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.

Part III: Back to India

I have decided that my India trip has been divided into three phases. In the first phase, I settled into my life in Udaipur, made friends, got to know my host organization and my cute little city. In the second phase, which began around the end of May, most of my intern friends left, I dealt with a lot of frustrations at work, had a somewhat lonely and very hot summer, but finally completed a small but successful project at the end of my internship. Then I journeyed to Nepal, which was a sort of transition between phases two and three of my trip. Now I have returned to India for the last leg of my trip, which will be spent traveling in the north of the country and exploring the amazingness of the Himalayas.

I kind of hate Delhi. I dread coming here, and unfortunately I have to pass through Delhi to get to many of my destinations. Mostly it is the thick, humid heat that gets to me most, but even without the heat there is still the awful noise and smelly trash in the streets and smoggy polluted air.

I splurged on a flight from Kathmandu to Delhi to get me back to India. I mentally prepared myself for a depressing arrival and horrid night in a dirty hotel. So I was quite surprised when I arrived in the Delhi airport to find that all my memories were completely wrong! I had remembered the airport to be depressingly dark and filthy and unwelcoming; instead, it was bright and shiny clean and beautiful like any other airport anywhere in the world! I was convinced maybe I was in a different terminal (I wasn't), or that they had recently remodeled the airport interior (they haven't). Instead, I guess my eyes have become adjusted to India and what was once disgusting is now perfectly normal.

I also remember the ride from the airport to the Tibetan colony Manju ka Tilla (where I stayed my first night in India in February) was a scary ride. Since it was February, it was very cold, and since it was later at night, the streets were mostly empty save a few crowds of homeless people huddled around street fires or under blankets. This time, however, as I drove again to Manju ka Tilla, the streets were full of Indian wonderfulness. The shops were lit up and crowds were bustling through side streets doing last minute shopping. Since I arrived on India's Independence Day, there were fireworks in the sky and kids were flying kites all around. It was a wonderful welcome, and I was very glad to be back in India.

The hotel I stayed at was not the same as my hotel in February. It was dirtier, which is fine because it is also cheaper, but equipped with a television! I was excited to watch a Shah Rukh Khan movie before bedtime, and I was able to catch up on all the new skin-lightening face cream commercials and Bollywood music videos I have missed out on while in Nepal.

Today I have been wasting time until my bus leaves for Dharamsala at 6pm. I spent a whole 2 hours trying to find an ATM. A kind young man from my hotel came with me to direct me to the ATM, but traveling by cycle-rickshaw on the Indian expressways was not the speediest solution, and it ended up being quite a journey. After I refilled my wallet, the monk Geshe Petu who runs the hotel (and who is also a family friend via my aunt Valle) gave me the key to his bedroom upstairs where he let me watch TV, use the bathroom, and relax for as long as I wanted since I had already checked out of my room. So kind!

Now I am looking forward to a good night's sleep on a bus (fingers crossed!), awakening to wonderfully crisp mountain air, and meeting another one of Valle's monk friends, Jamyang, who also became my brother Graham's good friend last summer in India.

Living Goddesses and Animal Sacrifices and Everything Else I Love

For anyone who comes to Nepal ever, Bandipur is a required stop along your tourist route. Lonely Planet describes it as, "draped like a silk scarf along the high ridge above Dumre, the town is a living museum of Newari cuture." Indeed, it was beautiful and picturesque and peaceful. I only spent one day and one night here along the way from Pokhara to Kathmandu, but I could have spent several more days drinking tea in the cobblestone town square, going on solo walks around the valley to moss-covered stone temples, and playing with kids in the hills. The town used to be on an old trade route between Tibet and India, and there are still abandoned shop houses in place along small alleys in town. Not many tourists stop here, so there was only one budget guest house to stay in, and miraculously, there was not a single store selling the usual tourist knick-knacks and pashmina scarves.

In the afternoon in Bandipur, the clouds parted and I was able to see the snowy peaks of numerous mountains beyond the valley over which the town is perched. In the evening I walked to Tin Dhara ("Three Spouts") where spring water pours out of five (not three) beautifully carved stone spouts from the surrounding forest. Two young girls were washing clothes and their long black hair in the running water.

Check out this picture, which I took in Bandipur. Among the traditional textiles and corn husks hanging out to dry is an American flag beach towel with a woman's thonged bare bottom. Lovely touch.

Kali, the Goddess of Destruction

I have recently concluded that Kali is my favorite Hindu goddess. Call me a silly, idealizing American, but I love the darkness. Kali is an incarnation of the goddess Parvati, and she is often referred to as the Black Goddess or the Goddess of Destruction. "Kali" in Hindi means "black one." In paintings and statues she is pictured as a black-skinned woman with a garland of bloody skulls around her neck and a bloody knife in her hand. She is always standing on a corpse, which represents ignorance.

My first day in Kathmandu I took a local bus an hour outside of the city to a Kali temple. Since it was Saturday, many Hindu families also made the journey to worship Kali and make offerings. There were long lines of Hindus winding down several staircases to the small temple by the stream in the low forest. As a tourist, and since I am not allowed to enter the temple as a non-Hindu, I was able to skip over the long lines and go straight to the temple grounds below. Perched from some balconies around the temple, I could watch the pilgrims go inside with offerings of flower petals and coconuts. Many people also brought chickens and goats to be sacrificed inside, as bloodthirsty Kali requires the blood of uncastrated male animals to be poured over her image every week.

