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.

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

Fear And Loathing In Ladakh

Another depraved day dawns... I'm holed up in a Ladakhi family's guest room with a moaning South Indian engineering graduate named Sandeep, and I've just learned the Telugu words for "My god, I'm about to vom' something the size of a papaya", or possibly "Fuck the parademics. I'm flipping this stew pot in Hell."

I'll never forget the look on that saddhu jackass's face when he left the bar last night. Oh, and just what is a Hindu holy man doing walking out of a Tibetan pub in those dogfight-behowled hours of the darkness? Being a self-worshiping rat-fucker, that's what. It's almost a bad joke -a tourist, a drunk, and a saddhu walk into a bar... We're watching the World Cup, by the way. This is a subject on which the locals are keen to offer chestnuts of footballing wisdom after glimpsing a fluff piece on David Beckham on E! News India. That such a program exists is only further proof that this entire planet will be destroyed in a massive crisis of socio-moral neglect long before the first Chinese nuke hits Tokyo (Japan gets it again. Life's a bitch). Visions of nuclear holocaust and subsequent Godzilla vs. Mutant Hello Kitties of spectacular post-apocalyptic futility aside, I had the more immediate gripe of a smug baba on my hands, itching at me like those lifeforms that lay their eggs in plates of village-saloon chowmein. The game's about to start, and despite the fact that it involves the Slovaks (a most redundant variety of the Slavs if there ever was one -have you ever heard the term "Slovak exceptionalism"?- I thought not), it at least gave me the chance to root against the Italian team and spit a little in my beer at the sight of Fabio Cannavarro's troll-distressingly ugly head. So, getting back to the main track of things, in comes this baba who looks like he hasn't seen anything but the undersides of the floorboards in an opium-dealing snow leopard's stash cave in the last half decade. He sits down, looks at the pub TV for about five seconds and announces "Slovakia will beat Italy 3-2", a rather specific and unlikely prospect. Then, he sanctimoniously orders a chai from the bartender and shuffled on his bench to a spot behind a pillar with an Avril Lavigne poster on it, and proceeds not to watch a moment of the damn game.

Slovakia beat Italy 3-2.

This, I felt, was a twinkling of hope in the oppressively deterministic world our planet is becoming. But then this motherfucker, this baba, rises up like an overly-content gerbil lying on a baking pastry in the oven and says "Slovakia 3; Italy 2" and leaves, and just then I remember there actually is no justice on this Earth since the birth of the human beast, and ahahaha guess what? right now somebody's probably busy raping the Congo.

This is the spirit in which I awoke to my puking roommate, and the spirit in which I was preparing to embark on another day, visiting indices Ba.-Ch. of the Ladakh Encyclopaedia Of Indistinguishable Buddhist Monasteries. In a cruel twist of destiny, Sandeep was as masochistically into monastery-hopping as I am. I forget which monastery we were going to that day. But then again I forget a lot of things now, like the reason I ever came to a country where Cruelle and Numerous Gods forbid you from eating beef, and for how many days I've been wearing the same pair of tamarind-encrusted boxer shorts (that by itself being a wretched tale too devoid of virtue for the telling).

So we left for this monastery -which one matters about as much as which side of the bed Hugh Hefner decided to shit on this morning- and we no doubt admired it greatly while at the same time mentioning to eachother in very tentative language that we despised our selves. I don't think it was Shey monastery. Shey monastery was the least pleasant and most unedifying of the bunch. This was partly because Sandeep and I had to walk five miles across a shimmering desert road in a desolate, arid mountain wasteland to a hopeless village that looked like it would have been full of strip malls and sand wholesalers if the entire populace hadn't blinked at the crucial moment when some Promethean, Asian god poofed into materiality by the roadside and said "One, two, three, I show you... Commerce!". Shey monastery is a nondescript, whitewashed Tibetan pile with a second-rate giant Buddha inside, and is surrounded by Ladakh's biggest stupa field. This merely means a large concentration of extra-crumbly iterations of those same ubiquitous, highly unfascinating displays of devotion that dot the Ladakhi landscape the way that ill-painted crosses dot South Carolina. The funny thing about the cross is that until Jesus got his carpenter self nailed up there, the structure had no more religious significance than Chapter 1 of Woodworking For Dunces. Imagine if Jesus was condemned to be nailed onto existing religious iconography and they pinned him to a 20-foot Buddha in the "Have No Fear" pose. Now that would have been something.

