Negotiator

I don't think a visit to India is complete without getting taken by Kashmiri rug merchants.  So  I went souvenir hunting this afternoon in Madurai, looking for something small, portable, and cheap.  An hour after entering the shop, I ended up with two gorgeous 3 foot tall painted Meerakshi statues paying the number I had intended to spend in mind, cubed. (mom/dad, they should be en route to Texas at some point, I geev you very special excellent price if you want one....) I also somehow ended up with a small rug thrown in for good measure, which I actually got a decent deal on, probably because I overpaid for the statues. But they kick ass, and considering the money I've saved here on domestic transit - I've traveled at least 1000 km or more in India overland, generally for not more than the price of a subway ride each way - they were worth it. Plus they're wood, so I can eat them if necessary.  

Is that a Gopura in your Pocket?

Madurai, Tamil Nadu, India

So Madurai features a lot of those by now familiar Indian tourism contradictions - a congested, sprawling ugly city full of hawkers, beggars and hustlers (though not quite as bad as Agra) surrounding stunning tourist sights and crammed full of saris so incredible that I might start wearing one. So again, you love it and you hate it, yin and yang, Brahma-Shiva-Vishnu, etc etc etc.

As for the good: the Shri Meenakshi temple is absolutely stunning, both inside and out, and worth the trip.  Among the top religious sites of any type anywhere, it's the high point of medieval Dravidian  (Nayak) sculpture/design around and makes for good photos. It's a Shiva/Parvati (his number 1 consort) temple although down here they have different names - suneshavara and meenakshi.   Among the more interesting aspects is that is in continuous use at all hours, with all sorts of ongoing ceremonies, usually multiple weddings (since it's a shiva-parvati fertility site), featuring elaborate marigold headdresses, tearful teenaged brides, stone faced grooms, and shoving matches between rival parents in-law - and some jerk wearing ugly mountain climbing sunglasses taking pictures of the whole thing. 

As for the bad: the usual range of auditory and olfactory offenders.  Special mention goes to the hotel Supreme, where my room features hideous decor that a 1979 mumbai bachelor would think was swinging, an air conditioning system that I think caught on fire last night or at least smelled like it and now is broken, and a toilet seat that was apparently designed for both standing and sitting - it's like a raised squat platform and just makes no sense logistically from any posture.  Anyway, it will now feature prominently in my vivid Melifoquinine induced nightmares for that reason from now on.  Plus the food is all South Indian veg - so it's dosa/uttapam/idli or bust.  I'd rather bust.

Tomorrow it's on to the absolute sticks (back to the Taj resorts for me, it costs more and is a lot by Indian standards but staying in dives I can only do once or twice a week) in Thekaddy to try to visit the Periyar dwildlife reserve, which might be closed and I might have to bribe/baksheeh my way in as you end up having to do a lot here as a rich westerner even if you're not rich.


Below is a corrected route map - black is by air, red is by land (or boat), and blue is - the future, but compare it with map 1 from months back and see that plans change.

Of 30-pondy-trichy

Madurai, Tamil Nadu, India

 

So it's undisputed that I've lost a bit of steam after the first few heady months.  The heat and hassle-wallahs will do that to you after a while, I've been gone for something like 76 days now and been in India for 5 weeks.  Very few grand adventures, just sort of shuffling around from place to place.  I tried to engineer a good story by trying to get a cycle rickshaw driver to let me cycle him around the other day, but it was met with blank stares and not much anectdotal potential.  I'm lining up a (smaller) mountain climb and some rainforest safari action in Borneo, Malaysia next month so maybe then Johnny Quest will be back.

 

As for the last few stops, Pondicherry, down the road from Mamallapuram, was sort of the odd counterpart to Shimla, the old British capital in the hills where I stopped a month ago.  Pondy, as it's known, was the capital of French India - and after a few wars with the British, it was pretty much all of French India until they gave it back in the 50's.  So like Shimla, it's like somebody plopped a Euro(French Med) town right in the middle of South India on the Bay of Bengal.  Even the cricket playing tamil kids in the street were speaking French.  Unlike Shimla, it has been kept up rather nicely, with contributions from both the French and this weird Sri Aurobindo Society cult type organization which apparently owns half of town.  That said it was a pleasant enough  if not exactly happening, spot in which to purposefully ignore a dubious occasion.  The food was decent there too as a number of French expats live there and have set up some respectable restaurants.

 

The next stop, Tiruchirapalli, aka Trichy, incorporated (as does most of inland Tamil Nadu, alas) the claustrophobic, wall to wall rickshaw, stifling heat  that Northern India does, so in other words it kind of sucks and is not worth my or your time.  It has a cool looking (from afar) big rock temple/mountain in the center of town, right next to a huge-ass cathedral and jesuit college, (lots and lots of churches down south) but other than that, nothing to write home about, other than that  I spent my first night in South India w/o air conditioning - which will be the last such night, ever.  

 

There's also some weird scam down south where everybody asks you for foreign coins.  Some school kid yesterday asked me for it for a "school project" and I gave him a nickel and some pennies and some Hong Kong change, and then I realized his project was probably a fabrication after about 10 other people asked me for foreign coin "souvenirs" as well.  Not sure what the hell they are doing with them.  

