Goodbye India

The last couple of days of our trip were spent back in Delhi, where we had to catch our plan back to America. We paid a visit to the pleasant National Museum, which among other things had some of the Marwar kingdom art that had inspired the idea of a trip to India in the first place. We also visited the nearby Gandhi memorial, the house where he was assassinated that has been turned into a museum. There are footsteps retracing his last steps until the spot where he was actually shot by a Hindu fanatic. This area of the city was quite a contrast from the older sections we had spent time in: wide, well-paved streets, real sidewalks, the sounds of birds and rustling trees, and a complete lack of people harrassing us. It was close to the government buildings, with many high fences and armed guards.

A month in India turned out to be about right. The country is too overwhelming to go for much less than that, and especially after getting sick we were too exhausted to stay any longer. We've gone back and forth over whether we would like to come back to India. Now that we've had the comfort and leisure of a few days in America, I think we might be willing to go back again someday. Especially if we ever had a friend to stay with or came to volunteer. We found it really difficult to get to know anyone or make sense of the place as tourists, and traveling between cities is too exhausting to do every two or three days. At any rate, we've at least come to understand India better than we did before, which was one of our biggest goals all along.

Agra

After Amritsar, we headed to Agra by train. It was wonderful to be out of the mountains and able to take advantage of train travel in India: AC, comfortable seats, and bathroom access whenever we wanted. Agra is on just about every traveler's list for India, as it is home to the Taj Mahal, as well as some other noteworthy sites.

We arrived in the evening, and only had time to enjoy the view of the Taj from our hotel's rooftop restaurant before settling in the for the evening. That night, however, disaster struck. Nissa woke up during the night with intense stomach problems, and I followed several hours later with the same symptoms. We'll spare the details but it was one of the worst sicknesses either of us have ever experienced, and at the moment we are tempted to swear off Indian food for the rest of our lives. Two days later we are still mostly sticking to toast and plain rice. Of course, Indian food has been the most consistent delight of our time here, and the only thing that could be counted on to go right every day. Now that the food has failed us, we have been looking forward to the comforts of home.

After two days of resting up in our hotel room, we were finally ready to see a couple of sites today. The Taj Mahal is indeed a beautiful building, but we would have enjoyed it more without the experience of the last few days fresh in our memory. Also, we were a little overwhelmed by the sheer number of people wanting to take pictures with us, or more accurately with Nissa; at one point a security guard broke up a particularly large crowd that had gathered around her.

The other site was the Agra Fort, a large Mughal-era fort that was also used by Shah Jahan, builder of the Taj Mahal, though it was built earlier. Unfortunately for him, it became his prison at the end of the life when his son Aurangzeb overthrew him. I don't know if it was any conciliation for him that the rather palace-like fort has a great view of the Taj Mahal. The crowds were much less overwhelming at the fort, and between that and our genuinely friendly rickshaw driver we were on somewhat better terms with India again by the end of the day.

a few of Nissa's eager fans

view from Agra Fort

India/Pakistan Border Ceremony

Amritsar is located right next to the India/Pakistan border crossing, which is used for two reasons; as a portal for people going to and from these countries and as the scene for the most ridiculous ceremony I have ever seen. Every night crowds gather on both the India and Pakistani side of the border to watch the border guard lower the flags and try to out do each other with patriotism. We joined the hordes of Indians bursting with national pride and got as close as we will probably ever get to Pakistan to watch the spectacle. And hordes they were, thousands of people turned out for this event, which was held in the baking Punjab sun. Thankfully there is a special foreigner stand, otherwise we probably would have been crushed, in addition to the melting in the relentless sun. The Indian side was much more lively, before the ceremony a giant Punjabi music dance party was held in the streets complete with cheering and overweight women running/gasping through the stands with Indian flags. It was hard to see Pakistan through the border gates, but we could tell they were not dancing..... A man led the Indians in Hindi cheers, I'm sure it was something to the effect of, "long live India," and after much anticipation the guards finally performed the entirely over dramatic flag lowering, complete with many exaggerated high kicks. I would love to know how this tradition got started, it was only a few decades ago that Indians and Pakistanis were slaughtering each other in the same location, and despite the overbearing patriotism, it seemed all in good fun. It was so wonderfully over the top that we thoroughly enjoyed it, despite the heat.

