Reverse Culture Shock!

I have always had major problems readjusting back to life in the United States. It seems to get a bit easier the more I travel, but still the shock to my senses and the order and cleanliness of everything, combined with intense jetlag, can make me very emotional upon returning.

I spent my last few weeks in India preparing myself to return home. I had long talks with my friends still in India over chai about our fears and vague plans for eventually diving back into the working world. In my head, I went over and over past episodes of reintegration to try and remember what the United States feels like after being away in a developing country for so long.

When I was sixteen, I spent two months in Merida, Mexico, during which time I lived with a Mexican family and slept in a hammock like a local! When I returned home, the first thing I said to my parents upon entering the house was, "Oh wow, you all painted the cabinets!" Our kitchen has always had white cabinets, and they suddenly looked so bright and new to me that I was absolutely convinced that my parents had repainted them bright white.  They hadn't.  I also remember being fixated on the thick, painted lines down every street and wondering how they could be so perfect and why Americans weren't constantly swerving across them.

I had assumed that the same things that shock me every time upon return would be my struggle this time as well. But instead, different things have been difficult. I haven't been disgusted by high prices. Even in India, I remembered that a cafe latte over here costs nearly $4. And yes things are neat and clean and shiny new. But here is what has really thrown me off:

Shoes. Everywhere I go inside I want to slip off my shoes at the entrance and pad around barefoot.

Waste. How do our trash bags fill up so fast? Everything we buy is plastic wrapped and grocers only fill our bags half way before putting them in the cart.

Car time. I forgot about how much time we spend in our cars. It's exhausting and disgusting and unfortunately, in Louisville, unavoidable.  And in general everyone is just so busy all the time!  What happened to just sitting and talking?  Afternoon tea?  A good book?

Grocery stores. Even the local food mart is a palace of wonders. I could marvel forever at the chocolate-covered banana chips and wasabi peas and bottled ginger-infused antioxidant-powered Chinese herbal chilled green tea. The produce section is like a dizzying kaleidoscope, and the search for avocados nearly put me in tears.

Bare legs and tank tops. Today for the first time I am wearing a short jean skirt with no leggings underneath, but just around the house. I feel naked.

Power outage and utter chaos. When the power was out last week, everyone was complaining (among other things) of hot nights. But I say unless you have slept butt-naked upside down on the bed with your head directly under a fan going at turbo speed - and were still sweating, you have not been hot.

Customer service!  It's really an amazing concept.  At a restaurant I ordered sauce on the side and it came that way - no problem!  Everyone behind the counter is so friendly and accommodating.  If I want lemons in my water when I eat out, the waiter smiles and actually brings them, instead of casually pointing to the produce shelves so I can get them myself and not disturb his nap on the floor.

I miss India.  But I'm glad to be home.

Parting Thoughts

Today I am leaving India.

It's a weird feeling - I can't quite get my head around it. Looking back, it seems like the months passed in the blink of an eye, even though at times I felt like I would never get through the week.

I know I will go home and people will casually ask me, "So how was it?" But how do I sum up eight months of living and traveling and working and laughing and crying on the Indian subcontinent? It's not possible in a sentence, and not even possible in this one blog post.

The problem with describing India to someone who has never been is that it seems to be everything at once. It is simultaneously beautiful and nauseatingly ugly. It is colorful and mesmerizing, but also at times cold and depressing. The endless crowds can bring on a deep sense of loneliness, and the vast, open, empty spaces can inspire a sense of inner peace and pleasure. There is an abundance of glitter and gold and opulent wealth with sewage-smelling slums at its doorstep. The streets are at once full of joyful dancing and pain and sorrow. Markets smell of mouthwatering spices and fried delicacies, but everywhere people are going hungry. Life and death are constantly battling it out right in your face. Even the wealthiest tourists cannot completely seal themselves from the confounding, overwhelming, and fantastic complexities that define India.

I think when I am asked, over and over, "How was India? Did you just love it?", I will smile and respond, "India is really amazing." What else can be said? It is such a unique place and I have had such a multidimensional experience that I am left with too few words to describe it.