 

Mamalla the Ugandan Giant

Mamallapuram, Tamil Nadu, India

Mamallapuram is south of Chennai/Madras along the Bay of Bengal.  It's kind of a cheap beach resort but unfortunately the beach isn't a place where you want to spend too much time here because you could step in something alas. The town is decent enough, with your typical pink/blue/yellow/whitewashed beachy colors and thatched roofs and that kind of thing.   It's famous for its rock temples (which are in art-historical family sense,  distant cousins of the ones I saw in Dunhuang & Bingling in northern china, 5000 miles away) and they are pretty impressive, even though looking at them takes some endurance because it's crazy hot here. 

A few more random thoughts - the South of India is easier going generally than the North - and there's fresh seafood too.  The area seems to be doing fairly well even though its right in the middle of the tsunami zone.  Most of the beachfront areas have rebuilt, if they needed to, and while there's some rubble I'm not sure if it's tsunami related or just general Indian miscellaneous debris.  That said the South generally doesn't seem to have the same sense of decaying/bursting/imploding that the North does, probably because it's in an economic boom.  While outsourcing and the growth of software and high tech industries are widely reported in the US, what isn't reported is the irony of it all here.  The South of India has been inhabited by darker skinned Dravidians, while the lighter skinned Indo-Aryans in the North( who invented the caste system, a lot of which revolved around skin color to separate themselves from the dravidians) have traditonally hogged the spotlight and still do, constituting the Taj & Raj imagery with which most westerners conceive India.  As far as I could see, Northern India looked like the past to me - nice temples and monuments, a huge government bureaucracy that is more bark than bite, and a raft of problems that nobody seems to know how to fix.  Southern India seems to be the future.

There's some unique problems though, a lot like their high-tech california colleagues, the Tamils have a thing about electing movie stars into their government.  Apparently every single state gov't official (state gov'ts are more powerful here generally, the chief minister is like a Governor on steroids) is a former Tamil  movie star.  ( Contrary to popular myth,  Indian film is very very regionalized.  Everybody in the West knows about Bollywood, but the thing is only 50-60% of the populace speaks Hindi, in which Bollywood films are made, and down here everybody speaks Tamil, which is not really related to Hindi at all. So as a consequence,  there's  a Ladakhi  film industry (which is basically a few guys in Leh with a mike and a camera) that I call Bol-Leh-wood (ha!), a Tamil film industry (Tamalewood? ha ha!) etc etc etc.  Of course all the movies in the regional cinemas are identical to a westerner - man sings earsplitting song, woman sings earsplitting song, dancing ensues, repeat, but that's beside the point.

The big-daddy of Tamil movie star politicians is some guy named MDR, who kind of looks like Moammar Qaddafi because he wears a lambswool hat and sunglasses, I say this because his picture and statue is literally everywhere, by the roadside, on the streetcorner, everywhere.  Of course he was a gangster and monumentally corrupt  and actually was reelected after he had a stroke and was incapacitated at the end of his career before he died (when a legion of his fans maimed themselves by cutting of arms/legs in sympathy, not kidding).....but man they love him, and they love his last wife too, who was also a movie star and succeeded him, and was also a gangster.  She's everywhere though here.

Patience

Chennai (Madras), Tamil Nadu, India

 

So it seems every time I step on a bus in India there's always a novel test of endurance awaiting me.  I thought very little could be as frustrating as the Amritsar ride on the night "luxury" bus, what with the controversy over the coffee table, the intense heat, choking diesel fumes, and the annoying, loud, sweaty sikh kid sitting next to me over whom I battled for the armrest (I pushed him back over the line of control) and who I eventually just had to tell to f-himself when he started trying to shut the window, which actually worked. 

 

Unfortunately the bus from Agra to Dehli on Sunday evening was even worse.  Having been shutout of train tickets and having a monday AM plane flight, I had no alternative, but to book another "deluxe" air-conditioned ride.  This time, my booking did not secure me a seat, but instead a spot on the floor in the back (some german loser who simultaneously got on took the last seat, made no effort to switch with me, and was bitching to me how it was uncomfortable - yes). 

 

Of course, I could have tolerated this had we made the 4-5 hour drive back to Dehli as scheduled at 5 pm.  Instead, the "deluxe" bus was actually the back end of a domestic tour bus, so instead of driving back to Dehli, we made several stops for night-time sightseeing in Mathura (where there are no streetlights or anything, but that's beside the point).  Mathura, in the 1-2 hours I spent there, managed to shoot past Amritsar and Agra as the biggest dump in India that I've seen yet.  Apparently it's significant as a pilgramage center due to the fact that Lord Krishna allegedly lived there during the events of the Bhagavad Gita, so there's loads of vishnaivite sadhus, and of course cows, cows, and more cows, as well as persistent hawkers and beggars.  While I take no position on the various Hindu deities, by the end of my time there, I was ready for Kali, Durga, and the rest of the sivaites to raze the place.

 

So after that unscheduled stop, already being well behind schedule and only being a little over an hour outside dehli, at or around 11 pm our driver made the customary roadside dhaba stop, for "dinner", which I'm pretty sure they usually do in order to get a kickback/commission from the owners as this happens a lot. Then at some point outside Dehli I was hustled off to a neighboring bus headed more towards my part of town, and although I didn't have to sit on the floor, I managed to lose my hat (which I thought I had lost in China but recovered).  Then the driver screamed at us in Hindi and dropped us off two miles away from our destination.  So at 1 AM I got back to the hotel marking the end of what should have been a four and a half hour drive after 9 hours.  India.

