So here I am sitting with a brand-new notebook in the Satluj View bar. It's called that because it's on a cliff above the Satluj river. I came in here for dinner, found that the restaurant portion had been requisitioned for the night by the Ministry of Energy, and I don't know why but I decided to go to the bar side and have a beer. They have a decent selection of rums and whiskeys, but I asked for a beer. The bartender, in a tone I now know was an apology, said "We only have Godfather beer, sir." So be it.
OK, I now start drinking the Godfather beer and it tastes awful. It has this guy who kind of looks like a young Karl Marx on the bottle and he seems to be having a good time. The bottle, which is large, also proclaims that it is "Super Strong" beer. We'll see about that. It might actually get me drunk. My tolerance for alcohol is at an all-time low. I rarely drink in India, mostly because the bars are vile, the booze tastes like crap.
Actually, now that I think about it, I puke considerably more often than I drink here. Questionable food and drinking water is probably to blame, but to me this reeks of SOCIALISM. In godly, American countries we firmly believe in a man's right to puke at most an equal number of times to drinking. LET FREEDOM RING.
Stray thought (I think there's going to be a lot of these): if I had to describe my "inner" "personal" journey on this trip using only well-known literary references, my life would be a mixture of Heart of Darkness, the Bhagavad Gita, and Where's Waldo?
Speaking of Where's Waldo?, you could produce a whole new Where's Waldo? anthology in any Indian city using only a bag of colored pencils, a dirigible, and about a quarter-dose of psychedelic mushrooms.
You know, I don't know if anyone has every said this before, but religion can, like, make people do really good things, but it can also make them do, like, really bad things. BARTENDER. ANOTHER GODFATHER.
It's impossible to get a good burrito around here.
I am drunk.
Catching the 6am bus is going to be a bitch.
Think about this: you can get to the end of a river really quickly if you just think of the "end" as the bottom.
You know what really sucks? Honor killings.
Jesus fuck, this beer tastes like detergent. From the makers of Tide, this shit. Come home drunk and puke in the hamper for savings on laundry. Compromises for a happy marriage. Wife send me back to the bar for a whiskey, clean the fucking dishes.
What's the rhyme Nas uses on that Ludcris song right before "Bartender, put a cosmo in that girl's hand!" ? I need to know.
I wonder if that cavity in my bathroom wall is supposed to be the shower.
Wait, have I even had a proper shower in this entire state?
No.
OK, Satan, here's the deal: if I eat less than eight unhygienic paranthas in the next week, you get my soul. Fair odds.
Google Maps driving time estimates are a perverse joke of diabolical origin.
That girl with the burnt ear on the bus was definitely hitting on me with the winking and the chewing gum.
Definitely hitting on me.
Awwwwwww I should call my girlfr.....ohhhh ho ho ho, no I shouldn't.
If India was a moment in stereotypical "hippie" recorded music it would be like getting really high and listening to Dark Side Of The Moon and forgetting about the part with all the fucking clocks and then jumping out of your sofa in surprise, except it happens every five minutes and whatever's causing the commotion is either completely unnecessary or it can kill you.
India has a plethora of crazy, mystical, super-yoga ascetic saddhus. India also has a space program. These need to be put together. SHIVA IN SPACE. I would so go on that mission.
If Indian bus drivers were football coaches, they would run the quarterback sneak three times in a row and then set the ball on fire on fourth down.
Hell, if Indian bus drivers were cricket players they would still move farther in a a day.
Dude, saddhus in zero-gravity. I'm still on that.
You know, I think I like sky-blue saris the best.
Where the fuck are my keys?
Jun 8, 2010
Jun 3, 2010
The Art Of Cow-Spitting
With Remarks On Puking On Mules
I would say it was one of those days, except all my days are some of those days.
It began innocently enough. I was just on day two of the journey from Gangotri to Yamunotri. Yamunotri, as some of my sharp-witted and dedicated readers may deduce, is the mountain temple dedicated at the source of the Yamuna river, India's second-holiest natural waterway. Yamunotri is by far the least busy of the four Char Dham temples, and is usually visited by people who have been to Gangotri already. It doesn't have the prestige of being the source of India's very holiest river, and it doesn't have the attractive bonus features of the Kedarnath and Badrinath temples, so it gets a little neglected. Sure, people pay attention to it. It's a logical and respected complement to Gangotri, but it just doesn't draw the same masses and explosive devotion; it is the Joe Biden of pilgrimage.
Anyways, after an exceptionally tedious journey averaging ten kilometers per hour over the ridges dividing the Ganges and Yamuna valleys on an ass-grinding, kneecap-shaving bus ride, we arrived in an extremely forgettable town called Barkot. I only refer to this dump by name so that I can embarrass the whole community by telling the whole world that its main recreational activity is sneaking into extremely crowded, plywood-built speakeasy shacks disguised as chicken coops. Young men came tumbling triumphantly out of their pitch-black premises, completely unaware that all the young women in the town were openly ridiculing them. I was quite concerned that I would get stuck in this town because the mid-afternoon transport window was rapidly closing and I was losing out on the struggle to claim seats on the last jeeps to men who were much more biochemically prepared for a brawl. They all left, without me on them. I waddled off with my luggage figuring I would sit and leisurely eat at a roadside snack hovel until the next jeep came by, if ever, when I ran into a young man who had been passingly nice to me on the bus. His name was Karun and he too was waiting for a ride with his father. One last jeep came by, already packed to the gills. A rapid negotiation in Hindi followed, and Karun called to me "Quickly, get on the top!" Oh, hells yes, time to ride the roof of the jeep.
This was perhaps not the best idea. I was already physically weak as I hadn't eaten all day. I suspected strongly that I was suffering from digestive illness, but I have learned a foolproof technique for reducing the adverse effects of these sicknesses: if you don't eat you won't have anything to desperately need to expel. Seven of us squeezed on top of the pile of luggage on the roof rack, and most of the others sat comfortably within the railings. I, being the last one on, had to content myself with balancing on the spare tire on the roof and clinging onto the railings and bracing myself in various ways with my feet for dear life. It was quite taxing on the limbs, but at least I had legroom (an infinite supply of it, seeing as my feet frequently flailed in the air) and that was an improvement. The real problem, I discovered, was that like all Uttarakhand roads, most of this 'highway' was under construction and there were rocks everywhere, sending me flying off my tire perch and more than once landing with a two-inch steel lug bolt up my ass. Finally we paused for a moment to allow an excavator to work, and we all managed to squeeze a bit intimately into the proper luggage area. From there on out it was all sport.
Riding on the roof makes the trudge over Himalayan roads seem about twice as fast as it actually is. Besides the rush of cool mountain air and the exhiliration of 360-degree mountain vistas passing by as you cling for your life on the wobbling roof of a vehicle that is itself rarely distant from falling off a tall, dangerous cliff, the open air and sense of freedom gives scope for a number of recreational activities. I refer of course, to cow-spitting.