Amritsar and the Golden Temple

After the cool mountain temperatures, we were in for a shock at our next destination, Amritsar, where the temperature was 104 degrees Fahrenheit. It never cooled down, and it was uncomfortable to be outside even when we went out at dawn to see the Golden Temple, the main reason for our visit to the city. Amritsar is in Punjab, home of the Sikhs, and is the holiest temple in Sikhism. We donned our head coverings, removed our shoes, and went in for a visit.

The Golden Temple is an extremely peaceful place, especially in the face of a chaotic and unappealing city like Amritsar, and one of the most pleasant places to be that we have seen in India. The high surrounding walls kept the sights and sounds of the city out, with little to replace it but the constant singing/chanting from the Sikh holy book broadcast over the speakers. Religious pilgrims bowed their heads to the floor or bathed in the holy water surrounding the temple. This was also the first place where the attention we received from locals was positive: children saying hello and shaking our hand before giggling and running away, or young men with camera phones wanting a picture with us. We enjoyed the experience enough to go a second time, near sunset of the following day.

Indian Food

If you haven't noticed already, we have given lavish attention to food on this blog. Sampling new cuisine is probably our favorite part of travel. Indian food has not disappointed. It is a mighty cuisine, and exploring it has been incredibly pleasurable. Unfortunately, Indian food is very fattening, but hey, we're on vacation!

Reflective of the nature of India, food varies considerably regionally. Each region of India is vastly different in culture, language, ethnicity and food. In the States we are most familiar with curries from the Punjab, probably because that is where most immigrants (at least in Washington/Vancouver) come from. We are also familiar with Northern Indian Nans and Tandoori cooking. As we have been in Northern India, we have been encountering a lot of the familiar, except of course it is a million times better and more complex, and we have also discovered many new wonderful treats. We've been spending the last couple of weeks in Tibetan country. Tibetan food is not nearly as exciting, but still we've had some decent noodles and momos (Tibetan dumplings). But we've eaten Indian food every chance we have gotten. Today we participated in an Indian cooking class, hoping that we will be able to replicate some of the delicious flavors at home. It turned out to be more of a demonstration than a class, but it was still interesting and of course we got to eat everything at the end.

Typical Indian meals usually are made up of curries or dals (lentil based soup-like food) and rice or bread. We learned how to make a basic dal first, which seems to be one of the easiest, and cheapest things to make. This is what we have had in basic cafeterias and road side eateries. It consists of a basic combination of onions and tomatoes, cooked with lentils and a typical Indian spice combination, chili, cumin, garam masala, and tumeric. Indian food is actually not very spicy; we are used to Chinese food which is way spicier.

Next, we learned how to make a vegetable dish in a nice tomato sauce. Vegetarian food in India is amazing. We have eaten hardly any meat since we have been here and Dan, who is usually quite the carnivore, hasn't minded. I believe this is why neither one of us has gotten sick. I got sick in Singapore, which sets world records for cleanliness, but have been fine in India. The kitchen that we were in for the class wasn't exactly clean, no soap in sight, and there were only two pots, so nothing is ever washed. But it is hard to get a parasite from veggies boiled and fried. The vegetable dishes are made extra tasty, we found out, by generous additions of butter, which explains why they are so delicious.

We then learned how to make Malai Kofta, which is one of our favorite dishes. It is a curry containing deep fat fried balls of cheese and potatoes. Yum! The curry sauce is sweet, we found out this is because it is made with watermelon seeds, and contains a lot of milk. Dairy is used generously in Indian cooking. Paneer, the Indian cheese, is my new favorite food. That, and the breads, makes it much more approachable for the Westerner than Chinese cuisine, and I think it will be very manageable, and fun, to keep learning Indian cooking at home. I've never used watermelon seeds as an ingredient in any Western dishes though...

Spice tray

The kitchen equipment

Finished product

McLeod Ganj

We're now at the end of a 4-day stay in McLeod Ganj, the town just north of Dharamsala, and home of the Dalai Lama and Tibetan government in exile. We weren't quite sure what to expect from McLeod Ganj before coming. We knew that it houses a large number of Tibetan refugees as well as a large number of backpackers and the usual Bob Marley posters and banana milkshakes that come with that, and it seemed like a strange mix.

And it is a bit of a strange place, and sad as well. I like towns with large numbers of monks going about their daily business: talking on cell phones, ordering tea, or reciting English words from a notebook. But in this case they are only here because of the situation in Tibet, and there are constant reminders of that around town, such as posters calling for boycotts of Chinese goods and flyers for showings of political documentaries. With most of our experience in Tibetan areas coming from our travels in China, seeing pictures of the Dalai Lama openly displayed in public is a shock in itself.