 

Chennai is a coastal city recently famous for outsourcing (which I guess here would be Insourcing) and is the first place I've seen in India which seems to be booming rather than decaying.  I'd like to see more of it, but I can't really stray too far from my hotel room due to a microbial souvenir from the north. 

Agravation

Agra, Uttar Pradesh, India

 

So New Dehli got old very quickly, the scamming and heat and the traffic make it a hard place to really enjoy for very long.  I spent a lot of time locked in my hotel room watching cricket.  While hanging out and watching TV isn't the reason why I came here, when you're in Dehli and it's hot, and you're tired of being harassed, it can be a refreshing alternative.  Also I got to meet up with my friend Hashmet - hiker/author/expedition leader/tour guide - who helped me plan the rest of my India travels.  That helped quite a bit, because northern India/Dehli can kind of sour your mood a bit as it's got the atmosphere of a prison riot in a phone booth.

 

Similar to that, and many times worse, is the spot where I am now, lovely Agra.  Agra represents the  postcard-best of India, boasting the Taj Mahal, the Red Fort, and a boatload of other monuments and places of historic interest just a short ride from Dehli.   It also represents the absolute worst, matching its monuments with extortionate pricing, punishing heat, wall to wall crowds, filthy, polluted, vile streets, and the most persistent and annoying touts, con-artists, scammers, and everything- wallahs on the subcontinent.  The only reason why I'm here is because I couldn't face the inevitable "you went to India for seven weeks and didn't see the Taj Mahal?" scrutiny that would have followed had I skipped it (and am now stuck here for a few more hours until a dreadful bus ride as the train tickets were sold out - although hopefully it will be better than the last bus ride from Amritsar to Dehli, which featured a lot of yelling in Punjabi and a trip to the police station regarding an attempt to place a coffee table in the aisle.)  The Taj is nice enough, it looks like it does in all the pictures, though I found the Red Fort more interesting.  Anyway, I've seen it, and now I can get the hell out.

 

Tomorrow I am heading southwards to Chennai aka Madras and then spending the next 3 weeks in Tamil Nadu and Kerala - supposedly the atmosphere in the south is more relaxed than in the north, which is good, to put it delicately.

 

India photos

So here's a small selection of the last 3 weeks or so, uploaded for your pleasure. Not sure how much bandwidth I have so check again if it doesn't load.

here's stok kangri from advanced base camp, we went up the back left side, which you can't really see in this picture



Here's the glacier field you cross on the way up



another summit picture, from left to right Dashi the cook, Tundep Tsetan, and Sir Hilary.



Chortens near stok village



Kullu house in old Manali



Pilgrims at Amritsar



Border guard at Wagah - he really was about 90 feet tall



An old Dehli school bus

Itinerary thus far

This is just for my own purposes recording where I've stopped so far, I'll update this later with stats and maybe even a revised map and wittier commentary

Beijing
Xian
Lanzhou
Jiayaguan
Dunhuang
Urumqui
Kashgar
Auytagh
Urumqui
Chengdu
Emei Shan
Chengdu
Kunming
Macau
Hong Kong
Dehli
Leh
Stok Park area
Leh
Manali
Shimla
Chandgarh
Amritsar
Wagah

Happy Indiapendence Day

Amritsar, Punjab, India

So today is I-day, aka Independence day or India day.  It's pretty much the same as every other day here, hot and sweaty and crowded.  The real hot nationalistic action occurred last night over at the border in Wagha.  Yesterday was P-day (Pakistan day - although I & P became independent simultaneously, they changed their national days so as not to be the same as the other) so it was a big deal over there too.  Thus the evening flag ceremony at Wagah,  the only official land border crossing between the two and where the flags are simultaneously lowered by each side's border troops in tandem, was the place to be yesterday.

Accordingly I hauled my ass out there for what was a suffocating shoving match even by South Asian standards.  The border is in the middle of a wide road with huge reviewing stands on the india side facing two gates, which has not-so-huge but still large stands on the Pakistan side., and two flags (indo & pak) right in the middle in no-mans-land-istan between the two gates.  By mutual agreement, the flags are simultaneously lowered around 6:45 each evening so that neither flies while the other doesn't.

So when you arrive you work your way through the teeming mass to try to get a spot as close to the border as possible.  The crowd is wild, especially since it is I-day weekend, and there's a live band playing tunes to whip them up.  The border guards are all about 6-5 or taller and wear absurd, vaguely 19th C. British style hats and sashes and vehemently blow whistles at people in the crowd, as gangs of younger males tend to stand up and dance which results in the occasional near confrontation from another gang seated behind the dancers.  This has limited success as the ceremony starts as pretty much everybody, regardless of creed or caste or nationality, in my case (though I have been mistaken for Indian a few times), leans on and shoves each other towards the border.

The ceremony (described even better here w/picture) itself consists of precision absurd marching at high speeds by the border guards on both sides. If a military conflict were ever to revolve on the ability to sychronize speed march fifty yards with little jump steps, the Indians and Pakistanis have established complete superiority. The flags are lowered in synchronicity while the Indian crowd chants and screams "Hindustan! Hindustan! Jai Hind!" and  the Pakistani crowd reciprocates.  Afterward, the gates are shut and then the crowd, which has been moving up despite frantic whistling by the guards, surges forward in jostling waves  as close to the fence as they can get ( i got maybe 20 yards away when I got sick of the human cattle stampede and gave up - which is about as close as I'll get to Pakistan which is too bad as there are certain high mountain regions thereof that I wish I could see,  but its also a bit of a relief).  The same thing looks like it's happening over in Pakistan except everybody's wearing white shalwar kameezes instead of sikh turbans, and there seems to be even more frantic running and retreating.  On the whole though, the crowd is fairly good natured given that its bitter enemies are across the way and the whole thing seems sort of tongue in cheek, with more waving at the other side than cursing.