I am proud to join the small community of men who have pioneered a wholesome game that can uplift the lives of many. Rather than being inspired by balls, nets, and sticks, I took a cue from the environment around me, which included a comparatively swift motor vehicle, no windows, and the frequent appearance of cows by the roadside. The sport is called cow-spitting. I will allow you to imagine the rules.
The secret to a reliable cow-spitting score is to resist the mighty temptation to go for the headshot, and instead rely upon the convenient breadth of the bovine target's abundant flank. The sputum is best formed as solidly as possible to counter the effects of wind resistance, and one most 'lead' the shot by remembering the vehicle's momentum vis-a-vis the fat fucking cow. Though I never did achieve the much-celebrated Face Splatter, I was the first player in the recorded history of cow-spitting to accomplish the elusive Double Kill, an achievement requiring a combination of luck and skill, dependent upon the tendency of spit globs to separate in flight and the tendency of groups of cows to cluster in panic on the roadside at the approach of fast-moving vehicles. Like Arjuna himself letting loose an unerring rain of arrows on his foes as Krishna drove his chariot daringly across the battlefield of Kurukshetra in the victorious battle of Good over Evil, so too did I strike many of my enemy's unrighteous cohort and leave them stained not just with slime, but also with the unwipable mark of dishonor.
We continued on our way merrily through the beautiful Yamuna valley, passing perhaps the most perfectly-situated little pagoda in the world atop a rock tower deep in the center of a bowl-like chasm at the confluence of two rivers. The occupants of vehicles close behind us frantically pointed and waved and displayed general confusion as soon as they identified my foreign face among our roof-riding troupe. The saddhus who we rapidly passed as they tromped barefoot up the road would have had time for no such observation, but they may have been puzzled by what they heard, which would have been something like this: "Eeiighty-four bottles of beeeeeeeee........"
After a quite enjoyable and scening ride on the rooftop, we approached Janki Chatti, the Yamuna's answer to the horrible little villages at the end of every pilgrim road in Uttarakhand where the people assemble for the last push on foot. As the village came into view at the narrowing of the valley around a number of long bends in the road, the inevitable happened, and I am afraid that I caused my traveling companions much wetness, because the gods clearly wanted me to complete the end of this journey riding on top of a jeep in a thunderstorm. At least, I figured, if I was to be struck by lightning because I was the highest point on an exposed metal doodad I would have the possibility of an exciting death combining a lightning strike with a flaming jeep accident and a thousand-foot plunge into a rushing river. You have to look on these things with a certain detachment. But not the jeep; you want to focus on remaining firmly attached to that.
The situation was most craptacular, but Karun and his father decided to take me under their wing and make me the third member of their group, treating me to all the negotiating benefits of apparently being part of a trio of broke-ass pilgrims. We had great difficulty finding a room in Janki Chatti, and the storm became so fierce we sheltered under a posts-n-trash-bags dhaba for a rest and some chai. They insisted on feeding me, and upon seeing my stomach unease Karun's father revealed he was a pharmacist and offered me one of an assortment of very large pills. I took it without water, suspecting that Janki Chatti's water supply would quite negate the salutary effects of pharmaceuticals. The pill did not have precisely the desired effect, as I immediately bolted up to go for my monthly vomit. I hunched over a miraculously-situated rubbish bin (I hope some day to find all 9 of India's remaining trash cans) in the edge of the rain, and puked my guts out a few inches away from the faces of a group of mules. The howling winds caught dribbles of my dangling, spit-infused regurgitation and blew them straight onto the mules' cheeks. I grinned with perverse satisfaction. "Well," I thought, "I may be puking my guts out in a goddamn thunderstorm next to a bunch of mules, but at least I still have some dignity...."
"...Bitch."
The three of us eventually found a room and I spent the remainder of the evening not eating a bite and huddling quite snugly and smugly under a heavy blanket. Pharma-Dad had a great deal to say about my condition and showed me a number of pills I could take if I so desired. Finally he concluded "What you need is Shiva." I was a little irritated by this. I didn't wish to begin a debate on traditional healing, and I had already had a bit of an odd conversation after Karun claimed his father was a Christian, which would have made this a rather odd pilgrimage, especially since the father lit candles and prayed to Shiva at dusk.
"What you need is the Shiva power" he repeated.
"Shiva power?" Color me skeptical.
"Yes, Shiva. Here, look, the Shiva power." Karun's father then began unwinding a dirty old rag. "The Shiva medicine can cure many problem. The headache, the fever, many illness, anything that make you need the rest. Take the Shiva." He opened the rag and showed me Shiva: a perfect ten-gram lump of sticky, soft, dark brown hashish. "You must take this any time" he said. Well, doctor's orders.
Karun and Pharma-Dad left for Yamunotri at some godforsaken hour of the morning, and I crawled out of my primordial blanket-cave around to pounce upon my age-old prey: gluten biscuits. The hike to Yamunotri is only five kilometers, but it is quite steep, and in my condition I found myself stopping every few hundred yards to contemplate the miserable fate of all living beings. It took me far too long to walk that negligible distance, but at least I had objective verification that parts of the trail were pretty hard: Yamunotri is far and away the home of Uttarakhand's most perilously-descending dholi-teams and its angriest, most immobile mules. Nobody was having a good time of it.
When I finally reached Yamunotri I was blown away. I'd been told by numerous people that it was the least interesting of the four great mountain temples, but it was beautiful. It is the lowest of them, and lies in a tight, lush gorge where the dripping-wet trees tumble down the slopes of the enormous Bandarpunch massif that closes in from every side. Once again, Yamunotri is evidently not the actual source of the Yamuna river, but in this case it is forgivable, because about fifty meters past the temple the water becomes a sheer tumble down the side of a snow-capped mountain from a glacial lake that you aren't getting to without the aid of actual climbing equipment. The town is tiny, but incredibly crowded as it has but one street the terminates in a horrendous crossing on a staircase when pilgrims to the temple must force their way past half-naked, dripping-wet men who have emerged from the hot pools on their way to recover their clothes and shoes. Finally, at the top of these stairs is a large stone patio and the temple itself. The temple is small and not much to look at save for its bright yellow pinnacle. Upon close inspection, the lower half of the shrine is built of the same cheap concrete pillars as every new village shrine in India, but these pillars have been covered, apparently, in kitchen-top granite slabs. The result is that the temple looks half-Mahabharata, half-Country Living. I stayed for a long time because it really is a beautiful spot, and I found a little ledge by the bathing ghat on which to nap. I napped soundly until I was awoken by a police officer jabbing me with a big wooden stick. He wasn't angry with me; indeed, he was concerned I was suffering from a serious headache. It's just that Indian cops know no way of interacting with the world that doesn't involve hitting things with sticks.