Chai & Chatter in Little Tibet

I returned to Dharamsala for my last week in India. I was worried I would be a bit bored - but not at all! I have been busy busy busy, which is a nice relief from the slow pace and occassional boredom I have been feeling while traveling alone. I like to have a base when I am spending a lot of time hopping from place to place on the road, so I left a small bag at Jamyang-la's apartment, and I wanted to end up back here in my last days to spend some quality time in a familiar place with this good family friend.

On my second day back in Dharamsala, Jamyang's cousin Nima Dolma put aside her entire day for me. She is a nun, though since she is living with and taking care of Jamyang she does not wear robes. She is also a recent refugee from Tibet, only having come here about seven months ago primarily to take care of Jamyang, who has tuberculosis. Nima Dolma is a bit of a crack-up, constantly making faces and blurting out random new words she has learned in English or Hindi. Every one of her facial expressions is a form of a smile - sometimes a worried smile, sometimes an "I'm sorry, food no good" smile, but often a very proud and happy smile, showing the white rows of her teeny teeth.

So after breakfast on Wednesday, when she finished cleaning up the apartment, we went on a walk up the mountain to a waterfall. As we were hiking up the trail, we came upon an Indian woman herding her goats. Out of nowhere, Nima Dolma breaks the silence with an obnoxiously loud "Baaaaaaaah! Baaa-haaa-haaa!!!!" imitating the goats. The woman turned and gave an amused smirk, and Nima Dolma kept baa-ing her way up the mountain. Then the woman said something to her in Hindi (Nima Dolma doesn't speak Hindi), to which she replied in Tibetan, and the woman turned around, passed Nima her herding stick, and walked away back down the mountain. So there we were, suddenly herding someone else's goats up the hill. Nima Dolma told me in Tibet she used to herd yaks, so apparently we were good to go. Later, we left the goats to graze in the grass near the path, and after that I don't know what happened to them, but Nima Dolma didn't seem too worried about it.

After a visit to the waterfall, we headed to some natural pools that have a constant flow of Himalayan glacier water coming through them. Nima Dolma wanted to swim, so I swam too. It was full of Indian tourists - mostly men in their underwear (women have to swim fully covered in their clothes). So I took off my shoes and jumped in to discover the water was painfully ice cold. I jumped in three times total, but swimming around in there was impossible.

In the afternoon, Nima Dolma took me to visit her Tibetan friends who she met in Nepal when she was on her way to India. We walked through the market and found the two women sitting on the side of the road watching shoppers go by. We drank some chai together, then went off to walk around the Dalai Lama's residence.

The women live in one tiny room in a dorm near the temples around the Dalai Lama's house. They have one gas stove on a table, with food cluttered around it on the floor. There are two twin beds, and a shelf built into one wall. There is not space for anything else in the room. The bathroom and the sinks for washing dishes are outside in the hallway. The women made us chai and cooked up four bowls of ramen noodles for a snack. One of them spoke a little English, so I asked her some questions about Tibet.

She said they left because "no freedom." They came to Dharamsala to be near the Dalai Lama, whereas in Tibet, even his photograph is banned. To get here, she and a small group of people hired a man to guide them through the mountains, traveling by night and sleeping undercover by day. They walked for 28 days before arriving clandestinely in Nepal, though they did not even possess passports to enter the country legally. From Nepal they traveled by bus to Dharamsala, India. The woman who spoke English has a husband living in New York, who periodically sends her money. There is no work for her in Dharamsala, so she and her friend attend a free English class for one hour every day, and literally spend the rest of their time bumming around town, which is why we found them just sitting on the roadside people-watching. Now that she is here in India, she cannot talk to her family in Lhasa because the Chinese have banned incoming telephone calls from Dharamsala. So she does not know anything more about her family.

Today, I accompanied Jamyang-la to the local hospital for a check-up. While we were waiting our turn to see the doctor, we walked around the government-in-exile offices and toured the library. All over Dharamsala and McLeod Ganj are giant wall-sized posters with pictures of Tibetans who have recently gone missing in protests of 2008. Jamyang pointed to one small photograph on one poster who he identified as his sister. She is only 17, and just this summer she participated in a Free Tibet protest during which she was arrested and subsequently disappeared. The family has no idea where she is or what happened to her.

