Small girl; big country

Alors.....

I was on the GNER Leeds train back home to Grantham from London yesterday, and we were delayed by 20 minutes because of a fatality at Potter's Bar. The thing that really sickened me was the women sat in front of me, who was complaining in a clipped staccato voice into her phone about her delay. Since when did we become so time conscious that someone's death is viewed as a mere inconvenience?! If that was her sister, brother, father, mother, aunt, uncle or friend, I'm sure Madam Whingealot would be appalled to hear people sat on a train whingeing that the death of her loved one has made them a pathetic 20 minutes late to get back to their cosy homes and their Marks and Spencer's ready meals. Come on.

"Charlotte... what is that? What have you done to yourself? Is THAT permanent?" - My mum's first words when she picked me up at the train station and saw me in my salwar kameez, wearing a bhindi and daubed in Mendhi henna.

Rocking up at Heathrow Airport on August 10th blissfully unaware of being amidst the terror crisis, I arrived back into England. Honestly, I had no idea about what was unfolding around me until I got to Kings X and saw it splashed all over the evening standard... good old no press hush hush airlines... "More chai madame? Gulab? Hand massage?" Ohhhh gulab I miss it so. And bherfi. And grotty street dhabas. And cheesy Pepsi ads with Shah Rukh Khan and Preity Zinta. (Pepsi-India by the way, has just been discovered to contain pesticide levels 14 TIMES the amount allowed by safety regs... and guess who was supping it the whole time she was travelling.. no worries there then.) And Shah Rukh Khan in pretty much every form of advertising POSSIBLE from underwear to lawn mowers to Limca. And aloo parantha and curd for breakfast. And MASALA CHAI! I bought some Assam tea and masala spices back with me and have been experimenting avec saucepan...but seeing as I'm about as Indian as chicken tikka masala, I have so far failed miserably.

So anyways, this will be my last blog on the subcont, as I haven't written anything about my last 2 weeks there - and there is alot to tell - I thought I'd finish that off and tie things up. Please forgive my poor poor memory though, if its all a bit sketchy... I think the mixture of DEET fumes and heat caused a few brain cells to disappear...

PSUTZ AND SHALOM SHABBAT - Back in the bling mobile to MANALI, take away pizza, 3am breakfasts and more Israelis

So after hurtling back up Kunzum La and Rohtang Pass to Manali, we came to a bit of a standstill. India being India, nothing is ever quite so simple, it always turns into an adventure... variety is the masala of life, hey?!

On the way back, we picked up Sunny (2 Tibetan Sunny's, so confusing) the owner of Batal's only free standing builiding - cum guest house - cum dhaba, as he was going to Manali to meet a friend and him and Govinder are thick as thieves. Not that we minded, Sunny turned out to be a really interesting guy. Tibetan, his parents and grandparents came to India by making the arduous journey on foot over the Himalayas from Tibet into India's HP. Sunny has lived in Batal ever since. Curious as to how someone of only 27 finds it to grow up and live literally in the middle of nowhere, with no electricity, no television, and the only company apart from his parents being passing travellers like us, Amelia and I fired the poor guy with questions.

MORE TO WRITE LATER... TOO TIRED

Jule ji! Sorry for the amazingly delayed and sparsed blogging, especially to Dad, Grandad, Uncle Suli and Andy, who I know read this Now we're in Shimla (more on that later) and Amelia and Ed are leaving me to traverse back to the streets of London in 3 days Shimla is a weird place, it has multiple personality disorder, largely made up of colonial British buildings from the 1800 and 1900s, it feels somewhat like 18th century London might have been. But more on that later...

LOSSAR, SPITI (Population, 80)

We had to sign in our passports at the police checkpoint; a little old school by some standards - we sat on old wire platoon-style beds, covered in sacking; with a morse code machine sat proudly in the corner; ready for any up-to-the-minute communications. This is what life is like at the roof of the world, nothing and no-one moves faster than 30kmph (apart from when Govinder gets a break of flat road and pelts manically dow the valley at 80) But then, to be fair, why should it? In London people are so obsessed with time, we are always short of it; we skip meals because we have "no time" to eat, if someone could bottle time and sell it, they'd be a billionaire. Here though, time doesn't seem to be an issue - noone even carries a watch, people set their daily routine by sunrise and sunset.

Monday 24th July - KIBBER, The highest motorable village in the world

The clouds are so close, I feel like I can reach out and touch them.

The "high" school (haha) in Kibber is surrounded by women surfacing the road, their faces swathed in scarves to protect them from the dust. On the side of the school, such inspirational mottos as 'Be always punctual" and "Study then suffer" are daubed in green paint... I hope that the person that wrote them was just making a few Hinglish mistakes, and that it won't have the effect of turning the entire population into terminal pessimists!