I returned to Janki Chatti and had an all-too familiar conversation with my hotel manager. Later, on the phone with Girlface I was asked "How do you get kicked out of so many hotels? You don't do anything bad!" Well, that is patently false, but she is right that I do nothing to hotels or their managers to deserve my constant ejection onto the streets of inclement mountain villages. Anyways, it didn't matter. I resolved, once again, to make an early start down towards the lower valleys of Uttarakhand, and this time I wasn't coming back. Uttarakhand was lovely, perhaps my favorite of all sixteen states I've toured so far, but I had completed my mission and more. It's time to move on.
Himachal Pradesh, you're next. Guard your cows.
I would say it was one of those days, except all my days are some of those days.
It began innocently enough. I was just on day two of the journey from Gangotri to Yamunotri. Yamunotri, as some of my sharp-witted and dedicated readers may deduce, is the mountain temple dedicated at the source of the Yamuna river, India's second-holiest natural waterway. Yamunotri is by far the least busy of the four Char Dham temples, and is usually visited by people who have been to Gangotri already. It doesn't have the prestige of being the source of India's very holiest river, and it doesn't have the attractive bonus features of the Kedarnath and Badrinath temples, so it gets a little neglected. Sure, people pay attention to it. It's a logical and respected complement to Gangotri, but it just doesn't draw the same masses and explosive devotion; it is the Joe Biden of pilgrimage.
Anyways, after an exceptionally tedious journey averaging ten kilometers per hour over the ridges dividing the Ganges and Yamuna valleys on an ass-grinding, kneecap-shaving bus ride, we arrived in an extremely forgettable town called Barkot. I only refer to this dump by name so that I can embarrass the whole community by telling the whole world that its main recreational activity is sneaking into extremely crowded, plywood-built speakeasy shacks disguised as chicken coops. Young men came tumbling triumphantly out of their pitch-black premises, completely unaware that all the young women in the town were openly ridiculing them. I was quite concerned that I would get stuck in this town because the mid-afternoon transport window was rapidly closing and I was losing out on the struggle to claim seats on the last jeeps to men who were much more biochemically prepared for a brawl. They all left, without me on them. I waddled off with my luggage figuring I would sit and leisurely eat at a roadside snack hovel until the next jeep came by, if ever, when I ran into a young man who had been passingly nice to me on the bus. His name was Karun and he too was waiting for a ride with his father. One last jeep came by, already packed to the gills. A rapid negotiation in Hindi followed, and Karun called to me "Quickly, get on the top!" Oh, hells yes, time to ride the roof of the jeep.
This was perhaps not the best idea. I was already physically weak as I hadn't eaten all day. I suspected strongly that I was suffering from digestive illness, but I have learned a foolproof technique for reducing the adverse effects of these sicknesses: if you don't eat you won't have anything to desperately need to expel. Seven of us squeezed on top of the pile of luggage on the roof rack, and most of the others sat comfortably within the railings. I, being the last one on, had to content myself with balancing on the spare tire on the roof and clinging onto the railings and bracing myself in various ways with my feet for dear life. It was quite taxing on the limbs, but at least I had legroom (an infinite supply of it, seeing as my feet frequently flailed in the air) and that was an improvement. The real problem, I discovered, was that like all Uttarakhand roads, most of this 'highway' was under construction and there were rocks everywhere, sending me flying off my tire perch and more than once landing with a two-inch steel lug bolt up my ass. Finally we paused for a moment to allow an excavator to work, and we all managed to squeeze a bit intimately into the proper luggage area. From there on out it was all sport.
Riding on the roof makes the trudge over Himalayan roads seem about twice as fast as it actually is. Besides the rush of cool mountain air and the exhiliration of 360-degree mountain vistas passing by as you cling for your life on the wobbling roof of a vehicle that is itself rarely distant from falling off a tall, dangerous cliff, the open air and sense of freedom gives scope for a number of recreational activities. I refer of course, to cow-spitting.
I am proud to join the small community of men who have pioneered a wholesome game that can uplift the lives of many. Rather than being inspired by balls, nets, and sticks, I took a cue from the environment around me, which included a comparatively swift motor vehicle, no windows, and the frequent appearance of cows by the roadside. The sport is called cow-spitting. I will allow you to imagine the rules.
The secret to a reliable cow-spitting score is to resist the mighty temptation to go for the headshot, and instead rely upon the convenient breadth of the bovine target's abundant flank. The sputum is best formed as solidly as possible to counter the effects of wind resistance, and one most 'lead' the shot by remembering the vehicle's momentum vis-a-vis the fat fucking cow. Though I never did achieve the much-celebrated Face Splatter, I was the first player in the recorded history of cow-spitting to accomplish the elusive Double Kill, an achievement requiring a combination of luck and skill, dependent upon the tendency of spit globs to separate in flight and the tendency of groups of cows to cluster in panic on the roadside at the approach of fast-moving vehicles. Like Arjuna himself letting loose an unerring rain of arrows on his foes as Krishna drove his chariot daringly across the battlefield of Kurukshetra in the victorious battle of Good over Evil, so too did I strike many of my enemy's unrighteous cohort and leave them stained not just with slime, but also with the unwipable mark of dishonor.
We continued on our way merrily through the beautiful Yamuna valley, passing perhaps the most perfectly-situated little pagoda in the world atop a rock tower deep in the center of a bowl-like chasm at the confluence of two rivers. The occupants of vehicles close behind us frantically pointed and waved and displayed general confusion as soon as they identified my foreign face among our roof-riding troupe. The saddhus who we rapidly passed as they tromped barefoot up the road would have had time for no such observation, but they may have been puzzled by what they heard, which would have been something like this: "Eeiighty-four bottles of beeeeeeeee........"
After a quite enjoyable and scening ride on the rooftop, we approached Janki Chatti, the Yamuna's answer to the horrible little villages at the end of every pilgrim road in Uttarakhand where the people assemble for the last push on foot. As the village came into view at the narrowing of the valley around a number of long bends in the road, the inevitable happened, and I am afraid that I caused my traveling companions much wetness, because the gods clearly wanted me to complete the end of this journey riding on top of a jeep in a thunderstorm. At least, I figured, if I was to be struck by lightning because I was the highest point on an exposed metal doodad I would have the possibility of an exciting death combining a lightning strike with a flaming jeep accident and a thousand-foot plunge into a rushing river. You have to look on these things with a certain detachment. But not the jeep; you want to focus on remaining firmly attached to that.
