

In the end, the ever-wily raven won the day, asserting its authority over the other, more easily distracted birdies by seizing upon the pertinent fact that going anywhere else but the aforementioned village would be much longer, and in a brilliant sop to the parrots, teasingly suggested "There could be yaaaaakkksss...."

So it was that I and the various entities inhabiting the haywire thicket of my neural pathways began our trudge up the mountains to the village of Kibber, despite knowing full well that at 4205 meters, Kibber is one of the highest villages on Earth (the bird who raised this objection, a Brazilian toucan, was shot, a fate common to the more troublesome members of my brightly-plumed flock of sentience at inconvenient moments). The walk up was not as hard as it could have been, since there was a proper road. The people of Kibber are very proud of this road, because it enables them to boast that they are the highest village in the world with both a motorable road and electricity. They formerly claimed to be THE highest village of all, but I guess their attention was drawn to a competing claim. In any event, their current boast, carefully phrased though it is, is still patently false, as can be demonstrated by undertaking the short walk many people in town recommend you go on to the higher village of Gete. Gete, it must be pointed out, is connected to Kibber by both road and electricity. Kibber's only defense is that Gete is hardly a village, consisting of seven houses and a fluctuating number of sheep.

This is not to detract from Kibber, which is indisputably altitudinous and borderline uninhabitable. Seeing as the height of summer is still rather nippy, and that the winters must be horrendously cold since the snow is enough to block all contact with the rest of the world, I was rather puzzled by the locals' insistence of hanging out in their stone houses year-round, despite having no immediate labor or other compulsion to do so. This seemed to me to reveal that this particular group of Tibetans is both exceedingly hardy and exceedingly immune to the temptation of other parts of the country where labor-free winters involve sitting under coconut trees and trying to get monkeys to pose with the little umbrellas from your drink.

As I said, the walk up was none too arduous, though it did presage difficulties to come. Most obviously, it gave me my first glimpses of certain mountains than soon were to factor heavily into my discomforts, but I also noticed that all the way up I was walking alongside a very, very deep and utterly vertical gorge. The completely denuded terrain and the rocky bluffs atop the gorge make a spectacular setting for Kibber indeed, and when the village comes into view your natural thought is "So that's what an infamously high village looks like." Kibber is cradled in a plateau of sorts (a plateau "of sorts" in that it is not even slightly flat like a proper plateau should be, but is on an undulating sheet of rocks and dust with a large enough expanse of not-utterly-vertical land to make it more suitable for habitation in comparison with surroundings that even the local goats refuse to traverse.

As one would expect from a village whose life centers around growing barley once a year and hiding from snow the rest of the time, the only real activity is leaving it. I am being a bit harsh. I mean the town itself is quite boring (but in a serene, potentially appealing sort of way), and the natural source of entertainment is to go for walks in the surrounding slopes. My first such walk was out to find this Gete village. "Why?" you may wonder. Simple. I was told, with no ambiguity, that there would be TONS of yaks. Predictably, I somehow missed the proper path and ended up climbing a mountain gully until I came across stray piles of snow and ice and concluded it was probably time to move in a more horizontal direction. I scrambled over loose rock slopes and all the way up and over a steep ridge with primitive Buddhist memorials on top, all in hope of gaining a vantage point from where to espy a throng of yaks. When I crested this ridge, I saw without question, the village of Gete: seven houses with a large expanse of rare green pasture stretching high above it on fortuitously "level" ground (i.e. a 30 degree slope). Dotting this pasture were a handful of gray ponds, and in the distance of mighty herd of... about 12 cows and an assortment of sheep. I WAS PROMISED YAKS.

