Pushkar Revisited

The preface to this entry .... http://justalittlemoreground.blogspot.com/2009/07/pushkar.html

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Our rented scooter’s headlight died with the engine as Thomas and I looked at each other skeptically. The gate to the yard of Shyam Lal’s hut has collapsed since the last time I had seen it and was laying on its side as a barrier to the front steps. “Shyam-baba,” I called out sheepishly, not wanting to disturb the sleepy cluster of neighboring huts. Nothing moved.
“Shyam-ji,” I yelled a bit louder. I was about to call out again when a woman suddenly appeared from the other side of a low cinderblock wall. “App kaha se hai? (Where are you from?” she asked accusingly. Thomas looked at me with the “I hate you, man,” glare that only a good friend can effectively pull off.
“Ham Ahmerika hai (We’re Americans),” I said quietly, trying to whisper but still be heard.
“Ahhh,” the woman sighed approvingly, flashing a toothy white smile across the dark entryway as she walked around the wall and removed the broken gate. We followed her across the tiny yard and up to the entrance. “Shyam Lal!” she shrieked louder than was necessary and simultaneously banged on the thick, wood door.

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I had phoned Shyam a week before to let him know that I would be in Pushkar. I assumed that he had understood but, in hindsight, he probably hadn’t. My first day in Delhi with no class was to be on Sunday so Thomas and I, seeing that we had only a two hour Hindi class on Saturday, decided to take both days off for our quick excursion to Pushkar. The two of us shot out of et at 6:00 am on Saturday, confident that we could still make our 6:05 am train to Ajmer. With a little sprinting and a lot of yelling at half-asleep rickshaw drivers we were standing, disappointed, on the empty rail platform at 6:14 am. Overhead on the loudspeaker a shrill woman listed all of the delayed departures. “Jaisalmer Express is five hours late, we are very sorry for the inconvenience. Ahmedabad Mail is seven hours late, we sincerely regret any inconvenience caused.” Apparently ours was the only on-time train in all of India that morning.
We found a booking agent and bought two tickets to Pushkar via what was enthusiastically described to us as a “deluxe AC coach.” We found our bus after a rickshaw ride from the New Delhi station to the Old Delhi station… neither deluxe nor AC equipped.
Touché, greasy travel agent man…
We perked up though as two very cute but similarly put-off French backpackers took their seats in front of us. An irate rickshaw wallah boarded next and began to pester the women from the aisle. Apparently, they had paid him the price that had been agreed upon but he was demanding more. The wallah began to get pushy and hovered over, trying to intimidate them. I got up from my seat to intervene
“Price malum hai…Yeh teek nahee hai,” I told him, finishing with “mahdachud” for good measure. He kind of blinked at me then turned back to the women, grabbed one of their legs, and began to yell again. With one hand on his shoulder and another on his slime covered chest I wrestled him to the front of the bus and pushed him out onto the street. I passed the appreciative women and turned to Thomas in desperate need of hand sanitizer.
We arrived in Jaipur at 3:00 where, unfortunately, the bus driver decided to terminate the half-completed journey. There was a lot of confusion and a packed tempo ride across town but we eventually found a bus that would take us from Jaipur to Ajmer. Our new bus was even less deluxe than the first and Tom and I found ourselves sharing a tiny, mysteriously stained sleeper compartment. This bus driver decided to end his shift at a dhaba fifteen kilometers outside of Ajmer so we hired a rickshaw to take us to our next bus. The final bus was the least deluxe of all with thirty seats for around fifty occupants but there was a chai-wallah selling one-rupee cups up and down the aisle.

Had Tom and I woken up just ten minutes earlier we wound have been in Pushkar by two in the afternoon. But we hadn’t, and at 10:00pm - sixteen hours, four rickshaws, three busses, and zero trains later – we finally arrived in Pushkar.

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The iron-studded wood door creaked open and the shrill pro-American woman stopped her screaming. A sleepy, confused Shyam Lal stared at me for a second and when he realized who I was drew me into his hut for about the biggest bear hug he could muster. I apologized repeatedly for our (clearly unexpected) late arrival and tried to avoid waking the four children who lay sleeping on the floor. Endra, the children’s mother, shuffled outside to make chai despite our protests and Shyam shook the rest awake. Anil, the eldest son, was excited but also disappointed to see that I had downgraded from a motorcycle to a busted scooted since the last he had seen me. Gigi, Shyam’s only daughter, stumbled around for a bit until a cup of chai finally cracked her eyes. We both told Endra that we were not hungry but chipati and subzje were nevertheless forced upon us. It being so late, the family’s outpour of hospitality had made us feel a little guilty so we told them that we would be fine on the roof for the night and begged them to go back to sleep. Shyam though would not rest untyil he was certain that we were as comfortable as possible. He, Gigi, Anil, Thomas, and I dragged a few thin sheets and lumpy pillows up their bamboo ladder to the flat topped roof of their hut and the five of us laid down under a blanket of desert stars. The first night of Durga Puja, a nine day Hindu festival celebrating the Goddess Durga and femininity, happened to be that night. At the base of a nearby temple-topped hill a Mayangar band sang, played tablas and harmonium until the five of us had drifted off to sleep.