The situation was most craptacular, but Karun and his father decided to take me under their wing and make me the third member of their group, treating me to all the negotiating benefits of apparently being part of a trio of broke-ass pilgrims. We had great difficulty finding a room in Janki Chatti, and the storm became so fierce we sheltered under a posts-n-trash-bags dhaba for a rest and some chai. They insisted on feeding me, and upon seeing my stomach unease Karun's father revealed he was a pharmacist and offered me one of an assortment of very large pills. I took it without water, suspecting that Janki Chatti's water supply would quite negate the salutary effects of pharmaceuticals. The pill did not have precisely the desired effect, as I immediately bolted up to go for my monthly vomit. I hunched over a miraculously-situated rubbish bin (I hope some day to find all 9 of India's remaining trash cans) in the edge of the rain, and puked my guts out a few inches away from the faces of a group of mules. The howling winds caught dribbles of my dangling, spit-infused regurgitation and blew them straight onto the mules' cheeks. I grinned with perverse satisfaction. "Well," I thought, "I may be puking my guts out in a goddamn thunderstorm next to a bunch of mules, but at least I still have some dignity...."
"...Bitch."
The three of us eventually found a room and I spent the remainder of the evening not eating a bite and huddling quite snugly and smugly under a heavy blanket. Pharma-Dad had a great deal to say about my condition and showed me a number of pills I could take if I so desired. Finally he concluded "What you need is Shiva." I was a little irritated by this. I didn't wish to begin a debate on traditional healing, and I had already had a bit of an odd conversation after Karun claimed his father was a Christian, which would have made this a rather odd pilgrimage, especially since the father lit candles and prayed to Shiva at dusk.
"What you need is the Shiva power" he repeated.
"Shiva power?" Color me skeptical.
"Yes, Shiva. Here, look, the Shiva power." Karun's father then began unwinding a dirty old rag. "The Shiva medicine can cure many problem. The headache, the fever, many illness, anything that make you need the rest. Take the Shiva." He opened the rag and showed me Shiva: a perfect ten-gram lump of sticky, soft, dark brown hashish. "You must take this any time" he said. Well, doctor's orders.
Karun and Pharma-Dad left for Yamunotri at some godforsaken hour of the morning, and I crawled out of my primordial blanket-cave around to pounce upon my age-old prey: gluten biscuits. The hike to Yamunotri is only five kilometers, but it is quite steep, and in my condition I found myself stopping every few hundred yards to contemplate the miserable fate of all living beings. It took me far too long to walk that negligible distance, but at least I had objective verification that parts of the trail were pretty hard: Yamunotri is far and away the home of Uttarakhand's most perilously-descending dholi-teams and its angriest, most immobile mules. Nobody was having a good time of it.
When I finally reached Yamunotri I was blown away. I'd been told by numerous people that it was the least interesting of the four great mountain temples, but it was beautiful. It is the lowest of them, and lies in a tight, lush gorge where the dripping-wet trees tumble down the slopes of the enormous Bandarpunch massif that closes in from every side. Once again, Yamunotri is evidently not the actual source of the Yamuna river, but in this case it is forgivable, because about fifty meters past the temple the water becomes a sheer tumble down the side of a snow-capped mountain from a glacial lake that you aren't getting to without the aid of actual climbing equipment. The town is tiny, but incredibly crowded as it has but one street the terminates in a horrendous crossing on a staircase when pilgrims to the temple must force their way past half-naked, dripping-wet men who have emerged from the hot pools on their way to recover their clothes and shoes. Finally, at the top of these stairs is a large stone patio and the temple itself. The temple is small and not much to look at save for its bright yellow pinnacle. Upon close inspection, the lower half of the shrine is built of the same cheap concrete pillars as every new village shrine in India, but these pillars have been covered, apparently, in kitchen-top granite slabs. The result is that the temple looks half-Mahabharata, half-Country Living. I stayed for a long time because it really is a beautiful spot, and I found a little ledge by the bathing ghat on which to nap. I napped soundly until I was awoken by a police officer jabbing me with a big wooden stick. He wasn't angry with me; indeed, he was concerned I was suffering from a serious headache. It's just that Indian cops know no way of interacting with the world that doesn't involve hitting things with sticks.
I returned to Janki Chatti and had an all-too familiar conversation with my hotel manager. Later, on the phone with Girlface I was asked "How do you get kicked out of so many hotels? You don't do anything bad!" Well, that is patently false, but she is right that I do nothing to hotels or their managers to deserve my constant ejection onto the streets of inclement mountain villages. Anyways, it didn't matter. I resolved, once again, to make an early start down towards the lower valleys of Uttarakhand, and this time I wasn't coming back. Uttarakhand was lovely, perhaps my favorite of all sixteen states I've toured so far, but I had completed my mission and more. It's time to move on.
Himachal Pradesh, you're next. Guard your cows.
Jun 1, 2010
The Treasure Is The Glaciers Of Ice
Part 1: Kedarnath
Later that day...
The glacial lake was empty. Girlface Buddha and I had walked up a long stone trail above Kedarnath to a sacred lake on the edge of the mountainside, one of the various places to have been distinguished by the sprinkling of Mahatma Ghandi's ashes. We reached the end of the trail, and it was about as definitive an ending as there could be because beyond the lake was nothing but sheer faces of ice and rock. If you were very determined you could equip a full-scale expedition to cross the glaciers, but you wouldn't get anywhere but even more isolated mountains and glaciers to climb over. Nevertheless, reaching the end was slightly irritating seeing as this lake has gotten the shit global-warmed out of it.
Everyone in Uttarakhand believes in global warming. You don't have to tell them about complicated observations of glacial meltage and carbon emissions and such, because they will just point out across the rocks and say "When I was a whippersnapper the glacier used to be here, now it's there. It's global warming." In the lowland city of Dehra Dun one man told me "Did you know it used to snow here in the winter?"
Cue the cries of a million Republicans: "Global warming? But it's sooooo coooooooooollldd." Cold? You shut the fuck up and you shut the fuck up NOW; that's what the fuck you do. Let Ghostface Buddha tell you some stories about cold. For instance, falling into a glacial river, that's pretty cold.
Well, I didn't so much fall into the river as slip into a shin-deep creek I was crossing on the slopes of the snowy ridges whence the water tumbled. In any event, the frigid waters soaked my legs and flooded my shoes, and though it was not miserable it was certainly unpleasant. When it really became ugly was when we realized that because of laundry issues I had made the 14-km hike up to Kedarnath the previous day without bringing a spare pair of socks. Not so easily discouraged, I planned on walking around town looking exaggeratedly miserable until someone agreed to let me dry my socks by their chai-boiling fire. Then we got kicked out of Kedarnath.
Once again, I may need to clarify: we were merely kicked out of our hotel. The owner, who I did not like, was upset with us for two reasons. 1) I had been repeatedly ignoring his angry bangings on our door on the assmuption that he was a member of the pilgrim group that was having exceptional difficulties keeping track of which four of the eight rooms in the lodge they had rented. 2) It was four hours past checkout time and nobody had informed us that we were supposed to vacate the premises in favor of a group of huddling pilgrims. The man was livid and within five minutes we were on the streets of Kedarnath village looking around very anxiously at a donkey-train of pilgrims passing through town that definitely outnumbered the amount of available hotel rooms. Girlface and I looked at one another in despair. She realized before I had to break it to her that we were about to have to make an unexpected and rapid descent of the Kedarnath trail before nightfall.