It had occurred to me also by this point, that I was walking completely alone across a wilderness, where there were visibly no other people for miles, that I was also ill and therefore fatiguing quickly, and that if anything bad happened it would be a long time before anyone stumbled across me. Not that anything bad could happen, or at least nothing worse than being alone on the mountain and being caught in a snowstorm. I was standing up there, marveling in my solitude. Now, surely I have been in more isolated places on this trip, such as in the middle of the Thar Desert, but that was with other people. I have also been on numerous camping trips and such into fairly unspoilt areas, but at that moment it dawned on me with complete clarity that I was as alone -as far away from any other human being- as I had ever been. The unobstructed, cover-less panorama confirmed that much. It occurred to me, recollecting my recent evaluation of the situation, that it was probably not good to be so alone, especially if, like I suggested, something bad were to happen, such as (I don't know), a snowstorm HINT HINT.

There may or may not have been a snowstorm. What I will tell you is that were definitely no fucking yaks.

Arriving rather bedraggled back into town, I called it an early night, since after all I had been on monastic adventures that very morning and since climbed up to Kibber and thence stupidly over some mountainsides. I awoke after a long sleep when I could no longer resist the morning sun assaulting the dark cocoon of my massive quilt through my carefully-maintained breathing hole. Stretching on my balcony I said to myself "Hey, I know! Let's go for a walk today!" I think the voice was that of a spoonbill.

Plainly visible from Kibber is the village of Chicham and the appealingly green, albeit steep, pastures above the town. From above Kibber, you can also see the winding dirt road that leads around the end of the gorge and up the slopes on the other side. Except, when you actually walk on the road, you will not fail to notice that the road does not go around the end of the gorge, but dead-ends at that same gorge at a point where about 8% of a bridge has been constructed on the other side. Since the sides of said gorge are inarguably vertical, made of solid rock, and approximately 3000 feet deep (by crude eyeballing), it goes without saying that the lack of a bridge posed something of a conundrum. Something, however, was pecking at my mind, and it wasn't a bluejay. There was a steel cable across the gorge, such as one would expect to find on the site of a future suspension bridge, except it was completely alone and there was in fact no bridge tower. There was however, in the distance, what appeared to be a crude metal basket hanging from said cable...

Nuh-uh. No. Fucking. Way.

Just then a local laborer came and confirmed my suspicions by pulling on a long, dangling rope which was also attached to the faraway basket, causing it to slowly climb the cable towards us. It was now pretty clear how we were supposed to cross the gorge. When we finally got the basket all the way up our side, I took my seat within and prepared to laboriously pull myself back across...and went fucking zooming. On the slightly downwards slope of such a cable, the basket behaves much like a zipline, save that it has no mechanism for braking and there is no harness to save you should you wobble yourself out of the basket. Almost as suddenly as the swift descent of the cable began, it stalled. I seemed to have reached the nadir, and though I was about 3/4 of the way across the gorge, this still left about 50 meters to manually pull to a safe disembarkation, and about a billion fucking meters down to the river. Fortunately, there is usually someone on hand to take a moment from their work and help tug you up to the landing (and then ask for money). "Well, that was much easier and about equally nerve-wracking as I expected", I thought. "The way back should be much easier."

I walked to Chicham and found it was much like Kibber, minus the idea of commerce, so I proceeded to Chicham's pastures, which were much like Kibber's minus the idea of slowing erosion. After a great deal of awkwarldy slipping about over the side of a creek, two options appeared before me, and they were both in retrospect the crazed jabberings of suicidal parakeets with nests in privileged positions on my frontal lobe (I suspect these nests are adorned with a mixture of tinsel, twigs, and cuttings from underground nihilist newsletters). One was to go up and over the top of the pastures, which appeared very very high and led to a mountain pass (it turns out that this route is indeed the beginning of a long trek into Ladakh). The other was to go directly up the side of the mountain immediately next to me so as to tromp about its relatively low-looking snowline and feel smug about myself. I doubt you will have trouble guessing which I chose.