Tonight I head to Dehli where I'm going to hole up at the Intercontinental and figure out what to do next and hopefully try not to sweat for a while.

Punjabi blues

Amritsar, Punjab Pradesh, India

 

At first glance, the Punjabi spiritual capital of Amritsar, close to the Pakistan border, is a dirty, hot, noisy, sweltering disaster area.  But this is inaccurate, as you peer deeper into its interior, one discovers that it is a really, really, really hot, noisy, dirty  sweltering disaster area. It's one saving grace however, aside from fairly friendly natives, is the famed Golden Temple of Amritsar,

which does make it worth it -- barely.

 

The Golden Temple is the vatican/mecca/wailing wall/jokhang of the Sikh faith.  While the Sikhs have a well earned reputation of being sort of warlike and martial (It is guarded by spear carrying sikhs, plus I saw a guy carrying around an actual medieval flail in the temple), Sikhism itself is a pretty interesting religion.  It comes from the Indo/Pak border areas It's described as a blend of hinduism & islam, though I don't know if that's very accurate.  It's more of a reaction to both.  It's actually based on very egalitarian and democratic principles, renouncing the caste system of any kind (that's why all Sikh men take the name Singh (lion) and woment take the name Kaur (wolf or something, I forget) and welcoming to people of all faiths.  In fact in the Golden Temple, all are welcome to get a free communal meal in the Langor with the Sikhs  regardless of race, creed, color, religion.  In what I think must be a subconscious jab at Islam, in sikhism both men and women are required to cover their hair and carry daggers.

 

Speaking of the daggers, the warlike tradition of the Sikhs contrasts a bit with the religion, although since they were the barrier against Islam on the west and later the guardians of the British frontier its only natural.  The British themselves waited till a period of Sikh infighting to conquer them, not wanting to take on the whole nation.  Afterwards, and up to this day, they formed the backbone of the Indian army, and still do, despite the troubles in 1984 that led to Indira Gandhi's demise.  A placard in the Sikh museum next to a picture of the destroyed facade of the temple gleefully alludes to the Sikh revenge against Indira.  The rest of the museum  features, among various guru portraits and battle scenes,  oil paintings of Sikh martyrs being: mutilated, boiled, crushed by giant wheels, sawed in half vertically, and otherwise disembowled.  But  they're actually a fairly nice lot, the Sikhs, everybody at the temple seemed happy to see me otherwise. 

 

On the 5-hour way here yesterday I took a bone-rattling, dirt cheap state bus.  It was , crowded, uncomfortable, and hot (but I don't think anybody vomited) but actually in a sick way I sort of enjoyed it.  Taking that mode of transport is a good way to go local, if miserably, and gives you a glimpse as to what life is like for 15-=20% of the world's populace.  So think of me as a man of the people, like Gandhi, except with a platinum card.

Pun in the Sun

Chandigarh, Punjab Pradesh, India

 

So to briefly cover the last few days, no real swashbuckling adventures.  I spent the last two nights in Shimla, former summer capital of British India from about 1864 - 1947 - though it became the de facto capital where the Brits spent most of their time after they realized that Calcutta was way too hot.

 

Shimla today consists of a strip of a bunch of run-down Tudor & Victorian buildings undergoing ineffectual, if any, restoration, set above the typical Hill State labyrinthine bazaar town. It's got everything a lively English town needs - a mall, consistent fog, and even a Gaiety Theatre, as well as constant territorial brawls between roaming bands of dogs and monkeys.  What it lacks is Englishman of any sort, which is sor of poetic justice given that natives were banned from the English section till 1917.

 

The other lesson I learned here is that Samosas over here are not the ineffectual little bite sized dumplings that you get stateside.  Rather, they are massive tetrahedrons of fried goodness 4-5x the size of their wimpy american cousins, which explains why people were taken aback when I ordered two prior to dinner.  Although I note that tthis time I avoided a repeat of the Quanjude incident back in Cathay and took them both down anyway.

 

A quick word in general about the sanitation here, it's been commented on at length by others, most notably a half rabid and stoned VS Naipaul back in the 60's, but it's an issue, and that's all I will say other than that its odd that a country which is so obsessed with ritual cleanliness and purity apparently tthinks nothing, for the most part, of simply discarding its garbage wherever it drops.

 

In the same vein, the bus ride to Chandigarh marks my third consecutive ride where people were violently retching out the window. Riding a bus in India in the Hill states is a lot like riding a roller coaster in the US, save for the fact that its cheaper and far less safe.  After a while you just have to put your head down and realize that you can't will the cement truck THAT JUST CAME AROUND HE FOG OF THE MOUNTAIN BEND AND IS ABOUT TO KILL YOU out of the way and relax.