"OK, we must go" she said in a no-nonsense manner. Trying to lighten the mood she added "It's no problem, we're the fastest people here!" There actually was one problem: I had no socks and a sheet of ice had formed in the bottom of each of my shoes. But then, rummaging through my bag, I remembered I still had my emergency hot-floor socks I take everywhere! Except there was only one sock. I then had one of those perverse flashes of inspiration that come to me from time to time. I may not have had any more socks, but I did have two pairs of clean underwear. I tried to decide which I liked less. "Alright," I thought, "It's going to be the last flight of the Scotch Red," and tied the ill-fated pair in a knot around my right foot and began hobbling down the mountain.
In no circumstances are boxer shorts the ideal footwear for rough stone trails in the mountains, but the experience was made all the more unpleasant by the now-pervasive coating of dry, pummeled shit of three thousand donkeys on the entire length of the trail. Or at least it was dry, pummeled shit until it started to rain. And it least it was merely cold, squelching shit rubbing on my bruising feet through my much-abused underwear until it became goddamn freezing, squelching shit when it started to snow. Four rushed hours of this torment and one failed attempt at squeezing into Girlface's petite spare loafers later, we arrived in a darkened Gaurikund and went to retrieve the bulk of our luggage, to discover that the hotel we had hoped of returning to was now full. Fortunately, we found a place nearby in a closet-sized box to sleep in, and the hotel boy brought us down to the manager to check in. "Room is OK" I said. The manager looked at me with a face somewhere between fear, confusion, and contempt. I realized what the problem was, and decided to clear up matters so he wouldn't think I was crazy. "OK, Girlface, translate this very carefully into Hindi so the man understands...."
"You must know... that I did not shit my pants... I was just wearing my underwear as shoes... and this is donkey shit... and I promise to throw them away."
It did not help at all.
Intermission
Travel in Uttarakhand is a huge pain in the ass, and getting from one place to another takes days. Besides the fact that vehicles can rarely exceed 25 miles per hour on the dangerous, narrow roads, one frequently comes to a chokepoint where two buses are extremely slowly inching forwards and backwards to clear each other on the one-lane roads without sending one of them and its fifty passengers for a thousand-foot plummet into the nearest sacred river. Furthermore, you can only even travel for half the day because for some reason the people of the highlands are loath to depart any town in the afternoon. Even if you get out at seven in the morning and arrive in your transfer point in midafternoon, too fucking bad, you're spending the night, because the last bus out left at 11:30. It's partly because they don't want to travel after dark, but this is hogwash because the scheduled trips always end up hours late anyways and crawl through the dark whether they like it or not.
All this assumes the transport actually leaves. Often, you can sit in a stationary jeep for hours at a time waiting for more customers to fill up the 'departure quota', only for the driver to decide he doesn't really feel like working today. The locals take this bullshit in remarkably good spirits and I always wondered what gave them this zenlike composure in the face of such intransigence. Over the course of some recent conversations I've realized it's because they never leave the state and have spent their entire lives assuming that this is the best you can expect from the operators of motor vehicles. I don't find any fault in this provincial attitude; attempts to leave the state are doomed to near-certain failure.
For these various reasons, it took me no less than three days of travel to cover the 250-odd kilometers (155 miles, seriously) between Gaurikund and Gangotri. The last transit point, the rather uninspiring town of Uttarkashi, marked a sad moment for this blog: it was as far as Girlface Buddha could continue on the journey. Alas, despite all my arguments that gainful employment is wildly overrated, she felt obliged to end her vacation and return to her accounting job as scheduled and not get fired.
Wait till she finds out I switched the pocket calculator in her purse with a similarly sized glow-in-the-dark, plastic-framed mini poster of Lord Ganesh.
Part 2: Gangotri and Gaumukh
In Kedarnath I walked 14km down a mountain on a shit-strewn pilgrim trail, some of it in a snowstorm, wearing a pair of boxer shorts on one foot. Oh, I can hear myself telling the grandkids now. But it was on my next adventure that shit really got...real.
There I stood, at the source of the Ganges, looking upstream at another 18 or so kilometers of the Ganges river. Gangotri isn't really the source of the Ganges, they just say it is. I really can't figure out why, because to get here you have to pass along an very long and dangerous gorge whose foot would quite happily be identified as a 'source' by Hindus anywhere else, and beyond Gangotri to the actual source is actually much easier terrain. However, for those pilgrims whose piety trumps both their curiosity and their negligible desire to walk up to 4000 meters above sea level at the end of a glacier, the holy waters of Gangotri are quite satisfactory.
The Ganga temple of Gangotri marks the spot where King Bhagirathi meditated for the goddess Ganga to descend to Earth in the form of a river. You see, the king's wife had 60,000 sons, but the king sent them on a mission and they, like, pissed off this sage and he turned them all into ashes, so the king was like, please, we need a really big holy river to perform funeral rites and/or restore my 60,000 sons to life, and Ganga was like, yo, that sounds reasonable, I'ma come down, but wait, I'm too powerful, I'll destroy the Earth so someone has to catch me, and all of a sudden Shiva was like, yo, no worries, I'll meditate over here and I'll catch you with my dreadlocks.
And that's how it went down.
Gangotri is a beautiful place and on such an obnoxiously long, inconvenient route into the mountains that it is much less pilgrim'd than the first two Char Dham temples we've visited. It's a narrow valley full of pine forests and a small pilgrim town, with little stone hermitages dotting the edge of the wilderness. Right through the middle of it all, the upper reaches of the Ganges river roar through a deep, pitilessly vertical gorge where the water leaps through holes and crevices in the the smoothed stone walls, gouging it ever deeper like a taut wire cutting through a block of cheddar. The temple itself, however is not much to look at, and whoever has been going around publishing the common claim that the roof is "gilded" obviously has some difficulty distinguishing between a sheet of gold leaf and a sheet of gray metal that one of the gods left to be battered in an asteroid belt for a few cosmic cycles.
My real purpose in coming to Gangotri was to begin the hike up to the actual source of the Ganges, the ice-cave of Gaumukh, the "Cow's Mouth", the legendary formation at the bottom of the Gangotri glacier way up in the mountains. The trail is actually quite gentle and easy, but it is long, and there are several points that would appear difficult to the squeamish who don't want to cross icy creeks on slick logs or pause and cling to dusty cliff-faces when gusts of wind threaten to blow you off the extremely narrow footpath. Midway through the hike, you leave the forest and the trail really deteriorates as it becomes exposed in the whistling expanse of rocks and scraggly grass above the treeline. Rocks tumble onto the trail with bursts off wind and waterfalls crashing down from the snow-capped ridges directly overhead carve fresh little chasms in the loose dirt of the spindly path.