Stories like these are commonplace. And it breaks my heart to see how much Jamyang and Nima Dolma miss their homeland. Jamyang-la repeatedly asks me if I will go to Tibet one day. He says (in bad Hindi), "If you go Tibet, you are veeeery happy." And every free moment she gets, Nima Dolma plops herself in front of the television to watch home videos on DVD from her family's Tibetan New Year's celebration. I don't know if she brought it with her from Tibet, or if her family mailed it to her, but she watches it over and over, pointing out her parents and siblings and cousins performing traditional dances in circles outside of their home. Other videos will simply film the family standing in a line in a meadow surrounded by spectacular mountains, or film a monk friend giving a tour of the family home or local temple. Another favorite video she calls "Black Yak," which literally just has scenes of mountains and grazing yaks accompanied by traditional Tibetan music.

On a more positive note - I saw the Dalai Lama! Finally! I was walking by myself down the street from McLeod Ganj to Dharamsala. Suddenly I heard sirens coming from the road below, and the man walking in front of me shouted something in Tibetan. Everyone around me hurried to the side of the road, dropped their bags, and crouched down. I asked what was going on, and he said "Dalai Lama-ji. Second car." I realized everyone around me was already crouched into a bow, so I pressed my palms together as well as the entourage of cars approached. And there, in the front passenger seat of the second car, was Dalai Lama-ji, sitting and smiling and looking exactly as he does in all the pictures. I was elated. Just seeing him for a split second was such a rush!

Mountains Beyond Mountains

After I left Leh, I spent an entire day on a local bus on my way to Spitti Valley, an amazing part of northern India not too far from Tibet, with small towns cradled closely between high, snow-capped mountains far above the tree line. Mostly I was drawn here by Graham's photos from his travels here last summer.


My first destination was Ki Gompa - a Buddhist monastery perched on a high peak overlooking the valley and the snaking Spitti River below. I was planning on spending one night and one day at Ki Gompa, but I ended up staying for three days and three nights.

To get to Ki Gompa, I chose to save money on a taxi and take the single, daily local bus to Ki, which was supposed to leave Kaza around 5:30 pm. Instead, the bus left around 7pm. I was incredibly nervous waiting for the bus, because it was dark by the time we left, and I worried I wouldn't find my way to the guest quarters at the Gompa, or that it would be full and I wouldn't have any other sleeping options for the night, or that it was past dinnertime at the monastery and I would go to bed hungry (I was already starving at 6pm). Luckily, two Ki Gompa nuns were also on the same bus and they were fascinated by me and pelting me with questions on the ride there, so I knew they would take care of me. When the bus pulled up to Ki Gompa, it was pitch-black. The nuns pointed up a winding road to the flickering lights in the windows above, while they headed a different direction to their personal quarters. With my huge backpack, I slowly made my way up the curves of the road in the dark, breathing hard in the thin air (4116 meters high!). When I arrived at the front door, a monk sort of pointed me inside and down a dark hall way, where another monk met me and whisked me into the dark kitchen, lit by a few skinny candles. I dropped my bags, and the monk in the kitchen (who I later learned is named Thandup) pointed to a chair and immediately passed me a hot cup of chai. Then, without asking any questions, he poured me a bowl of vegetable stew and reheated some chapatis. I was so relieved and happy. There is nothing more comforting when travelling than kind monks and a good, hot meal. When I finished, Thandup showed me to my room. The monastery has five dorm rooms that can sleep about four people each. Luckily I had a room to myself, and it was clean and cozy. The bathrooms, though, were sincerely lacking both cleanliness and comfort. I refrained from bathing during my stay in Ki, mostly due to lack of hot water.