With stiff backs we awoke the next morning on the cool cement roof. Thomas and I continued to wake up as we sipped hot drinks and played with the kids at the family’s chai stand. Anil and the two of us then hiked up to the hill-top Savitri Temple where I was surprised to find an infestation of monkeys that hadn’t been there earlier in the summer. The moment I produced the rice puffs I had brought as a temple offering, the monkeys went crazy and did not stop their assault until I had thrown the entire package into the bushes where they could fight it out amongst themselves.











Back at the chai stand Thomas entertained Gigi and Rual with his camera and ipod as I talked with Shyam. Before leaving for town I remembered that I had brought with me a five-dollar bill and a few quarters for Shyam to add to his impressive collection of foreign currency (Nepal, Zimbabwe, Russia, France, but no $’s). He didn’t seem too interested in my explanation of Abraham Lincoln but he was quick to tell me that he disliked George Bush when I started about George Washington.





In town, Tom and I did puja at Brahma Ghat, visited the Brahma temple, and strolled the length of the main bazaar looking at the same pregnant-carved-wood-elephants, chillums, tie-dyes, and cut-off tees for too long. We each had a thali and lassis at a rooftop café, did some writing, and when it became to hot to laze we went for a drive through the village-dotted countryside. At a temple up a short path in a shaded gorge we encountered a group of twenty very drunk men having lunch and playing cards. As soon as we arrived, an argument over a game of rummy turned into a mutton-slinging food fight, into a fistfight, into a stickfight, and then into a slapping match, before ending with the participators either tripping and almost knocking themselves unconscious, or crying while being held back by their slightly more sober friends. A very amused silver-stubbled old guy in a red turban asked me where I was from. Tom and I decided that we were a little out of place and left.



Back in town we wandered from the main drag to find a bag of chipati flour for Endra. The men in the goods shop were amused if not impressed that two foreigners were buying five kilos of flour and they made no attempt to overcharge us. Pushkar is a very touristy town so it was interesting to notice the different looks that we got in the main bazaar now that we had a bag of flour. Other foreigners, I assume, just thought that we were weird. Indians seemed to think the same (with or without a bag of flour) but they on the other hand were curious to find out what we were up to.
“Hey! What is that?” a shopkeeper would shout from a doorway.
“What is the name of your friend?”
“Shyam Lal? Of course I know Shyam-ji!”
Another man, in a jewelry shop, laughed at Tom and I with a good-natured smile.
“You both are very odd. I do not see this very often. But I think that it is very good,” he said after we told him about Shyam.
“You have the right idea, you two, in seeing the people as well as the places.”

We were near the end of the bazaar’s carved-marble elephant-inside-an-elephant, polished fake-gemstone, and incense-stocked gauntlet when a teenaged boy approached us and told Thomas to give him the bag of chipati flour.
“But I need it. It’s for a friend,” Tom said… “It’s mine.”
The kid looked at us as if we were stupid for not understanding the logic of what he was telling us.
“You give me. You buy more. For you, no problem,” he explained.











There was nobody home when we sauntered into the Lal’s hut, so we left the flour in a corner and trotted down to the chai stand at the base of the hill. We played with the kids some more, talked with their parents, and happened to run into Bunti, the brother of a friend of mine from earlier in the summer who told me to come see him in Goa in December. Tom and I wanted to see the sun setting over the desert from the ridge west of town so we initiated goodbyes. I thanked Shyam for his hospitality and told him that his was undoubtedly the finest hotel in Pushkar. He regretted that we had a train to catch and that we couldn’t stay for dinner but he carefully wrapped a mound of greasy hot paranthas in newspaper and stuffed them into my bag. Repeating our goodbyes we turned around to wave goodbye before sputtering off on our comically small scooter.

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Since the summer and this second visit to Pushkar I have made many friends. There are so many conversations and cups of chai that I have already forgotten. When I first met Shyam I remember being unsure of what the relationship was leading to. When was he going to ask me for money? When would he ask me to buy something? What was the pretext of our friendship?
It bothers me when friendships here are underpinned by hopes or attempts at financial benefit. There are other many other people who I have become acquainted with. Some I have visited repeatedly just to hang out with. Some still call me even though they know that I have long since left their city. Months after Pushkar, Rajesh, a rickshaw driver, hosted Thomas and I at his older brother’s house outside of Varanasi. But on the way back from tea with his brother, he tried to overcharge me for the ride.
Whenever I passed by Raj, a silkshop owner, he always abandoned his shop to go with me to get pani puri outside of his mother’s bead store. However, when Raj and I would return to his shop, I always had to see every silk scarf he owned and tell him that I didn’t want each one… even if it was, “a very auspicious day for purchasing,” as he would say.
Even so, friends are friends and I don’t have enough. But I do wish that I met more people like Shyam.

Meeting Shyam-ji for the first time this summer, I had been surprised and moved by his family’s hospitality and genuine warmth; a friendship with no expectations. People say that Indian hospitality is a cut above. I’m not so sure about that. I’ve met generous, caring people all around the world. Moreover, India is by no means devoid of people whose idea of hospitality is to shove a begging street-kid to the ground. There are people like that in all countries and cultures and I don’t expect much warmth from them wherever I am. However, most people here ARE unbelievably hospitable in some way or another and, as the Lal’s have repeatedly shown me, will go out of their way to allow you a glimpse of their lives.