The problem with this mountain, obviously, was that it was steep. And I mean really steep. I've talked a lot about steep paths, but this was no path, it was just the side of a very, very steep mountain. Aside from a number of tough stream crossings, I rather underestimated the steepness of this slope, which at times reached about 70 degrees, yet I foolishly pressed upwards, pulling my way up with my hands as the ground constantly gave way under my feet. It was a slope best tackled with proper climbing shoes, a rope, carabiners, and an Austrian man named Jurgen. Lacking any of these aids, I had to make do with the supplies on hand: sneakers, a backpack containing a 500-page history of Muslim India, and a large pair of polished titanium-alloy testicles. As I got higher and higher and neared the 5000-meter mark, the dangerously loose soil ceased and the dangerously loose stones began. I have never studied geology, but based on my firsthand experience, it would be better if it did not exist. It would seem that the part of a mountain that is usually covered in snow all the time experiences dramatic effects from the summer thaw, and this summer-denuded area consists not of a solid rock surface, but of about a two-foot layer of precariously balanced, very sharp stones about the size of a loaf of bread. Whereas lower down the soil beneath my feet slipped and forced me to cling desperately to handholds above, I found that hanging on these rocks was a very poor idea indeed as it tended to send similarly large rocks crashing down towards me, and many of these rocks were in turn maintaining the delicate equilibrium of very lethal-looking boulders. Nevertheless, I pushed up, charting a torturous course on ground I chose on the basis of how far I would fall if the entire pile slipped (and this was important because the pile always slipped), and the likelihood of triggering a non-trivial avalanche. Weaving between islands of snow at a snail's pace, bloodying my hands grasping which sharp stones seemed most immobile, and bruising my hands many times as the rock immediately above tumbled ever-so-perfectly onto my knuckles, I finally reached the bottom of the Himalayan snowsheet. This being the astronomical peak of summer, the summit was a mere 150 meters above me. I looked up at the possibility, and saw a whole lot of rather deep snow, some even worse slopes, and some much unsteadier-looking rock piles. I thought to myself "Fuck. That." The eurasian nuthatch may be a little bitch of a bird, but he has his uses.

I contented myself with using some of the smaller stones nearby to assemble the Ghostface Buddha signature you may be seeing in the photograph on the side of this page [unless I have changed it by the time you read this], and then made my way down the mountain. "Making my way down" the mountain entailed bringing much of the mountain down with me, taking very worried glances over my shoulder, and turning several spots on my ass and thighs the same blueish-gray color as a North Atlantic fish. Unable to cross the streams back over (since I had made several daring leaps that were obviously not possible in the other direction), and with the memory of soaking my feet and walking back down the Kedarnath trail with boxer shorts on my feet fresh in my mind, I hit upon a desperate, and ultimately stupid strategy. I could easily have dry socks and shoes, I figured, if I just hiked up my pants, went barefoot, and scampered through the freezing rapids as unclumsily as I could manage. A serious tip: though idiotic, this actually proved much more pleasant than having drenched footwear.

I lumbered back to Chicham extremely slowly and scrounged a bowl of barley-thickened milk curd to assuage the fatigue of hunger. Finally off the mountain, I had a long night of very dedicated nothing-doing in my bed to look forward to... on the other side of the gorge.

Some time later I was once again in the crude metal basket and zipping over the void, though this time I stopped quite near where I began. Going back up, I had neglected to calculate, was going to be a much greater challenge. Pulling on the rope relentlessly, I inched my way across the chasm, and the closer one gets to the middle, the more acutely aware one becomes of the extreme height one is dangling at, the suddenly perceived immensity of a 200-yard crossing when made in five-inch increments, and the incredible crudity of the contraption in which one is sitting. The problem isn't so much the height: presumably, if you were to sit and do nothing, you would just harmlessly sit there until you muster the willpower to get yourself the hell out. However, on an upwards slope this is not the case, because if you let loose your aching grip on the pull-rope for even an instant, you are going to zip back down to some other point in the middle of the gorge as helplessly as a baby on a treadmill, and until you can pull yourself all the way to one side in a single, continuous application of brute force you will never reach the end. That, and because you are sitting in a basket rather than a box, you continually worry that important items may fall out of your pocket and be a real bitch to pick up later. Suddenly, I was inspired by another classic Sean Connery role (all I can say is that it must have been one of those days), though this time a less happy one. I refer specifically to the scene near the end of The Man Who Would Be King, which fittingly takes place in an obscure Himalayan kingdom, and made a strong impression on me as a child when spoiler! Connery is walked onto a rope bridge, the ropes are cut, and as the narrator hauntingly recalls, "It took him half an hour to fall..." Later, Connery's head is presented to a rather stunned Rudyard Kipling, but it was the falling part that stuck with me. As I looked down, I had the presence of mind to at least do some elementary physics calculations and concluded that a very nasty wobble would be the beginning of a fall lasting a mercifully brief 45-85 seconds, depending on the terminal velocity of a pimp.