In the morning at 7am, Thandup blew the monastery horn (a conch shell) to awaken all the monks for breakfast and morning puja. I was already awake and dressed. Thandup gave me a bowl and a spoon, and wrapped in my amazingly warm yak-wool blanket, I made my way to the prayer room for puja. I sat with the monks on the long carpeted benches and drank hot chai from my bowl, which a very small monk was constantly refilling. It was so wonderful and I was so happy. About an hour into the puja, the little monk served us butter tea with barley flour, which we mixed with our fingers to make tsampa, a barley pooridge that Tibetans love and routinely eat for breakfast. Personally, I could never see tsampa again and be happy, but it's good to try traditional foods at least once. So the monks paused the puja to eat their pooridge, then continued the chanting and bell-ringing and drum-beating for another three hours. And I'm very proud to say that I sat through the whole thing - from 7am to 11am!

After puja I went on a solitary stroll down the path and around the mountain to see some of the valley. It was spectacularly beautiful. The mountains are such amazing colors - a swirling blend of red, purple, black, green, yellow, brown, gold. From the mountain where the monastery sits, there are euphoric views of valley. (See attached pictures.) In the afternoon I helped Thandup cook dinner - a significant feat for a monastery of 150 monks! Monastery food isn't the best - mostly variations on bread and a vegetable dish. So we peeled and chopped many, many kilos of veggies, threw them in a pot with some water, some spices, a little dirt, maybe a few pebbles, and soon after dinner was served.

After preparing dinner on my first day at Ki Gompa, Thandup told me, in his bad mix of English and Hindi, "Abi we go, gayi. You come, thora thora." And before I knew it we were trekking down the mountain to Ki village to retrieve the monastery's cows. So I became the monastery cow herder during my stay at Ki, guiding them up the mountain and into their shed. It was quite exciting, actually. And on my second morning at Ki Gompa, I took a break from the four-hour puja to help milk the cows too! Sadly, I sucked at it, but at least I got some milk out.

I made some good friends with the monks at Ki Gompa. Only one really spoke decent English, and the other spoke to me in a mix of Hindi and bad English. A lot of our communication was me teaching them new words in English. Then I would walk around the monastery and monks would randomly shout out words I had taught them earlier, so that I was constantly greeted with random words like "Summertime!" or "Eh-snake!" or "Dirty!" or "Goodmorninggoodeveninggoodnight! Food!" It was quite endearing.

After my stay at Ki Gompa, in which I sat through four-hour morning pujas, slept in a monastery dorm but did not bathe, and milked and herded the cows (I'm repeating all this so everyone knows how hard core I am), I went to a another small town in Spitti called Tabo. Most people come to Tabo to visit the Tabo Gompa, which has been declared a World Heritage site, and preserves "some of the finest Indo-Tibetan art in the world." It was founded in AD 996, and has amazing murals in its various prayer halls. I also attended morning pujas in Tabo, which began at 6:30am but only lasted about an hour. Not so hard core.

On my way back to Manali from Spitti Valley, our bus went through a serious snow storm. In the morning in Kaza, where I woke up to catch the 7am bus, some of the mountain tops were already covered with snow. Then, while we were stopped at a local dhaba (food stand) in a tent in the middle of nowhere for lunch, some very wet snow began to fall with the high speed winds. Then, as we kept driving, it turned into thicker snow. Eventually huge heavy white flakes were falling all around us, and the ground was quickly turning white. I could no longer see across the gorge or any of the mountain tops around us. We were litterally driving through a white cloud of snow. Also, the bus only had one windshield wiper, which kept about one-fourth of the windshield clear during the storm. The driver and his assistant kept stopping to dump water over the windshield to clear it of ice, though it only made more ice. It was very reassuring to be riding along mile-high cliff edges like this.

Now I am back in Manali for two days before returning to Dharamsala. I'm staying in a lovely guest house a bit removed from the tourist traps of Old Manali. Its balconies face green mountains and the house is surrounded by apple orchards where the tree branches are heavy with ripe fruits. There is also a garden of sunflowers and marigolds. And - I have my own bathroom with a hot shower! Such luxury.