After many hours of walking you arrive at a place called Bhojbasa, which people have the audacity to call a village. Bhojbasa consists of: 1 restaurant with dormitory tents for hire, 1 police barracks, 1 ashram, 1 utility shack, and 1 utility manager's shack. Just beyond Bhojbasa is the massive pile of rocks left thousands of years ago when the Gangotri glacier reached its greatest length and didn't push no further. Neither the restaurant nor the ashram had anywhere for me to sleep, and I had a feeling the weather that night would be distinctly, well... glacial.
I decided my best chance was to wait for nightfall and look miserable so that someone would take me in, and that in the meantime I might as well hike my ass up the last five miles to the end of the glacier. From there on out the path was a mere track through the sand and boulders winding its way through the massive, barren gouge left in the mountain rocks by the ancient glacier. After a while, even the grass disappeared, and I was walking amid nothing but the multi-tonne boulder scatterings of the last ice age. Occasionally I would see a carving in the rocks, marking the toll of global warming, as the scientific and religious authorities had collobarated to mark the spots where the Gaumukh ice-cave stood in 1935, 1966, and so on. These glaciers are definitely melting. Finally, around the last mighty pile of rock deposits I saw it, the source of the Ganges, the Alpha, the holy spring whence flows forth the timeless life-giver of Indian civilization.
It looked like shit.
I'm not saying that Gaumukh doesn't possess a certain majesty; indeed, it is spectacular, but you would be hard-pressed to call it gorgeous. You see, the thing about glaciers that I had forgotten is that in addition to being rivers of ice, they also carry along incredible amounts of rock and dirt, especially at the ends. It took me a while to realize I was not going to climb up the giant pile of filthy rubble I saw before me to get to the glacier; it was the glacier. Right in the center, in the gaping hole that must be the Cow's Mouth, you could discern that indeed it was a huge mass of greyish ice, but that the ice, like solid stone beneath soil, was obscured by a thick coating of ugly brown crap. And from that gaping hole emerged a surprisingly large and powerful Ganges river.
It must be said that Gaumukh doesn't look a damn thing like a Cow's Mouth. Of course I didn't expect any more than the most passing resemblance on a geological feature, particularly one that spends centuries moving and melting. However, Gaumukh looks about as unlike any part of a cow as it possible to be. The most important part is called the "Snout", which on every cow I have seen is an outwards projection of the head, whereas on the glacier the snout is a gargantuan indentation in the ice. It wouldn't look like a cow's face unless they were to find a cow that had recently confronted a sledgehammer. (A note to the Hindu priesthood: I have a suggestion for a service I could render...)
Some pilgrims caught up and began clambering over to the riverside to collect the holy water in big plastic jugs. They dipped into the freezing torrent and emerged with a proudly-filled containers of yellowish sludge. Far from being a pristine source of ever-clear melted ice poured from the heavens that many expect, even at its very source the revered Ganges is visibly disgusting, and doesn’t become clean for a single inch of its epic journey. I felt that this threw a new perspective on the last eight months of my life.
I stayed up at the glacier to watch the sun fall behind the mountains and cast massive shadows across the valley, and had half a mind to get to some serious plant-extract-assisted “meditation” only to find that it was impossible to keep a light in the whirling winds. Perhaps that’s why I didn’t see any saddhus up there. I trudged back to Bhojbasa for my delayed confrontation with homelessness. I made a point of befriending everybody who was huddled in the Spartan mountain canteen, and as the diners dispersed I stood with my day-pack near the front gate of the compound, very exaggeratedly and slowly changing my clothing in the chill alpine air. One person after another became alarmed and would say “Oh, please see for room at the ashram!”, the ashram being full, and people from the ashram would say “Best you look at the lodge!”, which was of course full. When this dilemma was pointed out, nobody really had anything to say.
Finally, the last diners tucked off to bed and I was forced to resort to plan 2, or rather, plan 2x10^99, where all other plans were “Say ‘fuck’ repeatedly.” I was going to sleep outside.
About a kilometer into the old glacier-path I had spotted a boulder with an Om sign painted on it, and had peeked around and discovered a cleft of sorts in the rubble where a Shaivite trident and some rusting butter-lamp trays marked the long-abandoned refuge of an unknown saddhu. Well, if the babas can do it, so can I. I put on every item of clothing I had and nestled into the rocks, found a way to shield a lighter from the wind, and decided that if I was going to curl up to sleep at 4000 treeless, windswept meters in the Himalayas at the end of a glacier behind a fucking rock like a deranged, frostbitten mystic, at least I was going to get high first. If a man has no principles in the face of hardship he has no principles at all.
It was, without a doubt, the coldest night of my life.
The next morning I shuffled down to the café for an overpriced potato breakfast. “Oh, where did you sleep?” the manager inquired. I answered first by brushing the coat of dust and small pebbles out of the fold in my wooly hat, sniffed a wet dribble up into my nose and added verbally, for clarity “Fuck You is where. Give me that chocolate bar or we’re both going to fucking die.”
That evening I was back in Gangotri. I hiked down that very morning despite my weariness because I refused to take a bed for the second night and give those people any money. Hot noodles awaited me, and after devouring three orders of them I creaked my body to a pay phone.
“Hi! How was Gaumukh!” Girlface said on the other end of the line.
“It was spectacular…” I said (and I meant it), “…oh, and how do you say cumming on the face of adversity in Hindi?”
“I’m at work. Don’t be disgusting. AND WHERE’S MY CALCULATOR?”
Later that day...
The glacial lake was empty. Girlface Buddha and I had walked up a long stone trail above Kedarnath to a sacred lake on the edge of the mountainside, one of the various places to have been distinguished by the sprinkling of Mahatma Ghandi's ashes. We reached the end of the trail, and it was about as definitive an ending as there could be because beyond the lake was nothing but sheer faces of ice and rock. If you were very determined you could equip a full-scale expedition to cross the glaciers, but you wouldn't get anywhere but even more isolated mountains and glaciers to climb over. Nevertheless, reaching the end was slightly irritating seeing as this lake has gotten the shit global-warmed out of it.
Everyone in Uttarakhand believes in global warming. You don't have to tell them about complicated observations of glacial meltage and carbon emissions and such, because they will just point out across the rocks and say "When I was a whippersnapper the glacier used to be here, now it's there. It's global warming." In the lowland city of Dehra Dun one man told me "Did you know it used to snow here in the winter?"
Cue the cries of a million Republicans: "Global warming? But it's sooooo coooooooooollldd." Cold? You shut the fuck up and you shut the fuck up NOW; that's what the fuck you do. Let Ghostface Buddha tell you some stories about cold. For instance, falling into a glacial river, that's pretty cold.