Needless to say, I successfully crossed the chasm and gloated inwardly at length while I rested. I hobbled along the desolate road and approached the tin-sided work shacks that were there for no apparent reason. Just outside one, a young Tibetan women was -gasp- changing her overshirt, and in the open terrain it was impossible for me not to see her undershirt. To say it could have been awkward is a massive understatement. I smiled and made a great show of looking as apologetic as I could while trying to indicate that to me it was really no great deal and I wasn't about to mistake her for a harlot and inform her relatives of her careless dishonor, or whatever the ingrained fear would be. Unlike my Hindi, which is awful, my Tibetan does not exist, and I assumed that I had done all I could do to ameliorate the catastrophic faux-pas. As I passed right by her, I felt acute anxiety of what she might do in reaction to my own reaction. Much to my surprise, in a land where things that are "much to my surprise" have ceased to really surprise me all that much, I was actually much surprised by the surprise that followed.

She showed me her tits.

Then, much to my surpise.... I will spare you further grammatic contortions, but I was very surpised indeed, she took hold of hy arms and pulled my wounded hands directly onto her cream-brown breasts.

There are several observations to make here. Firstly, it would appear that altitude and decreased atmospheric pressure have no detectable effect on the texture and consistency of the human mammary organs. Secondly, it further appeared that in this particular case, it was the effects of gravity that had instead been suspended. What I'm saying is that they were some very perky breasts. I paused for a moment and came to a third conclusion: regardless of the unexpected circumstances, having one's hands grasping a comely Tibetan girl's soft, naked breasts is a considerable improvement in a day that had theretofore been marked by grasping very sharp rocks.

What naturally is to follow in such situations I will leave the reader to imagine, for I cannot empirically provide the answer myself. Interrupting the research prior to its conclusion, as it were, I pulled myself away remembering that Ghostface Buddha's customary state of bachelorhood is currently in a state of deluded yet happy compromise thanks to the nefarious yet delightful wiles of an Indian sweetie. With the Tibetan tongue once again eluding me (though the other Tibetan tongue had not found me so elusive), I struggled to gesticulate that by declining what seemed to be a very generous offer I was not being ungrateful, but merely had other commitments. Unfortunately, I had no idea how Tibetans would sign "girlfriend", so I tried "married", though since I was even more clueless of the markers of a married Buddhist man, I had to make do with "Hindu wife". This only seemed to add to the confusion, as the girl's face registered first that I apparently was proposing marriage, and then a second look of even greater confusion, perhaps meaning I had accidentally told her that I transgressively dabble in the customs of Hindu women. Finally I tried the gesture for having a "child" or "something about knee-tall", and though I have no idea what she thought, the cyclone of her desires had seemed to fade into mere tropical storm territory. With that, I left.

"Go back, you moron!" I heard myself thinking. "It's not too late!" "She WANTED you, man!" "That was a way better Tibetan experience that Dharamshala."

My head contains a multitude of sexually voracious birds.

Conversing With The Ancients

My position in the drab Spitian market town of Kaza could not be maintained forever. Anywhere where a mainstay of the local economy is the import and distribution of exotic goods such as "wood" is usually not very exciting to begin with. As soon as I saw the righteous victory of Dutch soccer prowess over Danish iniquity I no longer felt attached to the sweet, sweet flypaper of the FIFA World Cup that kept me trapped in the stewing, impatient pot of resentment that the snowbound tourist community in Kaza had become. It was time for a trip. "I say," I said, "let's go to somewhere I can spell for once. What's this? A monastery called 'Ki'? Fantastic." And off I went.