I’ve known humbly hospitable people where I’m from in Texas where they say that southern hospitality is a cut above. But I’m sure that India and Texas are oceans apart in this regard. Maybe the two are not even comparable. But I do know that there is a family in Pushkar who, no matter my company nor how unexpected and untimely I may be, will always be ok with me crashing on their roof for the night.

Delhi

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Delhi is unique in its diversity; of people, religion, politics, and culture. It is a settlement comprised of eight successive cities and has thus become, since its inception as Indraprastra in 1450 BC, the product of dozens of civilizations that developed here. As Delhi grew over time, invaders repeatedly usurped control. As the cycle of new and foreign rule was repeated, the different regions of the city grew, changed, additions were made, and in some cases it was decided that a better city would be build upon or near the existing settlements. When the British Raj moved its administration to Delhi in 1911 a fervent effort to westernize the city ensued. Instead of revamping or modernizing the northern neighborhoods, which in 1857 had been the site of a devastating native uprising, the British established New Delhi just to the South. Radiating from centrally located Connaught Place the Raj constructed wide, tree-lined boulevards such as Janpath and Akbar Road, apparent emulations of strolling European thoroughfares which bore little resemblance to the crowded streets of Old Delhi. Enormous stately mansions, parliamentary buildings, grand public offices and flag-lined embassies were carved out and walled in, effectively protecting the city’s elite class from the unsavory sights, sounds, and smells that might have wafted down from Kashmiri Gate.

The differences between the northern and southern neighborhoods of Delhi are striking; it would not be difficult to mistake certain stretches of immaculately manicured Akbar Road for the affluent neighborhoods of Paris or to confuse India Gate and Rajpath with the Arc de Triumph and Champs d'Elise. Shajahanabad, now known as Old Delhi, is a world apart from CP and Lodi Colony but within what remains of its crumbling seventeenth-century bastions lays a city of diversity. Old Delhi’s main artery, Chandni Chowk, runs from the Red Fort to Fatehpuri Mosque and is a vibrant, congested tangle of parading people, cycle rickshaws, cows, and obviously overwhelmed foreigners. Halfway down Chandni Chowk, near the subway station, if you head south on Chatta Shah Ji and turn left at Chawri Bazaar, the massive white dome and minarettes of Jama Masjid appear ahead, rising above the dizzyingly tangled masses of exposed electrical lines. Designed by Shah Jahan and built by a workforce of five thousand people over twelve years, it is India’s largest mosque and can accommodate 25,000 worshipers. It was originally called Masjid-i-Jahanuma – ‘Mosque commanding a view of the world’ – and, given the expansive view of the Red Fort afforded from the mosque’s wide stone staircase entrance, the original name seems fitting. Constructed in the seventeenth century at the height of the Moghul Empire’s power, the mosque must have then been an impressive statement; a representation of the Moghuls’ immense wealth, engineering technology, and piety.

A remarkable aspect of life in Delhi, particularly life in proximity to historic monuments, is the disparity between the intended uses of such places and the uses for which the city’s thirteen million inhabitants have appropriated those places.
I arrived at Jama Masjid at dusk. Outside of the main gates, chai-wallahs and cart-food pushers had just begun to prepare dinner for the neighborhood’s Muslims who, it being Ramadan, were already salivating, eagerly awaiting the end of the day’s long fast. The half-asleep guard didn’t even look up as I passed through a metal detector barrier and continued up the front steps. The staircase was crowded with people snacking on pakora, channa chatt, or gabbing with friends or on cell phones. Not even half of the crowd appeared to be Muslim. A Punjabi, wrapped in a powder-blue turban, sat silently waiting for someone, or maybe just thinking. A Hindu woman, a young mother, slapped her child repeatedly when the toddler wouldn’t stop crying. The little boy’s dark eyeliner began to run when he cried even harder. Schoolboys in pleated navy slacks, loosened neckties, and shouldered book bags snickered at what I assumed had been a dirty joke. Shirtless street kids scampered up and down the steps, pulling lightly on kortas and touching their filthy fingers to their lips. The older and handicapped beggars sat at the base of the steps with their hands outstretched; most of them too tired or forlorn to actively beg for charity. The entrance to Jama Masjid may have been intended as a glorious ascent into a spectacular place of worship, and it is. However, residents also use it as a secular meeting place, a common ground where people of different religions and regional backgrounds come to talk, picnic, purchase, or just sit in silence.

fInside the mosque the scene was not very different. There were fewer non-Muslims but to a certain extent it seemed to also be a welcoming communal area. People of all classes and backgrounds had spread blankets in the marbled courtyard in preparation for the evening service and a steady stream of people continued to enter and wash themselves as I milled about. At sunset the call to prayer exploded from speakers in the towering minarettes and a very cordial bearded man told me to leave the mosque.