During the last few days I have been feeling very ready to go home. Though I'm a bit intimidated to be returning to the States - and especially to Kentucky of all places - I am looking forward to the comforts of home. I miss coffee shops and clean streets and the way people actually stand in line at stores instead of pushing their way to the sales counter. This morning in Manali I treated myself to a cup of filter coffee at a very touristy, very hippie coffee shop. And while I was ordering, a local woman with a large basket tied to her back edged up to the counter next to me and handed over two large metal canisters of fresh milk to the man behind the counter. And as I was walking back to my hotel room, there were small boys and old men walking up the hilly streets selling incense to the shop owners who were just opening their doors for the morning. I could smell the incense burning already all over the town. These are the little touches of India that I will miss when I am home in sterile suburbia. Even in the most touristy of the tourist nests, India is still India.

This last picture I took on the drive through the snowy mountains to Manali. Even baby cows need blankets against the cold!

Leh!

Leh is maybe the most amazing place I have ever been. It is a very small town seated in a valley surrounded by the most spectacular mountains I have ever seen. Leh is in the eastern Ladakh region of Jammu & Kashmir, the most northern state of India, which borders Tibet and Pakistan. Though there is a lot of turmoil lately in other parts of Kashmir, Ladakh itself is very safe and peaceful.

The ride here was exhausting and uncomfortable but also spectacularly beautiful. It usually takes two days of driving to reach Leh from Manali, but I scored and found a mini bus (or large van) to take me in one day. It meant I was picked up from my hotel at 2am, and we arrived in Leh around 7pm. Somehow I thought I would be able to sleep the first few hours of driving, but ohhhh I was wrong. It was absolutely freezing cold, the driver had the windows down to defrost the windshield, and the road was so horrible that I was constantly being thrown around in my seat. It was quite miserable.

Then, around 5am, I looked out the window wondering why the sky was not beginning to lighten since the sun rises around 5:30am. Eventually I realized that in looking out the window, I was looking straight at the side of a dark mountain. I opened my window curtain fully, stuck my head down and looked up at the sky, where I saw the amazing jagged lines of the mountaintops against a light grey sky. And then I knew it was going to be a spectacular day.

At our first stop at a police checkpoint where we presented our passports, I threw on a second pair of pants and was immediately warmer. Also another traveler lent me her extra wool blanket, which worked wonders. Only then did I understand how the rest of the bus was surviving the cold ride with the windows down. As soon as I arrived in Leh I purchased a huge yak-wool blanket for future rides.

The mountains were beautiful beyond words. Manali, our starting point, is a small town in a pine forest about 2000 meters above sea level. There is nothing to do in Manali but smoke pot with Israeli travelers, so I only spent one day in transit there. As soon as the sun rose on our drive out of Manali, we were already above the tree line and into the dry, rocky terrain of northern India. The mountains were all different colors: black, red, and shades of brown and gray and sand. The trickling streams and small lakes that ran deep in the gorges were a soft sky-blue, a reflection of the deep periwinkle color of the clear sky above.

The highest point on the road was around 5300 meters, and boy could I feel it when we were there. I sat panting in my seat in the bus. When we stopped for a late lunch, we were all walking zig-zag from the bus to the food tents set up along the highway. Some people got very sick during the trip, and luckily I felt fine (thanks to my ginger tablets and ginger chews, I believe!).

As we drove into Leh, a magnificent sunset lit the sky and colored all the surrounding mountains. When I arrived in Leh itself, it was dark and I could not see the town. When I awoke the next morning and walked through town, it felt like I had entered another world, or certainly another continent. Everywhere I looked, mountains sprung up around me. Some were jagged and rocky and brown. Others, further away, looked smooth and gray like ripples of sand. Others were capped with snow or huge glaciers. Mountains aside, Leh itself is a wonder. Despite being a touristy town, it still retains its village feel. Many of the buildings are made of mud and bricks, and there are donkeys grazing in fields everywhere. Many Ladakhi women wear traditional dress and sell dried apricots and vegetables under the shade of trees. In the back streets of the old city, fresh Tibetan bread is baked fresh in traditional ovens. I'm in heaven. The only bad experience I've had here was being solicited by a male prostitute.