The sacrificing itself was very matter-of-fact. There was no ceremonious delay or chanting; a young man with a sharf butcher's knife sliced off the head and tossed the pieces back to its owner. Sometimes the owner would then clang the goat's head against a brass bell in the temple, and then the carcass would be carried over to the butchering station where men boiled off the fur and handed back the chopped pieces in a plastic bag.

Mostly I like Kali because I am fascinated by Hindus' worship of her. For a good hour I stood and watched lines of families pour into her bloody temple, and I couldn't help but wonder what they were thinking as they approached her terrible image and clanged her bell to announce their presence. For me it's difficult to conceive of God as bloodthirsty and frightening, but it's useful for me to try, which is why I like to think about Kali.

Family Ties Across the World

My second day in Kathmandu, a Nepali family friend named Nima picked me up at my hotel and took me to some Buddhist stupas and gompas around the Kathmandu Valley. It was very kind and helpful, because I would not have been able to figure out the buses around the valley on my own!

Sometimes my family ties in places as far away as Nepal amaze me. This is how I (now) know Nima:
Geshe Gelek is my aunt Valle's Buddhist teacher at her Tibetan Buddhist center in North Carolina, and now he is a good family friend of the entire Jones extended family. Geshe Gelek's sister is Sonam, who lives in New York and is also the nanny for my little cousin Dora. Sonam's husband is Pasang, and Pasang's brother is Nima who lives in Kathmandu. Even though I have never met Sonam or Pasang, they arranged for Nima to meet me in Kathmandu yesterday, and now I am invited to dinner at their home on my last night in Nepal. Fabulous!


What does a living goddess look like?

She is dressed in a fancy red and gold Nepali dress and wears a lot of makeup, and she is very beautiful. Today I saw her. Nepalis call her the Kumari Devi, and she is eleven years old. She resides in the Kumari Bahal temple in the old city of Kathmandu, and as I was standing in her courtyard she poked her head out of her window upstairs to give the hungry tourists a glimpse.


Nepal actually has several living goddesses, but this Kumari is the most important. I learn these things from Lonely Planet Nepal. She is only the Kumari Devi until she reaches puberty; after her first period she becomes mortal again and a new Kumari Devi is identified as the deity's reincarnation. The Kumari must always come from a Newari caste of silver- and goldsmiths. She must pass a series of tests - one of which involves being trapped inside a dark room with scary noises and masked men and 108 buffalo heads on display. The true Kumari will not be scared. She also has to have certain physical characteristics, the appropriate horoscope, and she must select certain objects that belonged to her predecessor. Several times a year she comes out of her temple in a festival procession through the old city.



I'm ashamed to admit that I have become a full-blown tourist. It's embarrassing to be constantly snapping photos, and though I'd still like to pretend I'm "different" from them all, I'm not. To prove it, here is a horrible photo of me posing with a fake Hindu priest, for which I paid him 10 of his requested 200 rupees.

"Naturally Nepal"

I spent the last four days trekking in the Himalayas. Even though it is monsoon season - not ideal for trekking - I couldn't avoid the obligatory mountain hike that beckons tourists from around the world. So I chose a short four-day hike to Poon Hill, mostly because the picture of Poon Hill in the Lonely Planet was so beautiful.

I did not realize that this would be luxury trekking. The trail was sprinkled with restaurants and lodges. My guide did not bring any food or tenting gear for us, since we ate in these village restaurants along the way and slept in lodges. Each night I had my own private room with a comfy bed, blankets, and access to a real bathroom and hot showers! If I had known I would have brought a towel and soap!

The only bad part about the trek was the leeches. Leeches everywhere. We were constantly picking them off our shoes and our clothes. I found three on my body - one on my ankle, one on my hip, and one on my arm. They bled a lot and were very gross.

The spectacular views were lacking a bit on this hike, since monsoon clouds often covered the snow-capped mountains surrounding us. We didn't even make it up to Poon Hill, since we were scheduled to climb it for sunrise on the third day, but it was pouring rain all morning. Still we caught occasional glimpses of the mountain range along the way, and the quaint villages hugging the mountainsides along the way were beautiful in and of themselves. We walked through a magical rhododendron forest on the third day, which literally felt like the Elf Forest in Lord of the Rings's Middle Earth. And every time I looked across at the mountain on the other side of a gorge, it was covered with sparkling waterfalls and bright green rice paddies. Spectacular.

Now, unfortunately, my legs are like lead from going downhill for two days. Even walking on a flat surface is quite painful, but I am trying to stretch it out.


Nepal vs. India

Here are some little things I have noticed in Nepal that are different from India.

• The cows are furrier here.
  
• Women carry heavy loads on their backs instead of on their heads as they do in India. Either they wrap them in cloth on their backs and around their chest, or they fill huge baskets on their backs and place the handle over their heads (Ecuador style!).
• The women are all wearing green bangles, which I learned is for a monsoon season festival.
• The food is not as spicy.
• There is beer on restaurant menus! No more waiters hiding our beer bottles under the table as they do in India, where restaurants rarely have a liquor license.
• There are chickens in the streets, in addition to the normal cows, water buffaloes, and goats.
  
• THERE ARE SIDEWALKS. Amazing.