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Photo cred to Ava


Class in Tugluquabad


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It has been more than a month now since I left Ladakh for Delhi. Things have changed dramatically as my three months of solo travel have ended. Now I am here with twenty-three other students. The others in my program are great. Everyone is adapting and slowly beginning to enjoy life in India. The gender balance of the group is pretty skewed; there are eighteen women and six men. Traveling with a large group has at times been difficult for me. I have lost a lot of my independence. The spontaneity is still there but sometimes it takes considerable effort and free time to realize it. Walking down a crowded street with twenty-three people is a world apart from walking alone. Obviously, we draw a lot of attention. I drew considerable attention by myself this summer but it was different. People looked at me. I assume that most of them were curious. It is different now. I no longer draw the same kind of stares when I am with the group. The women around me do, but it is fairly clear that innocent curiosity is not the intent of some Indian men. In most cases the unwanted attention is harmless, however, women in my group are whistled at, catcalled, and occasionally groped.

I would not want to be a woman traveling in India. Their experience is in so many ways more challenging than mine. I think that I would have difficulty not taking on a negative attitude. Apart from harassment there are numerous challenges that female travelers face.
Carol, one of our trip leaders, approached me one evening incensed. Trying to arrange a rickshaw from a government hospital she was bluntly told that the rickshaws were not for foreigners. When I approached the same man whom she had dealt with just minutes before, I was helped without reservation; he drove me around on his motorbike until we found a rickshaw and then refused to accept the ten rupees that I offered for his trouble. It’s a petty example but it does illustrate my point; that what the man meant to say when he refused to help Carol was, “my assistance is not for foreign women.”

As well, women cannot afford the independence that I enjoy. I don’t have to think twice about smoking a cigarette in public whereas women must consider the impression they are projecting and the inappropriate responses that they may be inviting.
I don’t think twice about going out alone at night, even to the seedier areas of Delhi such as Paharganj. A woman, whether at night or daytime, would be asking for trouble were she to do the same.

Traveling with women has at times been hard on my psyche. I hate the feeling of walking around with clenched fists. In certain places, when I am with women, men are viewed with suspicion – an attitude that I am not used to carrying. When it is just I, or I and another guy, men on the street are probable friends, not possible wrongdoers.

Visiting the Jama Masjid alone had been a great experience. I had felt a little out of place but very welcome. It was the positive memory of that first visit that I carried with me as I walked up the massive marbled steps, this time with twenty-three others. The women in my group are very culturally conscious with their dress. Some of them wear salwar kamez and all of them wear shawls to cover their arms and bosom, and a headscarf when we are in Muslim areas.
After walking the gauntlet of chest-level stares, we were informed by the gate attendant that we would not be allowed to enter. Following tempered arguments with a number of officials, the women who they determined were too scantily clad were permitted entry wearing borrowed pseudo-burqas.
On my first visit people had smiled and approached me with curiosity. This time however, people kept their distance; we did not at all feel welcome and I felt that we were making the people there uncomfortable. We were eyed carefully, scaled and appraised as intruders on hallowed ground.

Sometimes I resent my group for the diminished opportunities for positive, meaningful social interactions in comparison to my solo experience this summer. At other times I resent the people here for interacting with me, a man, in such a different way than with my female counterparts. Most often though, I resent myself for ill-feelings towards either of the two.
It would be unwise and presumptuous to say that Indian society, especially regarding women, should strive to adopt what we in America deceive ourselves in calling social equality. America is less than perfect in its progressiveness. For that matter, America is less than progressive in many regards. But India too has a very long way to go. I wish though that the good in people was more apparent than the bad. I wish that the man who smiled and wagged his head at my group stood out in my memory more than the man who grabbed at one of the women before ducking into the shadows. It is unfortunate that the overwhelmingly numerous positive interactions are sometimes outshadowed by the infrequent but searing negative experiences.

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It has been a struggle to find the time and energy to do much writing since school started. My course began in Delhi where I spent three weeks living and taking classes. There are too many stories to tell in such a short space and I wouldn’t be able to recount them effectively if I tried. To choose between having an elephant as a designated driver after a debaucherous night in Paharganj, or piloting cycle rickshaws around Rajiv Chawk to the delight of backseat cycle-wallahs, would be too difficult. I wouldn’t want to leave out getting pulled over by the police while driving an auto-rickshaw (apparently you have to be a licensed autorickshaw driver), but then I might have to exclude splashing around Old Delhi without umbrellas on a muggy monsoon afternoon. And what about riding Delhi’s subway during rush-hour? If I had tried to write about it all, it might have meant three additional blog-postless weeks.
Since leaving Delhi, I have spent time in Pushkar, Agra, Fatehpur Sikri, Vrindaven, Dhera Dun, Rishikesh, and Haridwar. I have now been in Varanasi for a week and will be here until the end of the month.
Much more to come soon.

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Thomas in Fatehpur Sikri










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Stok Kangri

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Stok Kangri, at 6,153 m (20,187 ft), is the tallest mountain in the Zanskar Range of the Himalaya. I wasn’t nervous about the climb but I did have a couple of concerns. Firstly, while the literature that I consulted recommended seven days for the ascent, I had only been acclimating in Leh for five days and was left with just five more for the climb. I was a little concerned that I might not have been adequately acclimatized.