 

Chandigarh, where I currently am, is one of the stranger (and richer) cities in India (and is a brilliant contrast to Shimla in a way).  Afer the partition, the old Punjab capital, Lahore, was in Pakistan, so J. Nehru decided to build up a new one from scratch.  So, looking forward, he let  Le Corbusier (french for "the corbusier") design his city of the future.  The result is a geometric grid of exact rectangles and broad boulevards, and intersecting roundabouts, filled in with large, concrete block buildings that double as Tandoori ovens during the 13 month long Punjabi summer.  Each sector is simply given an Orwellian number (right now I am in Sector 17B, I think), which I guess sounds futuristic, but the long, broad layout creates plenty of business for cycle rickshaws, the primary mode of transport which I bet Corby didn't have in mind. I guess it's not that ugly, but it also isn't nice, tthough the layout does seem to minimize filth concentration which is good.

 

The major sight is the Neck Chand Rock Garden, which is a bizarre, Gaudi-esque park/sculpture garden/playground type thing designed (illegally) out of rocks and old bathroom fixtures by a bored road engineer back in he 70's.  At first its a bit underwhelming and it has you wondering why the hell you dragged yourself out to the Punjab in the middle of August to see it [thats another phrase I thought I'd never type].  But after a while it seems deceptively large kind of like you're walking around in an MC Escher print or something.  Pleasantly surprising overall.  Unpleasant was the fact that they closed the state museum right before I got there, which allegedly has some great Gandharan art which is harder than hell to find in most places.

Kullu Valley High

Manali, Himachal Pradesh, India

 

So I should say a bit about Manali.  It's a former colonial hill station in the Himalayan hills at the head of the Kullu Valley, home of the Kullu peoples (as always, its easiest to distinguish them from the various Nepalis, Jo's, and Tibetans by their headwear) and is the first actually Indian place I've been, although it also has more Israeli backpackers than you would think existed, as old Manali has more Hebrew signs than Hindi, no kidding.  Otherwise its a popular Indian resort town set on the banks of a bunch of raging rivers in deodar, pine & evergreen forests and is fairly low key for India. And I'm staying in a renovated wooden cottage dating back to the Raj days so it's kind of cool.

 

There's not exactly a lot of sights as its a resort area, and its the rainy season, so that's how I found myself hanging out with a bunch of Mumbai guys drinking beer and watching wrestling yesterday (which is incredibly popular here as of late).  Of course, the whole afternoon was a pretext for a scam (actually the first attempted scam on me in India in two weeks, which is pretty good, in Beijing they started the second I got off the plane).  This one involved giving me free beer and then asking me smuggle diamonds back to the US to avoid import duties. I'm sorry to say this - but what a bunch of total amateur hucksters.  I'm not Joe Idiot Australia guy.   It takes a lot more than two beers to get me to commit to something that stupid, more like 10.  Thanks for the beer though guys.

Wrapping up Ladakh

Manali, Himchal Pradesh, India

So I had a bunch of entries ready for the end of Ladakh but am sort of condensing/scrapping them.  Most of them were just laments about how incredibly bored I was (which is what happens when you reach the apex of an 8 day trek on day 4).  Briefly - the highlights

-two days after climbing Stok Kangri, out of sheer boredom and truly just....because it was there....I climbed another mountain named Guleb Kangri.  Although it was shorter (maybe only 18.5 k feet or so) It was a real pain in the ass to climb.  It was mostly scree and slick, dangerous, ice so I climbed w/o equipment.  I thought it was technically much more difficult than Stok because you have to cross a bunch of very dangerous, massive boulder fields on the way in and out and the ascent is a lot steeper and the descent is a bummer.  About the only thing fun about it was a bit of free rock climbing at 17k feet, which, btw, is very dangerous and nobody should ever try at home including myself.  I'm not sure if it was fatigue or just lack of motivation but climbing this guy was more like work than fun, and I took a lot of spills that thankfully  I was able to survivie but could have turned ugly.  So I think my high-altitude mountaineering days are done for now.  At the end of the day I was completely exhausted after the 11 hour ordeal  and near collapse at dinner in the kitchen tent (meals, btw, became their own ordeal of mass quantities of curry, lentls, and peas as time went on and became a real sore spot)  and, in his charismatic way, Tsetan asked me "You tired?" to which I responded  - "A little bit, do you watch a lot of  Matlock or something?" in response to which Dashi was convulsed on the floor with laughter - some things are universal I guess.

-On the last night of a trek, there's usually a bit of a party.  Ours was highlighted by a gathering around a pile of flaming bullshit - or techinically I think it was dzo-shit (cow/yak hybrid) since there's no wood.  A bunch of locals joined us, so at first when they at me down near this fire surrounded by candles I thought they were going to do some weird local initiation ceremony.  But it was actually just the standard "singalong" thing.  Invariably attention was turned to me to sing along.  I didn't have a lot of ideas but the good thing about this type of thing is that you can make up the words and they won't know the difference.  I led with "you've lost that loving feelin", followed up with La Bamba (great for word making up), took a misguided yet inspired detour into "let me stand next to your fire" and then closed with the original Sargent Pepper, simply because I knew all the words.  I was then presented with a cake which said in huge letters on it "HAPPY JOURNEY MAV TREK", which I graciously accepted

-On my final night in Leh, I booked a ride on the 2 AM jeep to Manali.  As a consequence I stayed that evening as a guest in the Tsetan house - which he referred to as his "family home"and I think housed either his sister or sister in law and a bunch of kids.  Dinner, of course, was mutton curry, and all sorts of other things I was forced to eat politely, as well as politely enduring a bunch of Boll-Leh-wood type VCD's put on for my entertainment which I alos endured politely.  I was also given the guest bed of honor near the buddhist shrine room which unfortunately  had its windows near some site of human waste, as are a lot of things here, but all in all a good show for Tsetan