Of course, I didn't go immediately. This was after all a town that had to wait days for gasoline and chicken to make it up the highway. I spent quite a while on the edge of town waiting for a tractor heading the right way to pass. Since you can count the number of roads in the Spiti valley (including town streets) on your fingers, I felt pretty confident that something would head my way soon enough. I got a ride to Ki, and when we arrived at the village on the valley floor the driver helpfully pointed out the way to the monastery.

Not that it would have been possible to miss it. The Spiti valley is one big wide gap in the mountains dominated by the seasonal battles between the colors white and brown. Presently, most of it was a smooth brown with a layer of glistening white at the top, not unlike a glazed chocolate pound cake, though this would perhaps only be appetizing if you digest in the manner of Jurassic herbivores by swallowing rocks. The monastery, by contrast, is a bright white towering pile of monastic cells and Buddhist temples on a conical spike of hillside striking out directly above a cliff. It looks like some sort of Buddhist answer to Minas Tirith from Lord of the Rings, which makes sense given its location and my belief that China is Mordor (However, despite the occasional Buddhist monk who immolates himself to protest oppression, there were no flaming figures flailing their arms and jumping off of citadels).

With some effort --because the back stairs are steep and one doesn't feel like stopping to catch one's breath when the back stairs also happen to lead through the cowshed-- I reached the prayer hall at the top, where a very old and shaky monk waved me in. As I entered I heard a lot of garbled chanting. There were some seven monks within, being supervised in prayer by their head lama. All evidence indicated that they had been repeating their mantras for a very long time, but none of the evidence suggested that these were all the same mantras. The effect was that of a particularly busy afternoon in a grumpy assistant headmaster's detention period with half a dozen delinquents each being forced to wearily but rapidly recite their particular offenses until the bell. I sat silently in a corner because at that moment anything besides prayers was clearly going to be the subject of intense fascination and the head lama gave me a look that said "Ahhh, Mr. Buddha, --if that's the title you really think appropriate for yourself-- have you come to observe our little correctional session or have you come to...participate? I should think any wrong moves on your part would suggest the latter."

I remained awkwardly still for a very long period of prayers, but couldn't take my eyes of the chief lama. I knew I'd seen his bespectacled mug somewhere before. Then, somewhere in between recitations of "Om padme I will not throw erasers during tantric meditation Bodh Bodh om", it hit me. He was in little framed photographs all over Spiti and Kinnaur, usually off in a corner somewhere giving pride of place to the Dalai Lama and the local abbots. He is without question a figure of some authority in these parts. For instance, I am told that the village of Tabo is essentially a theocratic village-state run by the monks of that order, with the unacknowledged crutch that half the villagers are on the government payroll for "jobs" they spend several moments a year performing. According to some people (a qualification I make because it seems like the sort of thing people would give me faulty info on), this bald bloke with the glasses is the current reincarnation of Rinchen Zangpo, a Buddhist monk and scholar of the 10th century who is credited with, among other things, translating a zillion Sanskrit texts and establishing half the monasteries in Tibet, and is revered as a sort of Deputy Buddha. When the ceremony finally concluded and the monks dispersed with great haste to go do anything else, the lama, reincarnated soul of the Propagator of Tibet, shared a few words with me...

They were "Where are you from?... No. Don't go back there. Room is closing now."

With great humility and great gratitude, I have received Wisdom from the sages. In life, one must go forwards, never backwards, no matter from where one may have come. For the one certain thing in the great prayer room of life, which we cannot delay with backwards reminiscences, is that the Prayer Room of Life will one day close, and Death will drawer a Frilly Ceremonial Ribbon of Mortality across the door, and one must put back on the Shoes Of The Transmigration Of The Soul and tie the Shoelaces of Eternal Rebirth to walk along the Chilly Stone Pathways of Earthly Existence until we reach the Dingy But Warmish Noodle Shop of Nirvana.