Three summers ago, at 18,000 ft. on Denali, I had a brush with severe altitude sickness. On day twenty-two of a thirty day expedition, stormed in at high camp, I began to fill Nalgenes with blood-streaked vomit. A helivac was impeded by the inclement weather and so, pumped full of dexamethasone, I was short-roped down the mountain in an indescribable thirty-two hour ordeal that involved the efforts of the national park service and innumerable faceless, but not forgotten, people who I will never be able to thank.


-------Denali-------

Altitude sickness can be unpredictable. It can impair a person at one time or on a certain climb and not at all on the next. For some reason, younger people are more susceptible to altitude sickness, but unfortunately not much is really known about it; there haven’t been many scientific studies done and I assume that there isn’t much money or motivation in finding a “cure.”
So, taking all of this and my past experiences into account, I was hoping for the best but was still a little uneasy.

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My guide was at my hotel at eight o’clock on Wednesday morning. I had met him the previous day but he had been quiet; he had sat there in the staging room with the solemnly reserved attention of a military man awaiting the orders of a superior officer.
“Tzetin, it’s good to meet you,” I had said, “but don’t call me ‘sir.’ My name is Ben.” Tzetin had been in the Indian Army for ten years and had lived in Ladakh for thirty-five. His parents had been Buddhists but he wasn’t. He worshiped the mountains but reluctantly agreed with Buddhist principles.

We packed a Tata pickup full of gear and drove to Stok Village, crossing the Indus River on a suspiciously rusty steel bridge along the way. In Stok we met Mutup the donkey driver. Two of the nine donkeys were babies, there not to carry loads but to learn the life of a pack animal. I think that donkeys’ nicknames belie their true character. They know what they want; after rubbing their too-large ears they would follow you around until I found a scrap of corrugated cardboard for them to snack on.



The trek meandered from the village up and into a rocky riverbed canyon. It soon began to rain, unusual for the region, and we stopped at one of the trailside yurts for a chai massala. The knock-off Northface shell that I had bought for six dollars in Leh had revealed itself as worthless in the downpour so Tzetin and I just waited in the dripping tent until it let up.

The rest of the way to Mankarmo only took us an hour and the entire day’s hike had been completed in two…half the time prescribed by the guidebook. We didn’t actually camp at Mankarmo but at a site six hundred meters down slope. An elderly man and woman live at the site during the summer months in a big white tent surrounded by donkey shit. The pair, I’m sure, does very well selling overpriced soup, tea, cigarettes, and poisonous spiced rum to foreigners. Tzetin and I crawled into the soggy tent and found seats on a dirt floor around the central support pole. The old man in a red robe emerged from a pile of blankets and switched on a cracked radio that he had fixed with strategically positioned rubber bands. The woman sat near us, stirring a pot of salt-tea on a kerosene stove. She smiled as Tzetin accepted a cup of the salt brew and cackled disapprovingly when I requested the exclusion of a wad of butter that dripped down her utensil index finger. Tzetin and the donkey driver talked for a while with the two mountain people before setting up camp. I asked Tzetin what it was the toothy woman had said that had so immediately drawn the attention of Mutup.
“He is worried about his baby donkeys. The woman says that she saw a snow leopard this morning on the ridge above campsite.”



I sat in the cook tent with the men and quickly understood why we had brought so many donkeys. I preparation Tzetin laid out a full pantry’s worth of spices, fresh vegetables, juice boxes, soup mixes, grains, lentils, and a bloody newspaper-wrapped sheep’s leg that had been severed just above the hip.
Supper was fantastic, begun with homemade french fries and tomato soup with parsley. We had Zuchini and cucumber mash followed by red dhal and rice with carrots and fresh ginger, fire roasted onions with garlic, and chili mutton in aubergine gravy. Just when I thought that the onslaught of food was finally over I was compelled to force down bananas and sliced pear for dessert. Alcohol and altitude do not mix well so I was a little unsettled when Tzetin produced a bottle of rum from one of the burlap donkey bags. The bottle looked nice. On closer inspection I was amused to see the warning on its label: “Possession by non defense personnel is a punishable crime.”
I quickly got over my reservations and took a few pegs in my cup of salt tea.





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I woke up to Mutup re-zipping my tent and rolled over to find a polished tin platter with a teapot and a plate of ornamentally arranged cookies on a doily napkin. The hike from Mankarmo to Basecamp took only two hours and was characterized by Tzetin and I rapidly overtaking groups that had left camp long before us. It’s always nice to travel in small groups; larger groups are slowed down by things that light travelers just don’t have to deal with.
The route was gorgeous, first following the same riverbed as the previous day and then rising out of the canyon into an alpine tundra littered with scampering marmots and lichen covered boulders. Basecamp was a small, tent city populated by roughly fifty people, thirty horses, nine donkeys, and a dozen wandering dzo – a mild mannered, bushy tailed cross between a yak and a Himalayan cow. The site was incredible but its aesthetic beauty was tarnished by an obscene amount of trash that not even the garbage disposal dzos could keep up with, though they did give an alarming but ultimately unsuccessful effort to ingest discarded soda bottles. Now, as a NOLS (www.nols.edu) boy, I am particularly sensitive to violators of Leave No Trace principles and so in this case, the trashing of the campsite was disturbing. Every time I saw some smiling idiot duck behind a rock with a roll of toilet paper instead of using the pre-dug latrine, I felt like going vigilante with my ice axe.