-The Manali-Leh jeep trek itself along the world's 2nd highest motorable road, frequently described as one that can't be missed, should have been avoided at all costs.  The scenery was nice but not that great considering the other stuff I've seen so far and not worth a 19.5 hour trip.  Otherwise, the heinous road conditions (most unpleasant I've seen anyhere, and I've been in Nepal, Mongolia, Tibet, Xinjiang, etc) and being crammed into a jeep with 8 other people are best skipped.  Particularly so if the driver is on the floor next to you with some wierd stomach ailment and some Ladakhi kid we picked up on the side of the road is now driving, and if some  androgynous middle aged dutch woman keeps stopping the jeep to vomit, inter alia.

Ascent Epilogue

Why the hell did I do this

Good question.  Lets begin with the reasons why I did not do it

Its not because of some death wish or anything like that dreamed up in moments of misery, even though this stuff really is quite dangerous at times.  It is not because of the camping either -- theres nothing fun about sleeping on the ground even if you have a 3 servants waiting on you. It is not because of the fauna - unless traveling to the other side of the world to see pigeons and crows and donkeys is worthwile. (theoretically Ladakh is the last refuge of the snow leopard, regarding which one is contractually obligated to use the word "elusive" when putting it into a sentence, so the chances of seeing one are slim and none.) The scenerz really is not all that great either.  I mean, trust me, the Himalayas are beautiful, especiallly the foothills and such.  But the high plateaus like Tibet and Ladakh are more beautiful in the stark, rocky, mars-scape sense than in any Heidi picture post card sense.

The reason why I came here (and went up there) is because the place and the activity is so very extreme.  The sun is intense, the cold is intense, the air is thin, life is barely supported.  Likewise, climbing up the side of a huge pile of rock and ice with your legs on fire and barely being able to breathe and having to concentrate and maintain focus and carve that ice step in the ice field with steek while simultaneously maintaining a foothold and your balance and having another hour to go while not slipping and falling and ending up dead is about as  extreme as a sport gets .  (with apologies to all you  skaters  and surfers and rollerbladers out there, despite what  modern marketing  may tell you, your sports are about as extreme as eating a bag of Zessty Salsa Doritos compared to this shit)  When I was a kid I dreamed of being an astronaut - well this is about as close as one gets to those conditions while staying on land.

Another reason is that its the ultimate individual challenge, and its so simple and easy in a certain sense.  THeres only two possible outcomes.  Either one goes up or goes home.  Thats it.  There is no middle ground, no gray area.  Either you answer the bell and dig down and take the next step or you dont.  A lot of writers & the climbing press, to the extent there is one, like to phrase things in terms of "you vs. the mountain".  I think thats bullshit.  The mountain is a bunch of ice and rock.  It has no feelings.  It does not care what happens to you if you grab the wrong handhold or whatever.  It does not care.

You, on the other hand, do care.  You came halfway around the world to do this and made all the arrangements.  You care a lot.  Its not you vs. the mountain, its you vs. yourself, and your own doubt, and pain,  and fatigue, and focus.

In a way it is almost too easy - people seldom make real life as simple as the up or down, go or no issues of the mountain.  Theres a lot more gray.  Thats why its fun to do this, its a way to test yourself on a simple level by removing a lot of variables, and its fun when you pass.

Ascent part IV (contd again)

So I forgot to mention that prior to the climb I had put on the one pair of yet unused underwear I had (this computer is totally fucked up so I cant hyphenate or apostrophe or get any punctuation to work correctly, sorry, and the y key is mixed up with the z key) - underarmour.  I was unsure why I brought it but I knew on the morning of the climb it was time to protect this house).    It ended up helping a lot on the descent.  Anyway, after reaching the summit T called his wife, boss, and mother in that order.  I adopted the air of "is this all" and then had a bit of lunch.  The descent was  a pain in the ass and I slipped a few times and managed to stop  myself from a long slide by performing a perfect textbook ice arrest with steek, although I dont think in the textbook one is supposed to pretzel their leg behind steek, but it worked, and my 99th percentile presidential  physical fitness test  rankings in flexibility from gradeschool were validated.  

Around this point I decided that fighting gravity was a silly idea so I followed the lead of a few of the other climbers and went down the easy way....sliding down on my ass.  While not glamorous, it was a shitload of fun and a hell of a lot easier than trying to walk down the steep ridges and such, and the only casualty is a wet ass, which everybody knows I dont mind.  Even when the slope evened out a bit and my momentum faded, I cross country assskied the rest of the way using steek.  I recached the big glacier field around 10 or 11 and then avoided the worlds biggest damned crevasse (it was so big it looked  like space-time was folding in on itself) Around the last hour back when I was dragging, the following exchange ensued(typical of T and I, whose english wasnt so hot)

T- "you tired"
me- "yeah I kind of just up at 2 am and then climbed a 20000 foot mountain my man. you tired "
T- "you tired"
me ""
T'  " I take you bag"
me "yours"

So around noon or a little later we got back.  And thats the story of that mountain.  I was pretty proud of the fact that 1. I did it, and 2. did it on the cheap-amateurish way (of course not counting my 3 man support staff).  I used a north face windbreaker that I bought with Amex rewards points, a 3$ hat that I bought at Duane Reade on Pine street on the way to the Jets game a few years ago, the lead boots from hell and shitty crampons, and purple steek.  Hell the underarmour  was the most expensive thing I had on aside from the ridiculous french glacier glasses, which I would have thrown off the mountain on the principle of their being so ugly but I needed them to get down.