Or you're Mormon and you enter into either the Celestial, Terrestrial, or Telestial Kingdom for a thousand years of Christ's rule until you a reborn in an immortal body in heaven, which is possibly on another planet. Who's to say.

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...

Here There Be Rocks

There's a certain tension when you really don't want to miss the bus. And I do mean the bus, since there is exactly one bus that heads north into the Spiti valley. Perhaps there is only one bus because sending more would be foolhardy; the highway through Upper Kinnaur to Spiti is, according to several sources, "possibly the most dangerous road in India." Well, no kidding.

At first the passage did not seem particularly intimidating. I am, after all, something of a Himalayan road veteran now. We passed through much of the Kinnaur valley with ease, following the Sutlej river all the way up to where the Spiti meets it right by the Chinese border, and then turned into the Hanglang valley. You can actually tell you're getting close to China because the spelling of geographical features on road signs ceases to distinguish between the letters L and R. I kid you not.

In the Hanglang valley, if I may continue to overuse the phrase, shit got real. The Hanglang valley road is narrow. Well, they're all narrow up here, but I mean really narrow, as in so narrow the conductor should use a plumb line to help the driver determine how far the wheels are from rolling off a 6000-foot cliff. The bus crawled as it scrambled over rocks that sent the bus slowly rocking to and fro like an ungainly man-of-war, to the great concern of all those on the side of the bus who could see the valley floor. Eventually at one particularly deadly-looking spot the bus actually stopped after the passengers spotted a cascade of falling rocks ahead. We could hear the dull thuds of fist-sized stones bouncing off the highway, and rather ominously could not hear them coming to their distance resting places far below. When it seemed the danger had passed the driver crept the machine forwards, rocking even more disconcertingly on the freshly 'repaved' track.

We didn't see the rocks start falling again; we just heard bangs and crashes of increasing volume on the roof of the bus. The driver tried to skid onwards, but the intensity of the bombardment was knocking the bus off from its smooth course. The left tires edged ever so slightly off the precipice and back onto the road as the lurching can recoiled from the pummeling stones. I can tell you this much: the total oxygen intake of the passengers on that bus fell to zero for about two minutes. It was with a great feeling of relief that I got off in Kinnaur's last town, Nako.

Stretching my limbs and feeling the ground to make sure the entire village wasn't at risk of sliding into the Hanglang valley, I took a look around at my surroundings. Nako is very high up and commands utterly spectacular views of the valley around. It was a serious departure from the scenery before. This area doesn't even look like it belongs in India. It would fit much better in somewhere like Tajikistan, or possibly Mars. The Hanglang valley has a great many features, but none of these are grass or trees. Actually, it really only has a great many features if you count 'snow' as one and each individual rock as all the others. The village itself, as its location would suggest, is a small and humble affair that casually mixes the clothing and speech of Kinnaur, the houses and religion of Spiti, and the climate of a Siberian quarry.

There was a wee shortage of places to stay in the village. In the end, I came to share one of two double rooms that I rented with a frustrated and odd-numbered trio of Israelis. Israelis are to figure prominently in my recollections of the Spiti area.

It cannot be said that Nako is the most modernized place in the world. Aside from the standard erratic electricity supply and a high density of angry donkeys, Nako doesn't have, say, cell phone service. Now, I don't think everywhere in the world needs cell phone service, but it would certainly help when the place also doesn't have regular phone service. A shopkeeper informed me that I was welcome to use a phone if I liked, but it could only be used for local calls within Nako village. I paused and looked around at the extent of Nako village, which takes about a minute and a half to cross if you don't take any wrong turns or find a cow blocking the alley. I suppose having local phones is useful for communicating across the village without having to strain your voice over the incessant protestations of unwillingly-confined goats.

Nako does however have honest-to-God, imported Tabasco sauce. Who would have known.

