bicrom abroad

there and back again

it’s been a busy, and fairly incredible, few days. i left shimla early on friday morning to head to manali. The journey was relatively scenic, winding around green hills besides the beas river, but uneventful as far as indian road journeys go. I did meet a very safe (northern!) irish couple though, ryan and rachel, who were to keep me company over the next few days. we arrived in manali at around 7 pm and i took a fairly instant dislike to the place… not as relaxed as shimla, with far more aggressive touts, nor particularly attractive due to the choking traffic. As such, we booked a share taxi to go to kaza the next morning at 6 am.
i’m nowhere near as bad in the mornings as some people, but following a tiring all day bus journey the day before i was hardly bright eyed and bushy tailed come saturday morning. we had a bit of luck as there were only three of us in the jeep so it was fairly spacious in the middle seats. still, the road snaking up the mountain away from manali was suitably bumpy to prevent too much comfort (after all, that would have been un-Indian).we wound all the way up to the rotang la pass, at just under 4,000m above sea level. i enjoyed the green hills of shimla, but i had come to himachal pradesh to see the huge snow capped peaks that i associated with the himalaya. as the jeep trundled over the ridge of the pass i witnessed an image that will stay with me forever… a line of imposing, dark mountains, sheer white glaciers at the top with waterfalls tumbling all the way down the sides. it was one of those (few) moments that made even me shut the fuck up for a second, as i gaped slack jawed in wonder. fortunately, the sight of these himalayan peaks was something i was to get relatively accustomed to in the following days.
the journey continued down a dirt track which forced it's way through the valley in the shadow of the mountains. the amazing views that surrounded the jeep were however tempered by the hilariously bumpy ride within. we discovered that the back of the jeep, where four cramped seats had been jammed in, was the place to sit if you really wanted to emphasise the bumps and continually slam your head into the roof (anyone who’s witnessed me insisting on drinking until i’m sick will know how much i enjoy these kinds of masochistic japes). this dirt track continued for about three hours, concluding in a crawl up to nungri la. at 4,500m some buddhist madman had made a gompa offering both breathtaking views, and an insight into the mind of these crazy buddhist types: the more inhospitable or inaccesible the terrain, the more eager they are to put a gompa up. i saw them up mountains, down sheer scree drops perched perilously above swirling rivers, pretty much anywhere where going for a quick pray carried with it a solid chance of death.
nungri la also saw the birth of a new extreme sport: al fresco peeing, which involved whipping the old man out and micturating to the most spectacular views possible. al fresco pooing is still in development, but i have to say that even i’m not that keen.
from nungri la the scenery changed, as the mountains which had been green towards their bases, feeding into a lush valley, changed to dramatic red rock. we entered spiti valley in a cloud of dust and headed towards kaza. the air was noticeably thinner as we finally arrived at a still relatively ramshackle town, based at 3,600m.
kaza is a strange place: very dusty and hot, and totally surrounded by imposing red rock mountains. it is located at the start of the tibetan plateau, about 100km west of tibet itself, and both ethnically and culturally is almost entirely tibetan: monday may have been indian independence day but in kaza noone had a clue. the most noticeable thing was the complete lack of people hassling you. there are travellers heading out there, but still no touts or beggars. everyone just leaves you alone to get on with it, a total rarity in india. Furthemore there are no mobiles and no internet connection (the claims of some places to be cyber cafes were basically a lie).
spitian languages vary, and are nothing like hindi or bengali. there is however one truly indispensable word: jule means hello, goodbye, please, thank you, sausage egg and chips, and pretty much anything else inbetween. it just makes learing a new language so much easier when there’s only one word in it.
the next day we headed up to ki gompa. as further proof of insane gompa building, this is perched on a rocky outcrop at about 4,200m… crazy monks. The place itself is absolutely incredible: serene, with stunning views in whichever direction you look. we managed to ingratiate ourselves to a monk, who showed us around and made us tibetan black tea. a thoroughly nice chap, although a quick glance at his forearms (like anvils) sugested he was not one to be trifled with. the entire place was noteworthy in that it even made me, not the most peaceful of souls, calm down and keep quiet too. oh, and there was also a particularly friendly cow in residence, although i’m thinking it was probably a hindu cow providing a professional service rather than a buddhist one hoping that a life providing monks with dung would lead to rebirth as a badger.
from ki we headed up to kibber, which claims to be the highest village in the world. At over 4,300m it’s a pretty good shout. we were just going to stop for a cup of chai, but having espied a gompa at the top of the village we decided to scramble up there. at that kind of height any kind of exertion is tiring so having reached the gompa i stopped for a while to check out the view. kibber is set on a green mountain: looking up the slope from the gompa you could just make out a jagged white peak behind it. my curiousity piqued, I began to wonder what the view would be from up the top. i started meandering up with ryan and after a few minutes we decided it would be a nice half hour stroll.
an hour later we were both out of breath and baked in the midday sun: we also had however one of the most spectacular views I have ever experienced, a panoramic snapshot of the entire valley with awesome peaks in every direction. stunning. our sense of achievement was slightly dimmed when an old spitian woman ambled up and past us, but anyone born around here must have lungs like an elephant so we threw out a quick jule and tried not to think about it.