Most of the other groups in camp had all sorts of fancy gear and stuff like that, of which I was naturally contemptuous, particularly awful was the DAV Summit Club' - Deutsch, who had monogrammed tents, and I swear to god, climbed and hiked in formation.

SO how did I feel after it all - good I guess.  I did one of the things I set out to do and did it well enough.  Not sure  if  I will ever do anything like it again or go much higher.  Maybe Kilimanjaro as an excuse to see Africa one day, but lets face it, at only 19k feet its really kind of beneath me at this point.

Ascent part IV (contd)

top of the world

Ascent Part IV

7-31-2005, Summit Day

 

Summit Day begins at night, at like 2:30 AM, due to weather issues (you have to cross a huge ice field/glacier on the way to and from the mountain, which you don't want to do in the afternoon unless you "VANT TO GO SVEEMING".  Our cook thoughtfully prepared a dinner of baked beans, which I declined as Ed Viesturs would consider it cheating, inter alia.  So I turned in around 8 pm to sleep a bit and plot my victory speech.

 

After the 2 AM wake up call, I loaded up my backpack (strike two for Dashi the cook, who prepared an unconscionably heavy lunch filled with stuff I won't eat like boiled eggs) and strapped on the most godawfully uncomortable, lead footed set of mountaineering boots ever assembled.  Seriously these things were like 4-5 lbs each.  My previous hikes were with lightweight sneaker type shoes, not even close to this kind of weight.  It was like the difference between running a mile and running a mile with a cartoon ball and chain on each ankle. 

 

Making matters worses was that the initial ascent from base camp is punishingly steep and nasty if not dangerous in the dark.  I did it with little trouble yesterday but today with the gravity boots on it was a hideous, hideous challenge.  My lungs were fine due to the diamox but the lactic acid burn in my calves by the time I got to the first ridge was more painful than a naked picture of Gertrude Stein.  After the first 30 minutes I was dreaming up scenarios to bow out gracefully and find a way to waterproof my normal shooes and try again rather than deal with the hell boots.  Not helping matters was that Tundep (T) and the cook Dashi (D) were setting a ridiculous pace as if they had somewhere importaint to be.  Around that point they forced me to start using my climbing pole (which really purple and cute in an elton johnish way), or as they called it " steek" which made matters a bit better.

 

I figured I'd last till Advanced Base Camp and then quit to make it respectable, but as we got past it and into the icefield around hour no. 3, the pain started to fade a bit as we headed up the Southeastern face of Stok Kangri (Kangri means glacial peak in Ladahki, btw).  I was still slow and tired but then strapped on the crampons and got a bit of a second wind going (by withholding steek and crampons from myself till absolutely necessary, I find it gave me a bit of a mental boost) and started making my way up the face and veering left towards the ridges, away from the summit but a gentler route.  A minor setback occurred around 5:30, when the sun rose and I put on my heinous looking glacier glasses, in the process dropping my gloves and watching them slide tantalizingly down the mountain.  Also around that point another group, which had chosen the steeper route, had somebody turn back, which made me feel good in a perverse way. 

 

After another hour or so I started to fade again so I jacked up the MP3 player and started big pimping my way up and up along with Jay-Z.  This was another mental motivational device that lasted for about 30 minutes and then faded, so I switched to the "step salvo" approach after that, where I'd plan to take 5 steps and take 7, 8 and take 10, etc, gasping in between.  I was way behind T&D at this point but was still making a decent if sporadic pace up the mountain, considering that I had to pause to readjust the world's shittiest set of crampons every five minutes by banging them with steek. 

 

Around 7 or 7:30 I made it to the top of one of the high ridgelines around 19k feet or 5600 meters or so.  I had a minor scare on the way when a handhold gave way (btw, this shit is really, really dangerous) on the way up but was otherwise OK.  I paused to inhale a juicebox and then popped another diamox for the final push to the top.  At this point, neither the muscial-climb-along method nor the step-salvo method was working due to sheer exhasustion.  So, to take things over the top I resorted to a method known to every Catholic school kid and honed in the classrooms of St. Rose, Seton Jr. High, and St. Thomas: self-flagellation. 

 

This consisted of repeating a few phrases mentally and out loud to myself over and over again, and went a little something like this: "come on, stop being such a bitch, do you want this you bastard? Then go take another step! Look at Tundep & Dashi, their families are poor! Probably because you didn't donate to the canned food drive and were busy watching wrestling! But they're already up there! Do you want to be a man! Then get the f- up there you little poseur! GO!"

 

At 8:35 am India time, I made it to the summit, 6,150 m (20,295 ft) above the earth's surface.  The feeling was a mixture of relief, euphoria, absolution, fatigue, and the tiniest bit of disappointment that a challenge had been removed.  I probably could have made it a bit higher, maybe another few hundred feet, but was pretty glad to be at the end.