Every day when I wake up and walk outside my sweet little guest house and into the wildflower garden with spectacular Himalayan views, I remember my parents' arrival in Cusco, Peru, and how they were overwhelmed by the other-worldliness and beauty of the mountain culture where they suddenly found themselves. I feel this way every day.

In addition to numerous Buddhist temples and palaces and mountain views, Leh has many other wonderful things to offer. Since I am traveling alone, which I have come to love, I have complete freedom to pick and choose what I want to do each day. While I was waiting to acclimatize in my first few days, I visited the Ladakh Ecology Center and the Women's Alliance Center to learn about local issues and local efforts to preserve Ladakhi culture and way of life in the face of the many changes and challenges tourism has brought. I also visited a donkey sanctuary (!!) in a village just outside of Leh. Between all these activities, I take breaks at a local eco-friendly organization that sells glasses of fresh juice made from an orange desert berry called seabuck thorn. And, I have created a little routine for myself, wherein I attend a 90-minute yoga class each morning (we perform our sun salutations before a large Buddhist shrine) and a meditation course each afternoon. In short, I am very happy.

Toilet Tales

On my last day in Dharamsala, I lost my Indian mobile phone down a squat toilet.

I was at a restaurant having a cup of chai with my friend Cheryl. Since I spend a large part of my days in the mountains drinking chai in little chai stalls and cafes, I have to pee quite often. So I ran upstairs to the squat toilet on the roof of the restaurant, and forgetting that I had stuffed my mobile into the back pocket, I pulled down my pants and the phone went flying out. It seemed to skid in slow motion through the damp floor of the bathroom, into the toilet bowl, and then plunked into the dirty water below before I could catch it. The water in the toilet bowl was dirty (as in, pieces of poop were floating in it), and I could see my phone flashing and vibrating right there on the bottom. I tried to fish it out with a toilet scrubber, but with no luck.

So I went ahead and peed (I had to go!) and ran downstairs to tell Cheryl about the phone. I tried to whisper it through my giggles, but the young man running the restaurant must have heard us and asked across the room, "Your mobile go down toilet?" I laughed yes, and then he translated this to the entire restaurant full of Tibetans. There was a collective murmur and surprised chatter among them as they wondered what to do, and eventually lots of laughter when they saw that even I thought it was pretty funny.

The restaurant owners asked if I could see the phone in the toilet. I told them about the flashing lights in the bowl, and one of the women who owned the restaurant ran upstairs to see what she could do. But even after reaching her bare hand down the messy toilet, she could not find it. My phone had gone down the pipes.

Luckily I don't have a huge need for a mobile phone anymore, since I am traveling alone now and don't need it to meet up with anyone again in the future. When I was having dinner later with my monk friend Jamyang at his apartment, I told him the story. After his initial worry and sympathy, he had a blast making jokes about my phone in the toilet.

First Jamyang jokingly suggested we call the police and have them conduct a city-wide police search in the Dharamsala plumbing for my phone. Then he decided to call my number to see if we could hear it ringing somewhere in the city pipes. When it did not ring, he said, "Phone sleepy." Then Jamyang's cousin Nima Dolma, who was excited to hear a word in English she recognized, repeated, "Phone! Sleepy time!" Then after much thought, she added, "Phone! Break-fust! Eat!" Jamyang laughed and corrected her, "Dinner! Dinner eat!" Later, as we were watching the Olympics long distance swimming marathon, Jamyang exclaimed, "Morel - your phone Olympics! Toilet!" and made swimming motions with his hands in imitation of my mobile somewhere in the Dharamsala plumbing. It was a sad, sad day for my phone, but it seemed to be a good source of entertainment for everyone else.

India in Your Face

This is what I love about India: everything is always in your face. People have always been asking me why I wanted to come to India, and I have never really had a good answer. But now I realize that I love traveling to foreign countries where I am surrounded and immersed in everything different from what I am used to and what I know. I love being overwhelmed by the foreignness of the sounds and smells and being baffled by the way life chugs along so differently from the way it does in the United States. Before I left home, someone told me India was an absolute "invasion of the senses," and that is precisely why I wanted to come.