Before Shey we had been in Tikse. To that extent, Tikse is to blame for luring us into close proximity with Shey, Shey's only restaurant, and Shey's only restaurant's gallingly rustic two-storey latrine. You read that correctly. Tikse on its own merits, however, is at least a dozen times better than Shey because it contains friendly monks, several large and rich prayer halls, fantastic views across the Indus valley, and a gargantuan bejeweled Maitreya Buddha that is literally the face of Ladakh's tourism promotion efforts. Perhaps the reason the monks are so friendly has to do with what Sandeep and I found on the roof: a box of broken glass, in particular, broken liquor bottles. To a shard -this would be far too inane a joke to bother concocting from thin air- the broken glass belonged to discarded bottles of Old Monk rum.

Let's see...so one day we also went to Thak Thog monastery. What a letdown. We get there on this obscure little road, having already misdirected ourselves on every half-visible cowpath in the Chemrey valley to see this Thak Thog because it has a special Buddhist cave. Then we get there, and the cave joint is closed. It was about to open in a week when the monks make their much-celebrated annual return to monastic duties. "Yuppp, I'm a monk, just gonna open the crib for spring worship...in July". Good fucking gracious, no wonder the Theravada school of Buddhism argues it takes millions of lifetimes to attain Enlightenment. They must have been observing these guys. These Mahayana-branch monks on the other hand are clearly striving for Truth on the assumption that it leaves time for deep-sea fishing. Incidentally, while at Thak Thog I also had to relieve myself next to some horrible desert plant that must be Tibet's answer to the saguaro cactus. So now you know.

Chemrey monastery is in the Chemrey valley too, though rumor is that they actually had to secretly change the name and burn the old records because in context being called the Lower Hudson monastery just sounded fucking stupid. It's got a great hill-perch, great views, a little museum with some fabulous cloth paintings. You should go there, if only because I've wasted my life visiting obscure Asian worship venues and I want someone to talk to.

Ohhh, and Alchi monastery, what fine memories I have of you. Alchi is famed for containing "some of the greatest art treasures in Asia", and fondly recalled for doing nothing superfluously awful to me. Also -and I mean this as a compliment, Alchi, in a way- never before have I seen a place so perfectly encapsulated by its Wikipedia page.

Hemis monastery, that's the famous one. It's apparently the place to be if you're the type to pore over calendars and show up at monasteries on the dates of traditional dancing festivals to get Rich, Vibrant Photographs with a hundred SLR-toting, L.L. Bean Brigade members scratching their cellulite in the background of every shot. We, however, did not arrive on such a day, which was for the best because that day the whiskey-hashish dialectic was really revealing the shocking and sordid material history of Buddhism in a vivid way. Really talking to a motherfucker, right through the vindictive seismic anomaly in the sonofabitch's cranium, y'know? Hemis has the largest (and probably most interesting) monastic museum of them all, but it was the "largest" aspect that directly concerned me as I painfully shuffled back towards the water closet by the entrance, desperate to forestall the spontaneous disintegration of my physical being by expelling the contents of my neutron-emitting stomach in an as-yet-to-be-determined direction up or down my digestive tract (it was up).

Then, finally there was Likkir monastery. We perused a collection of Tibetan tantra paraphernalia. There was one bowl made out of a polished fucking human skull. I looked at this for a moment, then pulled out my guitar, shredded a death metal solo in like five different time signatures, and rode a fuck-train all over the summoned Valkyries while the local lamas pounded gongs until the moment of climax.