As a town, we haven't been too fond of McLeod Ganj. It is not a peaceful place, with the same small lanes with big jeeps we've seen in other cities in this part of the country. We arrived pretty worn out from our adventure in the Himalayas, and have actually spent a lot of time in our room reading or watching TV, or eating at a great restaurant just down the road. Which has actually been rather nice. Because McLeod Ganj is so well set-up for travelers there are many language classes, Buddhism or yoga classes, and opportunities to teach English or otherwise volunteer with refugees, but fewer one or two-day activities. We did visit the large temple in the compound where the Dalai Lama lives, but with the large crowds of pilgrims I felt slightly intrusive, and embarrassed by some of the over-eager tourists who put cameras right in the faces of people praying.

Tonight, however, we did have a very worthwhile experience. We'd read about Tibetan folk music performances put on in a room at a local school on some nights, and decided to attend. It was a simple affair: about 8 people in attendance, low wooden benches for seats, and just two solo musicians. One, a man named Karma, was also the host. He was born in Tibet but fled China at a young age, after his parents died in prison. These performances were his attempt to help Tibetans preserve their culture. For example, in Tibet each family owns musical instruments and the skills are passed down to each generation, but in India the cost of instruments and music lessons in their new home is prohibitively expensive to most Tibetans, and the younger generations are more drawn to pop music anyway.

Karma gave helpful explanations in English of each song as an introduction, and sang two or three songs unaccompanied. The music was haunting and often sad; one song had been penned by the Dalai Lama's teacher soon after escaping China as a tribute to the many Tibetans killed. However, most of the songs were performed by a young man Karma had discovered who had left China only a few weeks ago. They even had trouble communicating with one another, because they were originally from different areas and each spoke different dialects of Tibetan. He accompanied his songs with either a deep, long-necked stringed instrument or a smaller instrument that resembled a mandolin. One song had been written by a previous Dalai Lama, the sixth, who was famous for music and poetry. The music was simple but powerful, and it was the first thing we had done here that gave us a more tangible connection to what this place is about.

leaving a birthday message for the Dalai Lama (his birthday was the 6th)

at the temple

prayer wheels, which are spun as you walk around clock-wise

a woman sewing prayer flags onto a line

people making prayer flags by pressing blank ones onto an ink stone

an Indian holy man we passed on a walk, hoping to sell us enlightenment

how are we supposed to walk to our hotel with all these monkeys around

the Tibetan musician

An 80 Hour Indian Bus Journey

Tuesday 3:15 am: Wake up, get ready for bus journey back to Manali. Excited to leave Kaza, there is no electricity here so it has been a long time without a shower.
4:00 am: Arrive at bus station, it is raining very hard out, and has been for a day. A man sells us his tickets because he doesn't want to travel in this weather. There is no way they will let the bus go if the weather is really that bad, right?
4:30 am: Bus departs Kaza. Our spirits are high, we have front seats so it is not nearly as bumpy as our journey to Kaza. With luck we will be in Manali by 2:30 pm, and won't even have bruised bottoms!
7:00 am: Depart Spiti valley and start accent of the first mountain pass, Kunzum elevation 15,000 feet
8:00 am: Snowing pretty hard on Kunzum, bus is making it though, we'll be over soon!
8:30 am: Bus becomes completly stuck in mud and sludge on the top of the pass
9:00 am: Enthusiastic local passengers begin to dig out the bus with signs from the bus that say which town we are going to. There is no shovel in sight, even though this happens every time the bus goes over the pass. The driver is wearing sandels, nobody has a coat
10:00 am: Sure is cold on this bus, blizzard conditions
11:00 am: Second bus arrives from Kaza, it gets stuck next to our bus
12:30 pm: Second bus is pulled out by a tractor, everyone from our bus runs to the second bus, Dan and I are trampeled, I'm pulled onto the bus by helpful fellow foreign travelers. We of course end up in the back of the bus, so much for no bottom bruises.... Our original bus is abandoned.
1:00 pm: Bus slides down the mountain, snow is very deep, road is very skinny, turns are very sharp. If we die this is when it will be. A large bulldozer coming up to clear the pass knocks into our bus, we are teetering on the edge.
2:00 pm: We make it to the bottom of the mountain and celebrate with some lunch at a rest stop