Another interesting feature of Nako is that it happens to be extremely close to Chinese-occupied Tibet. In fact, if Nako were at the same approximate position on the other side of the mountain it's nestled on, its people would be too busy being oppressed to celebrate the fact that their village would probably have working telephones. From Nako it is a mere two-kilometer climb up to the crest of Leo Pargial mountain where India and China meet at its climax, not that anyone ever does this, first of all because it is extremely steep and cold, and secondly because the number of Tibetans sneaking into China can be assumed to be minimal. I don't know what it looks like on the other side, but I've come to imagine China as a snowier version of Frodo Baggins's first glimpse of Mordor, a hellish wasteland of conical-hatted slaves marching and tilling rice paddies amidst storm-shadowed boulders and lava flows laced with MSG. I was tempted to bundle up and go for a stroll to relieve myself most satisfyingly upon the Middle Kingdom, but I happened to be stoned and wasn't about to go up that 6800 meter motherfucker without having some french fries first.

I did however see something that demanded my urgent attention. I will give my long-time followers an arbitrary paragraph break to guess what I had to deal with near (hint hint) the end of Indian territory...

... I spotted, once again, the Last Cow In India. It was standing near a Buddhist prayer mound on a fairly steep slope of loose rocks below the glistening white peak of Leo Pargial. It was young, perhaps in its early adolescence. It was also a hairy little bastard... and it was utterly fucked. It couldn't outpace my scramble up the rocks and slipped trying to flee, leaving it helpless in my path. A one-two-three of gleeful pimp slaps later and the devil calf was shamefacedly slinking away, slipping on more stones as it focused on the still-present slapping danger and its inner self-doubts rather than its footing. THERE'S NOWHERE IN THIS COUNTRY WHERE YOU CAN ESCAPE FROM ME, COWS.

I returned hurriedly to the village, mostly because I was in shirtsleeves and suddenly found myself getting snowed on again. I popped into Nako's ancient little monastery, an eminently missable maroon mud structure on the outside with incredibly old and incredibly faded, exquisite Buddhist painting within. I returned to the guesthouse to find a distinctively cannabis-like aroma in the air and all three Israelis sitting where I left them, knitting indeterminate forms out of wool. "So I visited the monastery...it's very nice" I offered. "Oh, there's a monastery?" they replied. You see, Israeli backpackers, who are essentially a louder, more irritating form of pseudo-hippie, never actually do anything in the places they go besides sit around smoking hashish, occasionally knitting or walking as far as the balcony, sometimes getting very drunk, and asking cafe owners if they serve shakshuka. "Is it still cold out?" they asked. "It fucking snowed" I answered.

"Oh, it snowed?"

The after-effects of conscription, my friends. We need peace on Earth, man. No more armies, no more war. One love.

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.

Shorty Wanna Be A Lama

My destination was Dharamshala, the hilltop town that is now home to the Tibetan Government In Exile, including the Dalai Lama, and a great number of Tibetan refugees. The name "Dharamshala" roughly translates to "rest house", which is apt because it turns out that there isn't really that much to do that doesn't involve sitting down. I got to Dharamshala and found it peopled quite differently from your typical Indian town. The population consisted chiefly of, in this order: Tibetans, rejects from auditions for Beatles cover bands, spiritually-inclined iMac aficionados, middle-aged authors, and Indians. Speaking as an authority on this subject, I judge that Dharamshala has the highest proportion of white people in its municipal limits of all the places in India. Tourists come here from far and wide for their fix of good liberal concern over vanished Shangri-Las with tantalizing proximity to the world's wisest celebrity, in a convenient snack-sized morsel of a nation ("Free Tibet in every box! Now with 99% less sovereignty!").

The Tibetan population, it must be said, are really chill, and quite easily distinguished from their Indian neighbors. Aside from the obvious facial differences, they can be told apart from Indians even from behind and at a considerable distance. If the dude is wearing jeans and a t-shirt, he's a Tibetan. If the dude is trying to be the COOLEST PERSON EVER, and is wearing jeans with a tucked-in pinstripe shirt, popped collar, "designer" shades, and the words "Authentic Power Wear. New York 29 Urban Life. Ultamate Connexion POLO" anywhere on the ensemble, the dude is an Indian. Tibetans apparently shop in the youth section of the Sears mail-order catalog. Indian men shop by mail-order from a combination of bilingual MadLibs and Braille editions of GQ interviews with Kanye West. When you get closer, the differences become even more sharp. A Tibetan in Dharamshala will greet you with "Hello!", whereas the Indians open with "Excuse me sir, would you like some...saffron?"