Everything except that last sentence is absolutely true- the deranged and aimless wanderings of a man for some reason trying to rationally categorize a bunch of monasteries in one lost corner of this deranged and aimless world.

The Princess Is In This Castle

"We're in Aghanistan!" Sandeep shouted.
"Well, I wouldn't go that far..."
"No! It is just like that movie...Body Of Lies! Have you seen Afghanistan in that? It is exactly like here!"

He kind of had a point. From where we were standing, the city of Leh did have a certain Afghan appearance, save for the fact that the large painted Buddha on the hillside was not obscured by a thick cloud of dust and a crowd of black-turbaned Taliban snickering next to a TNT detonator like Wile E "the Mad Mullah" Coyote.

The people of Ladakh - the Ladakhis - are quite similar to Tibetans but not exactly. They have their own language, costumes, and a slightly different majority sect of Buddhism. It all gets a little confusing though with the number of Tibetan refugees that live around Leh as well, but there is one thing that is clear: they aren't "Indian". As I've mentioned before, they are proud to consider themselves the southeastern fringe of Central Asia, a claim that has some merit given that they are on the other side of the Himalayas from the rest of India, and there isn't a Hindu in sight except on the massive army bases. Most of all, the appearance of the land itself is Central Asian, a huge expanse of arid, craggy mountains capped with snow and dotted with isolated monasteries and the odd minaret. In fact, I was told that a number of movies set in Afghanistan have been shot here (on the other hand, the Times Of India reports that Richard Gere is shooting a film about Tibet here soon, God help the people of Ladakh).

There isn't much debate about what constitutes Leh's most striking feature; it's the palace. Right in the middle of town is a large, steep ridge with a ten-story palace on the tip. Supposedly, it's a miniature copy of the palace in Lhasa, Tibet, but since it has been completely denuded of paint it is now a hulking pile of bricks the exact color of every rocky crag for miles around, and makes it look more like a tyrant's mountain hall than a pleasure palace. Ladakh used to be its own semi-important kingdom, but thanks to a series of foolish wars that coincided with the underhanded advance of British control in the Himalayas, the royals got deposed, sent to their summer estate, and their kingdom handed over rather incongruously to the puppet rulers of Jammu and Kashmir, a bizarre political union that continues in republican form to this day. Long story short, the palace looks completely awesome looming over the city, but thanks to history now possess one of India's all-time boring interiors. There's no trace of the royalty, of art, or of anything other than plaster and bricks inside (other than one small temple chamber), for which the Archaeological Survey of India has the gall to charge a hundred rupees admission. The Leh palace is like a Bulgarian stripper: pleasing to the eye but best admired without paying to enter.

Sandeep and I ended up staying for the long term in a Ladakhi guesthouse in the old town, with fantastic views, a puzzling absence of tourists, and immediate proximity to the town football pitch, which revealed one of the great gulfs of opinion between Ladakhis and lowland Indians: Ladakhis, and especially Tibetans, love the vague patriotism of the World Cup sing-along "Waving Flag", and are even more enamored of the song which is surely to become the ultimate relic of 2010, "Waka Waka". Investigating this phenomenon further, I found that this song is less popular among mainstream Indians because "Shakira sings like a man." Well, I suppose you might hold this opinion if your male pop singers sound like women and the main qualification for female pop music in your society is the ability to murder a kitten at 2,000 yards.

Over the next several days Sandeep and I embarked on an extensive tour of Ladakh's numerous Buddhist monasteries. At the end of one such day we pulled up to the palace of Stok, which Sandeep swore up and down was actually supposed to be a monastery (though to be fair, Sandeep also swore up and down that the entire Tibetan Buddhist faith, and indeed every religion, is plagiarized from the Rig Veda). Not allowing this disagreement to deter him, he wandered around the "monastery" enjoying the palace-museum's exhibits with great interest, periodically coming over to me to ask in whispered tones "Why are there so many females allowed in this one?" Because I was busy I refrained from informing him that the females in question were members of the deposed Ladakhi royal family, who have taken it upon themselves to preserve the summer palace and the royal heirlooms as pieces of cultural heritage for the public. I must say, of my various encounters with deposed Indian royalty (that this has happened to me more than once is itself slightly remarkable), I must say that this was by far the most enjoyable, not least because one of the Princesses of Ladakh is quite the cutie.