Dinner, again, was great. More mutton, chow mien with broccoli and chilies, steamed cauliflower, ginger saffron tea, anchovies in tomato sauce, and creamed chicken soup.
At midnight I stumbled into the cook tent where Tzetin was warming some porridge. Most people spend a day acclimating at Basecamp, and move to High Camp the following day, before finally making the push to the summit. However, Tzetin and I had been feeling good, and the mountain gods had given us a window of perfect weather that we couldn’t resist, so we decided to just go for it from Basecamp. Even if we had to turn around, we figured that we would have two more days to either try again or move to High Camp and take it from there.

I was a little dismayed by how cold it was; much more so than I had expected. A dozen headlamps speckled the ridge high above camp. I wondered if we were starting too late but Tzetin and I caught up and passed the other parties within an hour of leaving camp. The first ridge was tough. I was cold, breathing heavily, and sucking dust that was being kicked up by Tzetin in front of me. We were moving very fast and when we reached the other hikers in High Camp at the edge of the glacial moraine we decided to stop and have some hot tea. Tzetin poured me a cup from his thermos and we were both surprised that it had already gone cold. I schwilled my water bottle but choked on the tinkling shards of ice that were beginning to form. Looking around the star-lit moonscape at the other people perched on their backpacks I thought to myself that they too must have been silently questioning their motivations. At 18,000 ft, at a time of night when sane people are comfortably asleep in their beds, you begin to wonder why you are not. Maybe you are insane…maybe you are an addict…or maybe you’re just a little weird. My suspicions were confirmed when a group of four announced that they were turning back. The others in their party seemed disappointed but at the moment were to self-occupied to voice much of an opposition. The other climbers, in their plastic mountaineering boots, down, fleece, polypropylene, and insulated stretchy tech-wear, seemed content to sit there for as long as their guides would allow. I, on the other hand, was too cold to rest. My toes were freezing through one layer of thin wool socks and it took kicking my New Balance jogging sneakers against boulders to return feeling to them. After a summer in Rajasthan my cold weather clothing was pretty limited but I had found a few, warm, wool-stuffs in Leh. Under my blue jeans I wore a pair of thick wool Indian Army long underwear. I had on a thin wool T-shirt, a thick yak-wool sweater, and a kashmir/rayon pullover hoodie. My yak-wool mittens were thin an ineffective, but my knit hat and silk paisley scarf saved me.

The glacier crossing didn’t take more than half an hour. It wasn’t much of a glacier; completely incomparable to those of Alaska or Washington that take hours, sometimes days, to cross. Even so, I disagreed with the route that Tzetin had chosen. I suggested an alternative to which he agreed more out of appeasement than concern for safety. My route took longer but ran perpendicular rather than parallel to the beckoning crevasses.

By then there were no climbers ahead of us and as we climbed the headwall I would turn every now and then to see the slower groups snaking their way through the moraine, each one of them a triangular beam of fluorescent glow and shadow on a colorless wall. My favorite thing about glaciers has always been their animate characteristics. These massive forces of nature appear static and lifeless, but they are not. From ice worms that burrow at night and wiggle to the glistening surface at dawn, to the steam train rushes of wind that howl through deeper blue-ice crevasses: glaciers are alive and will show you if you pay attention.
Nearing the black silhouette of the saddled summit ridge I stared stupidly at the brilliant night sky. With comparatively little atmosphere between us, the starscape was absolutely spectacular and I tripped often, looking at frequent shooting stars instead of at my feet. Every so often the muffled gunshot sound of the cracking, groaning glacier would interrupt our silenced heavy breathing.

We had reached the summit ridge at 4:45 and by then it was bitterly cold. Thankfully though, the eastern sky began to glow and the promise of warming sun reenergized us both. The ridge was steep and the drop on the frozen western side gaping. I was tired but by no means exhausted. The high altitude meant that we were taking three deep breaths between every paused step, but for me the thin air was not as big of an issue as what I call “electric hands.” At 20,000 ft. your body’s circulatory system begins to protest and the sudden rush of blood into inert limbs can be surprisingly painful. I have had the same issue on other climbs, and especially on Mt. McKinley, but never before as severe as on Stok Kangri. As the ridge became steeper and I was forced to use my hands for scrambling stability, each reach or outstretch sent a startling electric shock radiating from my fingertips to my neck. I tried to use my hands as little as possible, tried stuffing them in the pits of my sweater, but I decided that electrified hands were more acceptable than tumbling down the sheer western face.

The final hundred meters of the climb were silly. Tzetin and I wanted to be on the summit to see the sun rising over the eastward range and so we would scramble too quickly for thirty seconds before stopping to wheeze, laugh, and lean on our ice axes for a few minutes before doing it all again.
We sat on the summit and sucked on frozen apricots as the sun ignited the Indus Valley 10,000 ft. below. The valley and mountains to the west were eclipsed by the massive triangular shadow cast by Stok Kangri and to the north, in the far distance, were the 7,000-meter massifs of the Karakorum.