the rest of the day was spent recuperating. at night we crashed a tibetan wedding: some head honcho was marrying off his daughter and it was pretty much an open inivite. good craic, though not as good as bengali ones (although they did provide a beverage which, while smelling like an unhappy mix of ethanol and despair, was actually quite quaffable).
the following day we went to tabo gompa, where the dalai lama plans to retire. although containing some stunning frescoes, my gompa standards were artificially high after ki, so it was a bit of an anticlimax. in the distance however you could see a peak that was clearly higher than the others. this was kinnaur kailash on the tibetan border, winter home of shiva and one of the most aggressive, and beautiful, mounds of rock i will ever see.
The time had come to leave kaza, as i wanted to get to dharamsala for a few days. so, the next day we bundled into another taxi jeep: unfortunately it had been overbooked so there were three people in the front, four in the middle seat (a tight squeeze), and four in the back (a tighter squeeze with added bumps). the atmosphere in the cab was therefore distinctly frosty, a situation not helped by the driver trundling along slowly on the last smoothish roads for a few hours, contentedly singing along to the hindu devotional music blaring out of his stereo.
i started off in the middle seat, but at the spiti checkpoint ryan and I took one for the team and went to the back seat to allow a french girl suffering from bad stomach (silly white people!) to have a comfier window seat. for some reason this rearrangement totally alleviated the tension in the jeep. our driver turned out to be a lot quicker on a dirt track, and another new extreme sport of chicken was invented which involved not holding onto anything so you flew about in the air: a great game that had to be stopped when I almost jammed my neck through my spine and into my coccyx. again, hilarious (though i can’t really move my toes anymore).
we were making good time and spirits were high: it looked like we would be in manali for about 6. all of a sudden we came to a queue of jeeps and buses… we got out for a reccy to find a landslide had taken out a small portion of the road. The drivers were trying to refashion a track but ryan and i thought more hands light work and all that and got involved lugging rocks into the newly formed crevice. soon a bunch of tourists were getting stuck in and we were making good, if muddy, progress. finally, after an hour, we sent a jeep over and there was much jubilation.
short lived i’m afraid. there were a few army vans in the queue: although the soliders had impressive tasches, as required, they had done fuck all to help the rescue effort. now the track was up however they barged to the front with one of their two wheel drive vans and promptly got stuck. cue the waste of another half hour until the truck was able to reverse out. rather than moving to the side and letting the passenger jeeps go, the army decided to try again. another stuck wheel, another wasted half hour. by this point all of the tourists that had helped make the new track were getting increasingly irate. i spotted a chap in camoflauge combats and some rather sharp aviators so i went over to harangue him. it turned out that he was the officer for these parts: this meant that he was in charge of the whole affair. after politely asking him where he’d been for the last two hours (and calling him a congenital retard and a moron in my most incomprhensible sarf london accent) i suggested that he tell the army to let our jeeps go, then work on strenghthening the road, thus preventing an unnecessary backlog. the cretin however was having none of it, so we all had to watch our hard work get dismantled as we got wetter and more dismayed in the drizzle.
it seemed that the master plan was to dynamite one of the big rocks out of the way. the chap holding the dynamite was a bit of a legend: constantly leaving it lying around and always with a fag in his mouth (which at one point he dropped next to the bag: white faces and people running away all around). finally, after an hour of making a hole in the rock, they embedded the explosives. an exciting bang, but absolutely zero effect. so, a gang of about twenty spivvys just rolled the rock out of the way instead! why not just do that in the first place! eejits.
anyway, at 7pm we finally got rolling again, having a final glimpse at the mountains that manage to simultaneously be both supremely beautiful and unreasonably intimidating, and started up to rotang la. the name means the pass of dead bodies because the rapidly changing weather conditions have taken so many lives: as the bright moon suddenly disappeared behind fog so dense visibility was under ten metres, we began to fear we may be about to join the corpses. our driver had just received a call, no doubt from his missus asking him why he was three hours late already, so he decided that now was the most appropriate time to put his foot down.
the thing about the road is that it clings to the outside of the mountain, which means that on this one track road you are never more than a few feet from a pretty tasty plunge. the situation’s worse at corners: any brake failure or understeer and your jeep becomes a fairly ineffective plane. it was hair raising in the birght sunshine: in the dark and fog it was absolutely petrifying.
during rides like this in planes or english roads the stats are with you: planes rarely crash, english cabbies never fly off mountains. unfortunately in india all such bets are off: although i’m aware how melodramatic this sounds, i was genuinely scared for my life, and I know all the other denizens of the jeep (in itself no range rover) felt the same. ugly, white knuckle scenes all round, and more than a few muttered prayers to a variety of gods.
still fair play to the driver, because we made it, bruised, battered, but alive. after a great night’s sleep I’m preparing to leave manali again to go up to dharamsala, although as it’s just started pouring with rain i may stay an extra night. i’m back in the hills, and while the mountains gave me some of the most frightening moments of my life, they undoubtedly also provided some of the most awe inspiring. I haven’t bothered shaving for a week so I’m going for a cut throat shave and a head massage, as the closer you get to kashmir (dharamsala’s just below the state border) the less wise the beardie look is...

posted by bicrom @ 7:50 am