Given this and my self-appointed mission of dashing adventure in India, I undertook as a matter of principle, and for your sake, my dear readers, to flirt with the Princess. Sandeep was still shuffling about, apparently engrossed by a display of semi-precious jewelry and wondering what possible use the monks could have for golden bangles, while I set myself the modest goal of hitting on the Princess until she laughed. It was to prove something of a challenge, as much of my charm comes at the expense of dignity, which I felt I had to preserve at all costs. Howevwe, comrades, I accomplished my goal fully, swiftly, and without a single reference to the excretory habits of cattle, finding myself soon engaged in a surprisingly vibrant conversation with a much-delighted and highly eligible royal. In fact, I seem to have been at least passingly amusing enough that I was told that if I wanted to converse more extensively (and observing full regal decorum), that I was welcome to ask permission for a chaperoned rooftop rendezvous from the Princess's mother. At this point however I had to politely decline, partly because Sandeep was finished talking to the palace's sole actual monk and was eager to leave, but mostly because if I actually had a flirtatious meeting on a royal balcony with an actual princess, regardless of how innocent the circumstances, Girlface Buddha would never let me live it down and I would be forced to spend untold amounts of time uttering trite apologies like "But you're my real princess..."

In any case, this is my triumphant story of how I captured just a sliver of the heart of a mountain princess. It helps, when flirting with royalty, that Ghostface Buddha is the King of Pimps. Kiss the ring.

La La La La Leh

The state of Jammu & Kashmir consists of three parts: Jammu, which is essentially an extension of the Punjab and is full of Hindus and Sikhs; the Kashmir valley, best known for natural beauty, international jihadism, and Led Zeppelin songs; and Ladakh, which despite getting no love in the state's name actually comprises most of its territory. Ladakh is a vast, incredibly empty expanse of desert mountains and valleys on the far side of the Himalayas, wedged in between Hindu India, Tibet, and the Central Asian 'Stans. Most importantly, Ladakh is completely immune to the South Asian monsoon, which was heading towards the Kullu valley at an alarming pace for those of us without gills, so I booked a van up into the mountains with haste.

There are only two roads into all of Ladakh. One is a paved road up from the Kashmir valley that passes right by the Indo-Pak battle lines on the Line of Control, and the other is a notoriously rugged and remote road starting at the Rohtang La and going over the spine of the Himalayas, through hundreds of kilometers of nomad-populated mountain wilderness, and over high mountain passes including the world's second-highest stretch of road. Since I planned to visit Kashmir as well, the only question was which way around these two roads to go. Thinkly deeply on the question, I decided that if Lashkar-e-Toiba and their buddies in the Pakistani Taliban and paramilitary services decided to start lobbing artillery at the Kashmir-Ladakh road, as they do from time to time, it would be easier to dodge mortar fire running downhill. Thus did I embark on the epic, infamous slog from Manali to the Ladakhi capital of Leh.

The journey did not get off to a good start. My van was half an hour late in leaving. Admittedly, this was entirely my own fault, as I was standing right there watching the climactic overtime finish of the World Cup playoff between the USA and Ghana. I got on the bus, cranked with about a gallon of chai in my system, and instantly began to see the drawbacks of beginning journeys on chai-binges at 2:30AM when I had the mother of all sugar crashes as we wound our way up the godforsakenly long switchbacked road up the Rohtang La in the dead of night. [Oh, by the way, "La" means "pass", which I probably should have mentioned several posts ago].We stopped about halfway to the top, where we could see the lights of half the Kullu valley twinkling in the crisp night air. The mountainside was silent, save for the distant crashing of snowmelt waterfalls leaping off the cliffs, and the very close crashing of vomit waterfalls splashing around our shoes.