The intensity of India is also the biggest challenge for me. Sometimes I think it's odd that the same things that I love about India are also the things I will be glad to escape when I return home next month. Perhaps my favorite description of India in this way is by Diana Eck, Graham's favorite Hindu scholar. In her book Darshan, which explores the importance of seeing in Hinduism, she writes:

India presents to the visitor an overwhelmingly visual impression. It is beautiful, colorful, sensuous. It is captivating and intriguing, repugnant and puzzling. It combines the intimacy and familiarity of English four o'clock tea with the dazzling foreignness of carpisoned elephants or vast crowds bathing in the Ganga during an eclipse. India's display of multi-armed images, its processions and pilgrimages, its beggars and kings, its street life and markets, its diversity of peoples - all appear to the eye in a kaleidoscope of images. Much that is removed from public view in the modern West and taken into the privacy of rest homes, asylums, and institutions is open and visible in the life of an Indian city or village. The elderly, the infirm, the dead awaiting cremation - these sights, while they may have been expunged from the childhood palace of the Buddha, are not isolated from the public eye in India. Rather, they are present daily in the visible world in which Hindus, and those who visit India, move in the course of ordinary activities. In India, one sees everything. One sees people at work and at prayer; one sees plump, well-endowed merchants, simple renouncers, fraudulent "holy" men, frail widows, and emaciated lepers; one sees the festival procession, the marriage procession, and the funeral procession. Whatever Hindus affirm of the meaning of life, death, and suffering, they affirm with their eyes wide open.

Maybe it is for this reason that I have been craving mountains since my last week in Udaipur. It's an odd but very very strong craving. I've never craved any natural environment ever like this before, but now my whole body and soul is absolutely aching for cool mountain air and the desert, snowy, jagged landscape of the north. Granted it is still India, but in my mind it is completely removed from the intensity of Indian life in my face as it has been in Rajasthan. Yesterday my friend told me that my craving makes sense, because with the high Himalayan mountains come isolation, silence, and solitude, all of which have been lacking thus far in my life in India.

Nepal did not quite satisfy my craving for mountains, only because it was still hot (I was counting on sweater-weather) and because the monsoon clouds were covering a lot of the good mountain views. But it's not just views that I want. I want to be in the mountains. So that is why I am heading north tomorrow, where I will spend the last few weeks of my trip holed up in the Himalayas and soaking up its own, different kind of intensity. From Dharamsala, where I am now, I am going to Ladakh - the most northern part of India - to the charming mountain town called Leh, which sits at 3505 meters above sea level. It will take me the next three days to reach Leh, traveling by bus over the second highest motorable road in the world. (The highest runs north of Leh, where I won't be going.) From Leh, I will go down (as in south, not down in altitude) to Spitti Valley, which is full of amazing Buddhist gompas and stupas and farming villages and, of course, Himalayan wonderfulness.

From here on out I will have little access to internet and may not update this blog much. But if you do read this, say your prayers for me while I ride on the high mountain roads over the next two weeks. Even though I'm not Catholic or Buddhist, I may have to buy my own set of rosary beads to finger during the hair-raising bumps and turns.

I've spent a wonderful week in Dharamsala with my aunt Valle's Tibetan monk friend Jamyang. I've been dying to meet him, mostly because he took such good care of my little brother last summer when he was in India and is a very dear family friend to both Valle and Graham. Two of my other intern friends are in Dharamsala also this week, so I have been splitting my time between drinking chai and going on walks with them, and hanging out at Jamyang's apartment. It's become my habit to throw on some sweats and wander to his apartment early every morning for Tibetan breakfast, and then to visit again in the afternoons before or during dinner. Jamyang is such a sweetie and so hospitable. He speaks almost no English, so we get by using Hindi and pantomime. After I finish exploring the north of India, I will return to Dharamsala to spend my last few days in India chillin' with Jamyang and drinking chai in cafes with good views of the green mountains.