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About an hour had passed before the first of the other parties arrived on the summit. An Austrian woman took a few photos of me and Tzetin posing next to a frozen mass of wind-sculpted prayer flags before, shouldering our bags, we began down the ridge. The headwall was steep and chocked with crumbling, shifting rocks and I was glad to be able to use my axe as a walking stick.






Basecamp is in the bottom-left corner


It had taken us only four and a half hours to summit and, after an hour spent on top and two hours downclimbing, the two of us loped into Basecamp at 9:00am. Another guide, a friend of Tzetin, stepped into our cook tent, blinking, surprised to see us back so soon.
“What happened?” he asked us, assuming that we had turned back below the summit.
“Nahee,” said Tzetin. “It was too cold and we couldn’t go slowly.”
“That must be some sort of record,” the other guide said before leaning in to give us both high-fives.

Tzetin and Muttup would have been content doing what most groups do after summiting. that is, spend the day resting in Basecamp and hiking the fifteen kilometers back to Stok village the following morning. But I had a lingering altitude headache and didn’t want to pay for an extra day of needless guiding and donkey portering. So, after endless grumbling from Muttup, who had been expecting five days’ pay rather than three, we packed up camp and began the stumble-step trek back through the high meadows, riverbed canyons, and rocky alpine passes.

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Later, that evening as I sat on the rooftop of my hotel with a full beer and a full stomach, across the valley the engorged sun dipped behind the summit ridge of Stok Kangri and, as the stars slowly revealed themselves to me for the second time that day, I thought to myself for the umpteenth time that day, “hell yeah...this is it.”

Leh - The Jewel In The Crown of India

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The sleeper train to Delhi was uneventful as far as I know. I slept. The taxi ride to my hotel took forty-five minutes. We drove from the train station near the Red Fort, past Chodni Chawk and India Gate, to Nehru Place in South Delhi. I was struck by how different Delhi appears to be from Jodhpur. The streets are wide and tree lined, a far cry from the sandy alleyways of the Blue City. I didn’t see any camels or horse-drawn carriages, and Delhi’s rickshaws are painted green; they run on clean natural gas.
I went for a walk after checking in and was startled by the lack of garnered stares. I realized as I retreated to my hotel, that I was experiencing a sort of unexpected culture shock. If this is what it’s like transitioning from the third work to the “second world,” I wonder how I will fair when I return to Portland.

I was at Indira Gandhi well before sunrise and in the air at about six o’clock. The descent into Leh was spectacular. Cruising at 30,000 ft, the jagged peaks of the Indian Himalaya appeared much closer than that. Viewed from above it is obvious that the Himalaya is a young range. The glacier carved valleys are shallow and the knifed ridges have not been as affected by erosion as, say, the Appalachian.

Leh is located in the Zanskar Range of the Himalaya, a high desert with picturesque towns nestled between soaring snow-capped peaks. The snowiest of those, at just over 20,000 ft, is Stok Kangri, the tallest mountain in the range.
At a headache inducing 11,500 ft, Leh has become a haven for treckers and climbers. The town of 28,000 is part of the Ladakh district of Jammu & Kashmir and because of its proximity to Chinese occupied Tibet it is heavily populated with Tibetan refugees. I didn’t fully realize until I arrived here that I might as well have traveled to a different country. The people here speak Ladakhi, a language that sounds to me more oriental than Indic. It’s strange to all of a sudden not be able to use the Hindi I have picked up over the summer. Even so, it’s easy to get by with just one Ladakhi word, “joo-lay,” which means, ‘hello’, ‘goodbye’, ‘please’, and, ‘thank you.’

The people here are beautiful; light skinned with Asian features and permanently blushed cheeks. The women wear their hair in long braided pigtails tied together at the small of their back with pink yarn. They wear turquoise bracelets, draping beaded necklaces, and quilted top hats that flare above their ears. The men wear long, yak-wool overcoats, colorful Kashmir sweaters, and pashmina scarves. Many of the people here have light colored eyes; perhaps, I was told, a genetic remnant of the armies of Alexander the Great.

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The people of Leh are friendly, warm, and interestingly almost all speak fluent English. Even the monks in the town’s many gompas, seemingly removed from the influences of the modern world, greet you in English.
One monk, again in perfect barely-accented English, told me the history of his fifteenth century monastery before walking me through and explaining the significance of the thousands of painted representations of the Buddha that adorned the interior walls.

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The city itself is a maze of shops, guesthouses, and restaurants. Tibetan handicraft stores sell shawls, buddah figurines, hook-loop carpets, and an array of knit clothes, socks, and shoulder bags. Between the craft stalls are outfitters that peddle insulated army jackets, knock-off North Face sleeping bags, crampons, and well-used ice axes. There are tons of tourists here. They consist mostly of the trekking and ex-pat crowd. Lots of beards, even more backpacks, and the per capita dreadlock rate in Leh might even outdo Portland. The downside is that it is expensive here. A cup of chai masala (some of the best I’ve had in India) is twenty rupees whereas it cost only three in Jodhpur.
The shopkeepers are pushy but amicable. Each one from whom I have made a purchase remembers me by name and, when I walk past, comes from their store to shake hands and chat for a minute.
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It isn’t so much the six-foot python around my neck but the cobra inches from my face that has me a little freaked out in this picture
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The restaurants here are fantastic. Many are on rooftops with views of the valley and mountains. Compared to my diet this summer in Rajasthan, this is heaven. There is little ghee used, and not every dish is either dripping in oil or fried in it. Enjoying steaming hot thenthuk or thukpa soup on a sunny but chilly rooftop as prayer flags flutter in the afternoon mountain breeze is about as close as I have ever come to moksha.
Delicate momos, saffron tea, mushroom chow mein, and steamed vegetables have replaced crispy samosas, butter lassis, gut-busting bhiryani, and murg mutton and, frankly, I couldn’t be more relieved. Instead of snacking on my usual vice, pani puri, I have been taking full advantage of the regional specialty of Ladakh: apricots. Dried apricots, fresh apricots, dehydrated apricots, apricot seeds, apricot juice, and apricot jerky; all of it is delicious and doesn’t slow you down like fried chatt does.