We reached the top of the Rohtang La in the wee-est hours, which is the way to do it, because unlike my previous passage the road was completely unblocked. There were no hordes of tourists trying to execute three-point turns over icy puddles in Suzuki town cars, no herds of ponies waiting for custom in the street, and no blindingly awful snowsuits threatening to distract the driver and plunge us all off a cliff. By the time we were halfway down the almost-as-interminable northern side of the mountain we were treated to a spectacular dawn view of the Lahaul valley, a sparsely settled, almost tree-less mountain valley that shimmers green with grasses clinging to the dark stone mountainsides and ice cream-like snow toppings dribbling down its peaks. This valley is defined by snowmelt. I assume that's what keeps the cliffsides green, and if you go two hundred yards without seeing a waterfall, it's only because a glacier is parking in the waterfall's spot. Unfortunately I missed most of the scenery in Lahaul because my chai-induced molecular decay had me slipping in and out of a half-sleep trance for the remainder of the morning.

At some point in the morning about seven hours after leaving Manali we stopped in the Lahauli capital of Keylong for breakfast and chai, of which I did not partake. Beyond Keylong is a whole lot of nothingness, marked by India's most famous highway sign, which announces that there will not be another petrol pump for 370 kilometers. As I faded into unconsciousness again we started the crawl up the second of the high passes on the journey, Baralacha La, which would take us over to the far side of the main range of the Himalayas. I woke up with a shiver as we got near the top. We were in a gigantic snow field, surrounded by nothing but dark pinnacles of rock capped in thick sheets of immaculate white snow. In case you haven't gotten the point, even at the end of June it was a memorably snowy place, and I have spent multiple winters in New England.

The fact that we had just crossed the Himalayas made little impression on us, as we were still not even halfway and the far side of the Himalayas actually consists of even more mountains and the road proceeds to get ever higher and rougher. Just after Baralacha La we crossed the state boundary into Jammu & Kashmir, but where we were exactly was an excellent question. If you look at Indian maps of the Himalayas, you will see that this area is somewhere in between Lahaul, Ladakh, and the ludicrously remote area of Zanskar, but none of the maps actually have any name for this area at all, and indeed depict nothing but a little red line twisting through a bunch of mountains. This is pretty much accurate. For hundreds of miles, there isn't so much as a village along this road. There are a handful of tent camps in the summer and two or three army stations along the way where understandably bored-looking soldiers tend to small medical posts and bulldozer maintenance shacks. Not even the Tibetan mountain peoples have seen fit to civilize this region. I have heard that some people call the area "Korzok" (a barbarian name if there ever was one), after the nomadic the region of the same name which is actually about a week's donkey ride away.

As the hours wore on and the afternoon stretched across the arid Trans-Himalayan wastelands with little other than the occasional nomad and his sheep to relieve the monotony, we all became extremely grateful that the Manali-Leh highway offers what is undoubtedly the most stunning, epic, and beautiful expanse of endlessly boring shit in the world. Once you've climbed over your twelfth pass and four-hundred-and-seventy-eighth switchback of the day, you begin to wish the dramatic vistas would just end for a second and you find yourself daydreaming about cloverleaf highway off-ramps with hundred-foot high signs for Denny's and Cracker Barrel beckoning in the distance.

Oh, I almost forgot to mention (it almost goes without saying) that for the vast bulk of its 474km length, the "highway" we are talking about consists of a single lane of dirt and rocks, punctuated by permafrost, ice puddles, and glacial streams running over the track. The only good thing you can say about the road itself is that it mostly manages to keep a reasonable margin of safety along deadly precipices. I have also excluded recounting a great deal of jovial quips and other bonhomie amongst the passengers of the van, because the circumstances warp one's perspective to find the utmost hilarity in remarks that are only the slightest bit relevant or amusing to people who are enduring the Manali-Leh bus together. Anyways, carrying on...