 

[to be continued tomorrow, the computer is fading here]

Ascent Part III

7-30-2005 - Stok Kangri Base Camp, Summit Eve

 

Today we hiked up to Advanced Base camp.  Tundep (whose wifes name is Nundep, and who's last name is Tsetan -- pronounced like you would expect, so yes I am following the path of Satan) told me it would be about 2-3 hours depending on speed but we did it in just over an hour.  Here is where I sing the praises of Diamox.  Normally I shun pharmas of any kind as both a practicing stoic and because they are for wusses.  But seriously, this suff works.  No headache or lightheadedness or coughing.  Obviously physical exertion is still troublesome and your heart stilll races, but honestly the stuff works.  Ed Viesturs would probably consider it cheating, but considering that i don't have fancy (or even adequate) gear or sponsors or any of that stuff, I consider him to be a cheater.  So take that no ox boy.  

 

As a consequence I feel good enough to take a summit crack tomorrow (Base camp, btw is at about 14,500 feet or so, the summit is like 20,300ft (6150m) or something.  In theory tomorrow was supposed to be a rest day.  But since I'm out of ideas as to leisure (all I brought was a New Yorker summer ficition issue due to weight concerns.  I normally shun this issue because it's way too self important.  No magazine should ever have two pieces that use the word "cerulean" in them.  Even worse the only thing left to read is a a critical snoozefest on "The making of Americans", a long boring incoherent rant by Gertrude Stein, which shockingly, happens to make a long and boring article that you don't want to read.  Yes, Stein was avant garde.  So what? That doesn't make her good.  I can be avant garde too.  I could write this narrative on the back of a piece of used TP.  That woldn't make it good). 

 

So what we've established in the preceding paragraph is that I'm climbing a 20k foot mountain in the  Himalayas because I hate the NY'er summer fiction issue, as good a reason as any I guess.

Ascent Part II

7-29-2005, Stok Kangri Base Camp

 

This morning we set out early to get a good base camp spot. Tundep (T) -- who just asked me my name yet again, hell I love you T but shit, I'm the only person here, it's not that hard -- set a nasty pace.  We ended up ascending maybe 2-3k feet in about 90 minutes.  Hiking at that pace is tough at altitidue, especially in the Himalayas, which, as has been said, begin where other mountains end.  I just sort of look at the ground and take it step by step.  Obviously this is not conducive to scenery viewing, but considering how big the damned mountains are the veiw doesn't change that much on a minute-to-minute basis.

 

So around 10:10 AM we pulled into base camp.  While the term "base camp" has a faintly romantic/exotic/rugged ring to it, inreality it is a dirty field of used TP where you set up your tent.  One of the major drawbacks of Himalayan mountaineering is that the climate and food conspire to ensure that every trekker leaves a colonic calling card to be mummified for future generations.  Gross.

 

 

Ascent Part I

7-28-2005, near Stok Pass, Ladakh

 

So I tried to be a good guy and save some cash and use an Indian agency rather than a US one.  That as a mistake.  The various middlemen involved did not relay critical info to my guide, (Tundep, who I just call "T"), who can't remember my name though everybody just calls me "sir" as a sahib anyway.

 

Among the information not relayed is that, as appealing as dragging heavy mountaineering boots, an Ice Axe, and Gaiters throught the Taklamaklan Desert would have been for the past month, I didn't bring any equipment.  So I spent yesterday on the back of T's motorcycle, renting & buying substandard equipment (I believe my rusty ice axe bears the inscription, " property of H. Harrer" on it)  The rest of the evening I spent googling things like "how to use an ice axe," in true Mallory & Irwin fashion. (hey maybe if they had they'd have made it)

 

Was glad to get out of Leh because it is crawling with tourists, particularly there are more French there than MOMA on a Saturday in August [you know even though france bashing is so cliched, it's really hard not to here.  French tourists are just as bad as any american crew and probably worse;  loud, annoying, insular, and either tubby fannypacked middleagers or hippies trying to go native and failing.  Get the hell out of here guys.  At least the English who also suffocate this place know that they don't fit in.]

 

So today we set out from Stok Village for a 3-4 hour hike up Stok pass.  Not an exceedingly difficult journey but by no means easy w/elevations ranging from 12-13.5 k fee.  My crew ( I require a staff of 4 - guide (T), cook (Dashi), helper (Dorje), and Pony Man (Pony Man) is currently hard at work setting up camp as I drink tea and wax ironic.  I've had full service camping last year in Tibet but never as the sole object of affection which is a little weird.  Of course I'm rather busy surveying for the RGS, and of course sending dispatches back to Simla on frontier developments ( a group of hashish smoking/new age Israeli backpackers being the most notable incursion) as well as the Bonapartists.

 

 

Ascent part 0

These next few entries cover the last 9 days or so.  The fact that I'm typing them nnow ruins a bit of the suspense as to whether or not I made it off the mountain for that, potential beneficiaries and heirs apparent, I apologize.

 

A little bit of general background as to where I was/am.  Ladakh is just on the other side of western Tibet (and is a.k.a. "Little Tibet" as its people are a sub-branch of Tibetans).  It's literally between a rock and a hard place as to the west lies the bloody valleys of Jammu & Kashmir where confrontations w/Pakistanis and insurgents continue and to the east is the disputed border area w/China where the Chinese, using specious reasoning even more pathetic than their flimsy claims in Tibet, invaded in 1962.  Otherwise though it's a lot like Tibet but with a substantial Kashmiri (Muslim) minority.