The mountains and hilltops that surround the city are topped with gompas (Tibetan Buddhist monasteries), stupas, ruined forts, and palaces. Leh Palace, uninhabited for what seems like centuries is perched on a hill overlooking the main bazaar. The bare interior is unlit and I was thankful for the burst flash on my camera; the dirt floors are crumbling and a misstep could result in a one-way express ticket to the basement. A steep switchback trail leads from the palace to the ruins of Tsemo Gompa. Prayer flags radiate from chortens surrounding the dilapidated building and the views of the Indus Valley are heart stopping.

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On the way back down from Tsemo a monk invited me into Chambo Gompa. At first glance the interior looked surprisingly plain. That was until the monk pulled back the curtain that divided the room. Behind it was a thirty-foot, psychedelically painted, seated Buddha statue, flanked on each side by fearsome fanged creatures.

There are many surrounding villages that are well worth visiting. Thiksey, about twenty kilometers from Leh, is a gompa but it might as well be called a village. Hundreds of monks live and work among the white washed huts that spill from the temple at the top of a dramatic hill. Prayer wheels line the staircase paths that wind around the entire place. An English sigh above some of the wheels reads, “Spin in a clockwise fashion. This will be very beneficial.” The prayer chamber has gorgeous hardwood floors, is covered in colorful patterned trim work, and above an alter is a framed portrait of the smiling Dalai Lama.

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On my first full day in Leh I woke up to a frigid morning. I followed the crowd to the main bazaar and by 6:30am found myself squeezed into a minibus that was a cramped on the roof as it was inside. The bus descended an impossibly steep road down into the valley and unloaded us in Choglamsar, a village seven kilometers from Leh. I followed the flowing red robes, the top hats, and the spinning handheld prayer wheels towards a lush green field bordered by thousands of multicolored prayer flags. A soldier with an AK-47 patted me down while another with a Sten machine gun inspected my satchel. I was directed to the “foreigners section” and was surprised and thrilled to find a spot in the grass only fifty feet from the stage. Looking around at the well-bundled masses I made a note to purchase a shawl that afternoon.

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After haveing sat there waiting for two hours a murmur began to sweep through the crowd. First, deep Tibetan horns filled the valley with an electrifying vibration. Higher pitched ones joined in - hundreds of them – all with different squealing pitches and varying intensities.
For most of the morning the thousands of monks that surrounded me had remained calm and pensive. Now, as the crush of base drums erupted around us they seemed to be overcome with emotion. They trembled with excitement and smiled joyously; the way one might in the presence of a beloved grandfather.
The murmur turned into a deafening monotone chant. “Ohm mani padme hum…ohm mani padme hum…ohm mani padme hum,” over and over.

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A procession of men in gold mohawked hats led an old monk to the flower-strewn stage. The other monks on the platform raised their praying hands to their foreheads and then, as the high horns, low horns, and base drums reached a crescendo, they bowed before the old man, the Dalai Lama.
The music and mantra stopped abruptly and the Dalai Lama turned, smiling at the crowd of around 15,000 people. He took a seat on a massive gold-leafed throne and began to speak in Tibetan.

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His voice was amplified by massive speakers that, unfortunately, drowned out the English translation which was being provided to the foreigners’ section.
I heard the translator say that the teaching would be on the Dharma Discourses but other than that I was only able to pick out key words such as, “virtue, piety, and selflessness.” Not being able to understand the Dalai Lama didn’t bother me too much, though. I was enamored just watching him and observing the effect that his words precipitated in the crowd. It was obvious, however, that some of the English speaking enlightenment seekers around me were devastated. I felt genuinely bad for them; those people who must have planned their trip to Leh specifically to see the Dalai Lama. For them it must have been like buying a ticket to the Superbowl only to find out on game day that their prized seat had an obstructed view. I on the other hand, replete with dumb luck as of late, didn’t know about the teaching until I arrived here.

Leh is a spectacular place. The past five days have been relaxing and revitalizing. Since I started writing this, I have visited many more gompas and palaces, and have met countless people who I wish I had more time to write about.
Tomorrow morning I leave for the town of Stok. Hopefully the four donkeys that I have arranged for my attempt of Stok Kangri will be there. With a little dumb luck, and a lot of hiking, all will go as planned and I will be back in Leh on August 30th. Until then, “joo-lay.”

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