Tuesday 25th July - TABO

Well, after much worrying and um-ing and ah-ing, we're in Tabo. There have been a few heavy storms, so the rain has bought landslides that have closed the roads. It seems to add to the relaxed pace of life here:
"Road to Tabo closed, no problem, it open in maybe 1 day, maybe 5."

5 DAYS... it is easy to watch all the Westerners pulling their hair out as their carefully planned (and possibly typed and laminated) itinerary is buried under a flow of mud and falling rocks.

Today, we were supposed to go to Nako but the road was closed, according to Angel, the Keralan rasta who runs the Jah Vegetarian Restaurant ("Full power maaan") and Guest House we're staying in: "Many falling rocks, very dangerous, all the days."

We drove panickedly back from Ki Gompa in the midst of a storm, narrowly missing a few small lahars, all of us silent, aware of the danger and feeling our mortality, with the Venga Boys on full blast... Govinder is the man. There was one incident though yesterday, that made up for the road to Tabo being closed; we went for lunch in The Third Eye (THE coolest, most chilled out and possibly only dhaba chain in the Himalayas... floor cushions, Buddha cloths and low lighting.. if you're ever in Kibber, Kaza or Tabo, go and have their simple breakfast...its beautiful, even at 6am) after applying for our inner line permits (possibly the MOST bureaucratic process I've come across in India apart from changing travellers cheques, so that's saying something) and there I got chatting to some Israeli's I'd bumped into in the ADCs office. One of them, Elad is probably the friendliest Israeli guy I've met yet apart from Manny. lad and I had a bit of a chat before he went to make schnitzel for everyone, including me

Wed 26th July PM - The Third Eye, KAZA - BACKTRACKING

After a longish morning, we have had to finally admit defeat in the face of the elements and turn back to Manali. We set out to Recong Peo around 12 after an interesting morning (more later), we got as far as a small village near Sumdo, only to find that the road between Chango and Nako was closed; heavy rain had bought some bad landslides. After discussing with Govinder, we decided to set out for Chango anyway, but were stopped in our tracks where the road had literally CRUMBLED AWAY. We talked to a man on the side of the road, who told us that to get to Shimla would take about 15 days. We had 3. Dejected, fed up and tired, we had no other option but to turn back. So tonight, we are missioning it to Losar and tomorrow, from Losar to Manali.
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Our attempts to reach Losar were also scuppered by landslides in that direction... so we ended up stuck in Kaza for the night. One Brit we met cheerfully told us that he got stuck in Recong Peo for 8 weeks when the Sutlej River flooded... No probs there then.

Tabo Tabo Tabo

A quick mention about Tabo, because I didn't include enough about it in my diary. Tabo is a small but very sweet village nestled in the mountains just between Spiti and Kinnaur, just a yak's spit from the Tibetan border of China. Tabo itself houses one of the oldest and most important Buddhist Gelukpa monasteries in the world... built in 996 AD by the translator Rinchen Tsangpo, the monk responsible for bringing Buddhism to Western Tibet (now consisting of Spiti, Lahaul, Kinnaur and Ladakh in India), it is amazingly beautiful and ornate. Tsangpo enlisted Kashmiri artists to paint the inside, alongside Tibetans, so the result is beautiful finite oriental drawings, and the best preserved Indo-Tibetan art in the world (most of the rest existing in Tibet, and consequentially destroyed and fading away after 1949) They also have some amazing, but modern, thangkas hung up in the new monastery, someof which must have taken years to paint.

A thangka is a Buddhist painting used to depict the different Buddhas and Lamas and is extremely important in Buddhism, as it is a painted incarnation of Buddha. Making a thangka is an extremely complex process, whereby a trained thangka artist meets with a Lama and a religious practitioner to draw out the guidelines for the painting. The thangka artist then lives in the house of the religious practitioner under their guidance for however long it takes for the thangka to be painted. Thangkas are a fantastic feat of artistry, highly detailed and highly emotional, many people have them in their homes, and I was lucky enough to get one for a good price in Dharamsala... they are normally extremely expensive.

Tabo itself is also important as it is where the Dalai Lama wishes to retire, and you can see why. The monks here have a fantstic sense of humour, walking around in their saffron robes wearing tie dye caps and John Lennon styleee sunglasses, practising wry English phrases that they have been taught and written down. That's one thing I have noticed about the Spitians and the Tibetans, they both have a very mischevious and dry sense of humour, always with a twinkle in their eye, they will laugh at people's clumsiness and mistakes, but not in a cruel sense, just as a goodhearted and mirthful observer. If by any chane, anyone harmed themselves, they would be the first to offer help.

