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.
Himalaya, himalaya remains copyright of the author Charlee, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.
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