Well, I didn't so much fall into the river as slip into a shin-deep creek I was crossing on the slopes of the snowy ridges whence the water tumbled. In any event, the frigid waters soaked my legs and flooded my shoes, and though it was not miserable it was certainly unpleasant. When it really became ugly was when we realized that because of laundry issues I had made the 14-km hike up to Kedarnath the previous day without bringing a spare pair of socks. Not so easily discouraged, I planned on walking around town looking exaggeratedly miserable until someone agreed to let me dry my socks by their chai-boiling fire. Then we got kicked out of Kedarnath.
Once again, I may need to clarify: we were merely kicked out of our hotel. The owner, who I did not like, was upset with us for two reasons. 1) I had been repeatedly ignoring his angry bangings on our door on the assmuption that he was a member of the pilgrim group that was having exceptional difficulties keeping track of which four of the eight rooms in the lodge they had rented. 2) It was four hours past checkout time and nobody had informed us that we were supposed to vacate the premises in favor of a group of huddling pilgrims. The man was livid and within five minutes we were on the streets of Kedarnath village looking around very anxiously at a donkey-train of pilgrims passing through town that definitely outnumbered the amount of available hotel rooms. Girlface and I looked at one another in despair. She realized before I had to break it to her that we were about to have to make an unexpected and rapid descent of the Kedarnath trail before nightfall.
"OK, we must go" she said in a no-nonsense manner. Trying to lighten the mood she added "It's no problem, we're the fastest people here!" There actually was one problem: I had no socks and a sheet of ice had formed in the bottom of each of my shoes. But then, rummaging through my bag, I remembered I still had my emergency hot-floor socks I take everywhere! Except there was only one sock. I then had one of those perverse flashes of inspiration that come to me from time to time. I may not have had any more socks, but I did have two pairs of clean underwear. I tried to decide which I liked less. "Alright," I thought, "It's going to be the last flight of the Scotch Red," and tied the ill-fated pair in a knot around my right foot and began hobbling down the mountain.
In no circumstances are boxer shorts the ideal footwear for rough stone trails in the mountains, but the experience was made all the more unpleasant by the now-pervasive coating of dry, pummeled shit of three thousand donkeys on the entire length of the trail. Or at least it was dry, pummeled shit until it started to rain. And it least it was merely cold, squelching shit rubbing on my bruising feet through my much-abused underwear until it became goddamn freezing, squelching shit when it started to snow. Four rushed hours of this torment and one failed attempt at squeezing into Girlface's petite spare loafers later, we arrived in a darkened Gaurikund and went to retrieve the bulk of our luggage, to discover that the hotel we had hoped of returning to was now full. Fortunately, we found a place nearby in a closet-sized box to sleep in, and the hotel boy brought us down to the manager to check in. "Room is OK" I said. The manager looked at me with a face somewhere between fear, confusion, and contempt. I realized what the problem was, and decided to clear up matters so he wouldn't think I was crazy. "OK, Girlface, translate this very carefully into Hindi so the man understands...."
"You must know... that I did not shit my pants... I was just wearing my underwear as shoes... and this is donkey shit... and I promise to throw them away."
It did not help at all.
Intermission
Travel in Uttarakhand is a huge pain in the ass, and getting from one place to another takes days. Besides the fact that vehicles can rarely exceed 25 miles per hour on the dangerous, narrow roads, one frequently comes to a chokepoint where two buses are extremely slowly inching forwards and backwards to clear each other on the one-lane roads without sending one of them and its fifty passengers for a thousand-foot plummet into the nearest sacred river. Furthermore, you can only even travel for half the day because for some reason the people of the highlands are loath to depart any town in the afternoon. Even if you get out at seven in the morning and arrive in your transfer point in midafternoon, too fucking bad, you're spending the night, because the last bus out left at 11:30. It's partly because they don't want to travel after dark, but this is hogwash because the scheduled trips always end up hours late anyways and crawl through the dark whether they like it or not.
All this assumes the transport actually leaves. Often, you can sit in a stationary jeep for hours at a time waiting for more customers to fill up the 'departure quota', only for the driver to decide he doesn't really feel like working today. The locals take this bullshit in remarkably good spirits and I always wondered what gave them this zenlike composure in the face of such intransigence. Over the course of some recent conversations I've realized it's because they never leave the state and have spent their entire lives assuming that this is the best you can expect from the operators of motor vehicles. I don't find any fault in this provincial attitude; attempts to leave the state are doomed to near-certain failure.
For these various reasons, it took me no less than three days of travel to cover the 250-odd kilometers (155 miles, seriously) between Gaurikund and Gangotri. The last transit point, the rather uninspiring town of Uttarkashi, marked a sad moment for this blog: it was as far as Girlface Buddha could continue on the journey. Alas, despite all my arguments that gainful employment is wildly overrated, she felt obliged to end her vacation and return to her accounting job as scheduled and not get fired.
Wait till she finds out I switched the pocket calculator in her purse with a similarly sized glow-in-the-dark, plastic-framed mini poster of Lord Ganesh.
Part 2: Gangotri and Gaumukh
In Kedarnath I walked 14km down a mountain on a shit-strewn pilgrim trail, some of it in a snowstorm, wearing a pair of boxer shorts on one foot. Oh, I can hear myself telling the grandkids now. But it was on my next adventure that shit really got...real.
There I stood, at the source of the Ganges, looking upstream at another 18 or so kilometers of the Ganges river. Gangotri isn't really the source of the Ganges, they just say it is. I really can't figure out why, because to get here you have to pass along an very long and dangerous gorge whose foot would quite happily be identified as a 'source' by Hindus anywhere else, and beyond Gangotri to the actual source is actually much easier terrain. However, for those pilgrims whose piety trumps both their curiosity and their negligible desire to walk up to 4000 meters above sea level at the end of a glacier, the holy waters of Gangotri are quite satisfactory.
The Ganga temple of Gangotri marks the spot where King Bhagirathi meditated for the goddess Ganga to descend to Earth in the form of a river. You see, the king's wife had 60,000 sons, but the king sent them on a mission and they, like, pissed off this sage and he turned them all into ashes, so the king was like, please, we need a really big holy river to perform funeral rites and/or restore my 60,000 sons to life, and Ganga was like, yo, that sounds reasonable, I'ma come down, but wait, I'm too powerful, I'll destroy the Earth so someone has to catch me, and all of a sudden Shiva was like, yo, no worries, I'll meditate over here and I'll catch you with my dreadlocks.
And that's how it went down.