The evening we got to Tabo I went for a wander by myself. Walking past a bus stop, I said "Jule!" to a group of women sat on the side of the road, waiting for a bus. (If you're ever in Spiti, Lahaul or Ladakh, Jule is the best multipurpose word... in the local dialect of Bhoti it means hello, goodbye, please and thankyou, so you can pretty much blag an entire conversation, by nodding repeatedly, smiling, and constantly saying Jule to everything.) A man dressed in Western clothes translated that they wanted me to sit with them, so sit I did. I've never meant such a bunch of jokers in my life, they had a brilliant sense of humour, laughing at all my Westernisms (again the lip piercing was pulled, and, along with my curls, pronounced "beautiful"... probably because they'd never seen them before) and pulling my handbag apart. I told them I was "from London " (try explaining G-Town to a unch of people in the Himalayas!) and they all exclaimed:

"Ahhh London, very good.... (then counted themselves) 8 rooms please!"

The English speaking guy, Sunny, took some photos of us and they gave me their address to send them to, so I'll have to do that when I get back. They were on their way to Chango and made me promise to come visit.... landslides landsliiiiiides...

Sunny turned out to be the English teacher at the village school, and invited me along to visit the next morning. So I wandered in at about 10 o clock, feeling funny about being a random Westerner just wandering into a primary school (if this had been England, I'd have been cuffed and given a full background check before I'd even reached the front gate) but everyone was really welcoming. I found Sunny's classroom and the kids, all aged 7 and 8, were really adorable (despite what you say Tenz :P!) and all superly shy when I went round to correct their work.

Tabo is such a friendly place, if it wasn't for it having no medical access and extremely sporadic electricity, I'd love to settle down there for a year.... everyone is really open, welcoming and friendly, always up for a laugh, and you do get The Stare, but only out of curiousity.

I am at the ends of the earth, or at least ti feels like it. I sit now, writing from a tent contructed out of tarpaulin and metal pipes, weighed down with sandbags. We are in the Himalayas. And by Himalayas, I mean real Himalayas, 4500 m up in a desert of yellow rock and scrub, stretching as far as the eye can see. Here it is wild, vast, untamed, a place where nature takes priority over man - our jeep battling with the waterfalls that flow over the road being proof of that. And I lie when I say roads, as there is only one winding its way through the Spiti Valley, its bend embracing the sides of barren, unforgiving slopes covered with shingle.

There's quite a sense of comraderie here, a mutual respect betwen people inhabiting the inhabitable. The drivers especially get on like a house on fire, all sitting outside in thwe wind and dust, in bare shirt sleeves, having jokes over a glasds of chai whilst us Westerners are muffled up to the eyeballs in hi-tec Northface thermals and woollen shawls. I mysel am exstremely thankful right now fot ther bright pink raving raving hoodie I bought in Manali and my Tibetan shawl, which is fast becoming my life partner.

Our driver, Govinder, seems to be quite a hit round here, he knows everyone, always stopping and having a banter thtrough the winow in fast Hindi with another driver. Right now, him and the owner of Batal's oly dormitory cum restaurant cum free standing permanent building are sat in the jeep watching wrestling DVDs, with his mum peering through the window, totally enthralled by the presence of TV, something, I can imagine, that you don't see verty often out here.

In addition to the drivers, there are also the unknown species... the lesser spotted trekker. Trekkers can be recognised by their lips whitwe with sunblock, sweatbands, ruddy cheeks and wraparound Ray Bans.

Ironically, most of the trekkers we've met are World Challenge GAp Year kids, who have paid $3500 for the priviledge of kipping in tents and weeing behind rocks. I don't really have the heart to tell them that it cost us 50 quid.

Because we really are ultimate lazy toads, Ed, Amelia and I got a taxi from Rewalsar Lake to Kullu. Our taxi driver, Sandoo, of 27 years, slightly grey haired from one U-turn too many on the side of a mountain, was a very friendly guy, who had a rather keen interest in obtaining an English visa....

After finding out we were from London, Sandoo told us that he was desperate to come to England and work for 2/3 years... and that his plan to get an English visa was by obtaining a "fraud marriage". After lots of repeated attempts by Amelia to try and convince Sandoo that "fraud marriage" really wasn't the best idea, and that the British authorities take a rather dim view on it (sign language for "jail" was an interesting one) he seemed a bit melancholy. Then, after we'd told him we were interested in going to Spiti valley, offered us a completely free trip (usually 20,000 rs.) if I became his temporary wife. Ummmmm. To be fair, 20,000 rs didnt really seem reasonable compensation for marrying a guy, and living with him for 3 years to prove it. Amelia suggested that it would be easier to convince the authorities of the authenticity of a "fraud marriage" by having a baby, luckily, Sandoo seemed reasonably deterred by this.

In all seriousness though, I truly felt sorry for him. He genuinely seemed desperate, the fact that he'd give up 20,000 rs just for our help was very touching, especially considering the average wage according to him is 2000 rs. per month. (Divide by 83 and you get the amount in pounds) When he found out how much he'd earn in England, he was overjoyed, but then suitably shocked when we told him that a cup of chai would cost him 160 rs.... and it would be Starbucks chai... the most hideous thing on the planet. I'm intrigued to see if Sandoo ever makes it to England, I hope he does, without the need for a fraud marriage.