By the time we got to the third high pass, the 5000+ meter Lachulung La, the road had become almost Escher-like in its torturous geometry. It climbs up the side of valleys, through gorges, up serpentine slopes, and cuts into cliff-faces in such preposterous sequence that you half expect that getting back down the other side will require flooring the gas to clear a roller coaster style loop-de-loop carved into the hanging ice of a frozen waterfall. Sadly, there is no such contrivance, and you are merely forced to descend yet another freakshow of erosion, a veritable Barnum's circus of grotesque geological forces, to get to the other side.

The most terrifying part of the trip, paradoxically, is also the safest part. After many hours of alpine meandering you suddenly find yourself on a semi-paved, almost straight road running down the middle of a high-altitude valley called the More Plains. After 12 hours on some of the world's most painful roadway, the drivers can't resist gunning it and flying across the plains with reckless abandon, swerving dangerously to avoid stray boulders, broken culverts, and the odd herd of angora goats. On no account should you encourage the driver to slow down, or even ask for the day's 19th urine break, because THEY WANT TO MOVE GODDAMMIT, and when the same man is responsible for driving 19 hours straight over a dirt track that defies the laws of physics and human endurance, you should be prepared to indulge whatever keeps the driver at ease, even if it is allowing him to play teeny-bopper pop hits about first love on repeat. I'm not saying the choice is by any means a clear one, but the other option does happen to be death.

At long last, the road begins to gently rise on the side of the More Plains on its final ascent to the big boy itself, Taglang La. Taglang La, as every single person who has crossed it will gladly tell you, is the second-highest road pass in the world at some 5300 meters (17,000+ft.). When we reached the top just in time for a spectacular sunset, the sky streaked in dark hues of blue, purple, and grey.Below the wispy clouds far above in the atmosphere we had an uninterrupted view across the snow-capped peaks of the Zanskar mountains, the Ladakh mountains beyond that, and the saw-like profile of the mighty Karakoram on the horizon. I was gripped by the desire to whoop with joy, and even more gripped by the inability to do so because I felt like I was breathing from a helium balloon. The pass is at 5300 meters, whereas the unacclimated human body begins to suffer from altitude sickness at about 3500. Though I have spent much time in the mountains lately, I felt a slight shortness of breath, and strange dizziness with a rumbling headache and dryness of mouth that reminded me distinctly of many a Sunday morning recovering from the biochemical demands of a liberal arts education. My co-passengers, who were mostly on their very first venture up from the foothills, were not faring so well and were in various states of unconsciousness, misery, disorientation, high-energy experimental regurgitation, and conspicuous flatulence. *Sigh…*freshmen.

The remainder of the trip was made in the dark (again). We flashed down the northern side of the Taglang La in our van in much the same way that Donkey Kong and Indiana Jones traverse caves in a mining carts. Under the shroud of darkness we finally broke into the valley of the upper Indus river, the heart of Ladakh, and blindly passed by a number of fascinating things on our way to Leh...but the tales of those things are for another time. Just before midnight, when I was becoming finally convinced that my bladder, my pancreas, and at least one of my kidneys had been replaced by hacky sacks, we pulled into the bus lot at Leh. We were far too exhausted to take any stock of our surroundings, and splintered off to find just wherever the hell would let us sleep. I ended up in an alliance the van's token Indian passenger, a Hyderabadi named Sandeep (whose identity shall be concealed in this blog for his sake) and we ended up crashing in a Tibetan guesthouse.

I awoke the next day around noon. Sandeep would rise from sheer motionlessness and in complete misery at about six that evening, and by the time I returned at 8pm he had read the part of my guidebook that discussed a most interesting phenomenon he had never before heard of, but had certainly now experienced, called "Acute Mountain Sickness". Anyways, as I stepped out of the guesthouse that afternoon, I was more than a little curious to see the town I had gone to such lengths to reach, and what I saw...

...could only be described in the words in my next post. Laterz!