I booked into a cheap hotel room that happened to be a completely isolated room next door to a massage parlor and opening directly onto the dining area of the largest, touristiest terrace cafe in town. My attempts at napping were constantly perturbed by the musings of John Lennon and Salman Rushdie wannabes, and in particular by a group of obese ecumenical Religion students (who, I admit, deserve credit for going to India to study other faiths while most of their classmates squat in Arkansas). There really are too many students and writers around. "I'm just going to journal for a few hours" I heard. Oh really? Anyone who uses the word 'journal' as a verb should go back to sixth grade where that shit is encouraged. Reread some Newberry Medal shit if you need inspiration. Julie Of The fucking Wolves. Recapture that sense of wonder, and learn the parts of speech. Write an essay about why we should free Tibet while you're at it, two pages, no double space, name and class section at top right. I would love to hear your thoughts.

I made the more or less mandatory visit to the main Tibetan temple complex, which is a giant, hospital-yellow pile of concrete pillars with a temple chamber somewhere in the middle. Inside the sanctuary, which does have nice paintings, devotees leave offerings to large, fine metal statues of various boddhisvattas, the compassionate semi-divine gurus of Mahayana Buddhism. The Boddhisvattas apparently like their edible offerings to be delivered in sealed boxes, and have a special place in their all-embracing hearts for Chips Ahoy!. Just outside the temple is the Dalai Lama's actual house. He was out on some Buddhist sermon in the mountains, but the house was interesting enough to look at from outside the gates for a minute or two. Nothing glam, but a comfy little pad with a nice zen garden. Between the house and the temple is a courtyard, where I witnessed a gathering of a few monks and their monastic students. The students were apparently being trained in debate. Tibetan debate, it would seem, largely consists of taking turns shouting, making ritual hand gestures, loudly clapping hands, and performing dramatic, torso-twisting foot-stomps. It all looked like a rather unusual form of communication amongst monks. Indeed, if only they had been members of the Red Hat order they could have filmed a perfectly synthesized Buddhist dialectic Limp Bizkit video.

Just around the corner is a little building called the Tibet Museum, which is where you go to get really depressed about how gratuitously awful the Chinese government is to Tibetan people and culture. I mean, everyone knows China does Bad Things over there, but seriously, some of it is just malicious. We actually should, like, free Tibet.

All in all, I found Dharamshala to be a very potentially interesting place. I say 'potentially' interesting because I got bored. Dharamshala is without a doubt the best place to delve into Tibetan culture. There are Tibetans everywhere eager to share their heritage, there are frequent cultural programmes and a plethora of oppurtunities for serious study. However, unless you are really willing to commit to an extended time with Tibetan stuff (which I wasn't. Tibet is fascinating but my purpose and mental energies have become intensely channeled on Indian culture while I'm here), there isn't really a whole lot to....do. Not that this stops anyone, since Dharamshala is also a good place with decent weather to sit around and do nothing and eat, on average, the best budget-oriented Western (i.e. Italian) food in India. If anything I should help free Tibet because for four days Tibet freed me from Gujarati food (I've come to regard the ubiquitous Punjabi-Gujarati-Bengali diners in India as inane petit-bourgeois establishments for plump, unadventurous domestic tourists where the only culinary flair is the risk of acute diarrhea.)

Dharamshala is an unusually pleasant, welcoming place, and most of all reasonable place, but here's the thing: "reasonable" is not on Ghostface Buddha's agenda. My heart just isn't really into it until I've spent twelve hours riding public transport on a single-lane mountain road until the bus engine catches fire - not that that has happened to me since leaving Dharamshala. OH WAIT. Remind me again why the hell I love India?