Gangotri is a beautiful place and on such an obnoxiously long, inconvenient route into the mountains that it is much less pilgrim'd than the first two Char Dham temples we've visited. It's a narrow valley full of pine forests and a small pilgrim town, with little stone hermitages dotting the edge of the wilderness. Right through the middle of it all, the upper reaches of the Ganges river roar through a deep, pitilessly vertical gorge where the water leaps through holes and crevices in the the smoothed stone walls, gouging it ever deeper like a taut wire cutting through a block of cheddar. The temple itself, however is not much to look at, and whoever has been going around publishing the common claim that the roof is "gilded" obviously has some difficulty distinguishing between a sheet of gold leaf and a sheet of gray metal that one of the gods left to be battered in an asteroid belt for a few cosmic cycles.
My real purpose in coming to Gangotri was to begin the hike up to the actual source of the Ganges, the ice-cave of Gaumukh, the "Cow's Mouth", the legendary formation at the bottom of the Gangotri glacier way up in the mountains. The trail is actually quite gentle and easy, but it is long, and there are several points that would appear difficult to the squeamish who don't want to cross icy creeks on slick logs or pause and cling to dusty cliff-faces when gusts of wind threaten to blow you off the extremely narrow footpath. Midway through the hike, you leave the forest and the trail really deteriorates as it becomes exposed in the whistling expanse of rocks and scraggly grass above the treeline. Rocks tumble onto the trail with bursts off wind and waterfalls crashing down from the snow-capped ridges directly overhead carve fresh little chasms in the loose dirt of the spindly path.
After many hours of walking you arrive at a place called Bhojbasa, which people have the audacity to call a village. Bhojbasa consists of: 1 restaurant with dormitory tents for hire, 1 police barracks, 1 ashram, 1 utility shack, and 1 utility manager's shack. Just beyond Bhojbasa is the massive pile of rocks left thousands of years ago when the Gangotri glacier reached its greatest length and didn't push no further. Neither the restaurant nor the ashram had anywhere for me to sleep, and I had a feeling the weather that night would be distinctly, well... glacial.
I decided my best chance was to wait for nightfall and look miserable so that someone would take me in, and that in the meantime I might as well hike my ass up the last five miles to the end of the glacier. From there on out the path was a mere track through the sand and boulders winding its way through the massive, barren gouge left in the mountain rocks by the ancient glacier. After a while, even the grass disappeared, and I was walking amid nothing but the multi-tonne boulder scatterings of the last ice age. Occasionally I would see a carving in the rocks, marking the toll of global warming, as the scientific and religious authorities had collobarated to mark the spots where the Gaumukh ice-cave stood in 1935, 1966, and so on. These glaciers are definitely melting. Finally, around the last mighty pile of rock deposits I saw it, the source of the Ganges, the Alpha, the holy spring whence flows forth the timeless life-giver of Indian civilization.
It looked like shit.
I'm not saying that Gaumukh doesn't possess a certain majesty; indeed, it is spectacular, but you would be hard-pressed to call it gorgeous. You see, the thing about glaciers that I had forgotten is that in addition to being rivers of ice, they also carry along incredible amounts of rock and dirt, especially at the ends. It took me a while to realize I was not going to climb up the giant pile of filthy rubble I saw before me to get to the glacier; it was the glacier. Right in the center, in the gaping hole that must be the Cow's Mouth, you could discern that indeed it was a huge mass of greyish ice, but that the ice, like solid stone beneath soil, was obscured by a thick coating of ugly brown crap. And from that gaping hole emerged a surprisingly large and powerful Ganges river.
It must be said that Gaumukh doesn't look a damn thing like a Cow's Mouth. Of course I didn't expect any more than the most passing resemblance on a geological feature, particularly one that spends centuries moving and melting. However, Gaumukh looks about as unlike any part of a cow as it possible to be. The most important part is called the "Snout", which on every cow I have seen is an outwards projection of the head, whereas on the glacier the snout is a gargantuan indentation in the ice. It wouldn't look like a cow's face unless they were to find a cow that had recently confronted a sledgehammer. (A note to the Hindu priesthood: I have a suggestion for a service I could render...)
Some pilgrims caught up and began clambering over to the riverside to collect the holy water in big plastic jugs. They dipped into the freezing torrent and emerged with a proudly-filled containers of yellowish sludge. Far from being a pristine source of ever-clear melted ice poured from the heavens that many expect, even at its very source the revered Ganges is visibly disgusting, and doesn’t become clean for a single inch of its epic journey. I felt that this threw a new perspective on the last eight months of my life.
I stayed up at the glacier to watch the sun fall behind the mountains and cast massive shadows across the valley, and had half a mind to get to some serious plant-extract-assisted “meditation” only to find that it was impossible to keep a light in the whirling winds. Perhaps that’s why I didn’t see any saddhus up there. I trudged back to Bhojbasa for my delayed confrontation with homelessness. I made a point of befriending everybody who was huddled in the Spartan mountain canteen, and as the diners dispersed I stood with my day-pack near the front gate of the compound, very exaggeratedly and slowly changing my clothing in the chill alpine air. One person after another became alarmed and would say “Oh, please see for room at the ashram!”, the ashram being full, and people from the ashram would say “Best you look at the lodge!”, which was of course full. When this dilemma was pointed out, nobody really had anything to say.
Finally, the last diners tucked off to bed and I was forced to resort to plan 2, or rather, plan 2x10^99, where all other plans were “Say ‘fuck’ repeatedly.” I was going to sleep outside.
About a kilometer into the old glacier-path I had spotted a boulder with an Om sign painted on it, and had peeked around and discovered a cleft of sorts in the rubble where a Shaivite trident and some rusting butter-lamp trays marked the long-abandoned refuge of an unknown saddhu. Well, if the babas can do it, so can I. I put on every item of clothing I had and nestled into the rocks, found a way to shield a lighter from the wind, and decided that if I was going to curl up to sleep at 4000 treeless, windswept meters in the Himalayas at the end of a glacier behind a fucking rock like a deranged, frostbitten mystic, at least I was going to get high first. If a man has no principles in the face of hardship he has no principles at all.
It was, without a doubt, the coldest night of my life.
The next morning I shuffled down to the café for an overpriced potato breakfast. “Oh, where did you sleep?” the manager inquired. I answered first by brushing the coat of dust and small pebbles out of the fold in my wooly hat, sniffed a wet dribble up into my nose and added verbally, for clarity “Fuck You is where. Give me that chocolate bar or we’re both going to fucking die.”
That evening I was back in Gangotri. I hiked down that very morning despite my weariness because I refused to take a bed for the second night and give those people any money. Hot noodles awaited me, and after devouring three orders of them I creaked my body to a pay phone.
“Hi! How was Gaumukh!” Girlface said on the other end of the line.
“It was spectacular…” I said (and I meant it), “…oh, and how do you say cumming on the face of adversity in Hindi?”
“I’m at work. Don’t be disgusting. AND WHERE’S MY CALCULATOR?”
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