2:30 pm: Continue on the road, we may make it to Manali yet!
3:00 pm: Bus becomes stuck behind a row of jeeps and cars, stuck in a mud slide
4:00 pm: We wait on the bus, everyone is trying to dig out the jeeps from the mudslides, meanwhile giant boulders are rolling down the mountainslide, the incessent rain has caused treacherous rock slides
5:00 pm: The bus is still stuck, the local passengers have walked 2 ks ahead to a rest house, the foreign travelers, Dan and I, a Kiwi and two French decide to grab our stuff and abandon the bus. We run through the rock slide, dodging giant boulders while being sucked into the quicksand like mud.
5:30 pm: Make it to the rest house. There are several rooms with beds, but they are occupied by people with "reservations" and we are not let in. We find a small concrete room that already holds a very sad Australian couple who had gotten a flat tire on their motorcycle and were stranded like us.
6:00 pm: We are soaked, it is very cold
7:00 pm: It is getting dark, we aren't going anywhere tonight. Thankfully the rest house has instant noodles. The foreigners huddle together and resign to spending the night in our concrete cell. We try to entertain each other with songs and stories, but it is so cold....
10:00 pm: Time to go to sleep. Dan and I have no sleeping bags. We put on all our clothes, the foreigners share some blankets and we all lay together for body heat. The concrete room is drafty and wet. We are at 12,000 feet, it is raining

car stuck in the mud, blocking our progress

abandoning the bus

Wednesday 5:00 am: We didn't freeze to death, but we didn't sleep either.
8:00 am: The bus has managed to get through the rock and mud slides. We get back on the bus and try again
8:00 am- 12:00 pm: The bus tries to make it through the next stretch of mud. Every 15 minutes we have to stop to clear boulders. Everyone gets out of the bus, the men try to break down the rocks and push them off the road. The women watch for falling boulders and yell when they roll down. Many sections of the road are too thin for the bus, so we build the road by stacking rocks, walk ahead and watch the bus driver skillfully drive the bus over the shaky ground. The bus hasn't gone over the edge yet....
12:30 pm: The bus gets completly stuck in the mud, blocking the road.
1:00 pm: We abandon the bus again, grab our stuff and walk through the rain to the next village, 2 ks ahead
1:30 pm: We arrive at the village to find many stranded travelers, the road ahead is completely blocked by a giant landslide that is totally unpassable by foot, 10 feet of water cover the road, it is very deep and will likely sweep people off the edge. The village is made up of about 6 tents, all filled with stranded travelers. We resign to spending the day there
5:00 pm: We find some blankets to buy and some socks and hats. Everything we have is totally soaked, we are freezing. There are lots of people here though, and food and fire, so other than the cold it isn't that bad.
10:00 pm: We find a small bench to share in one of the tents. We attempt to sleep, but they tent has no walls. Still it is much better than the concrete room. No sleep

Thursday 8:00 am: The rain has stopped
9:00 am: We have met some other American travelers who have been communicating with the leader of a British school group that is also stranded. He has found a satellite phone in a nearby homestead that works by solar power. Once it is sunny he is able to call and have the British government send a bus to the next village, that is 16 ks ahead.
11:00 am: We set off with the British high schoolers and the Americans on the 16 k hike to the next village. Nobody has as much stuff as we do, and much of the hike is up hill at a high altitude. We have to cross landslides, rockslides, mudslides. Thankfully the British are experienced and have guides, who are able to help us out. The Americans help us carry our stuff, but we are going at a fast pace to get the bus
4:00 pm: We arrive at the next village, the bus is there. We are exhausted, but so close to Manali!
6:00 pm: The bus leaves, we only need to get over one more pass, Rohtang elevation 13,000 feet, to get to Manali
8:00 pm: Bus gets stuck in a traffic jam, this pass has just been opened and it is full of trucks trying to get over. Nobody is directing traffic and the jam is totally unorganized but could be easily fixed
9:00 pm: Giant landslide comes down the pass, totally destroying the road. We aren't going anywhere
10:00 pm: We are to spend the night on the bus. We have no water, and only stale cookies to eat.














Friday 5:00 am: We wake up, the bus is cold, but it is better than concrete or skinny bench. The road is still destroyed
6:00 am: The foreigners on the bus, other than the British school group, decide to take our stuff and walk down the mountain pass. We find short cuts down the rock faced mountain, making it by far the easiest of all our walks. And it was downhill! We couldn't wait for the pass to open
8:00 am: We arrive at the next village, 1000 feet down. We are able to get a taxi to Manali
9:00 am: Taxi leaves the village, we pass hundreds of cars coming up the pass. Nobody has put up a road block or put out any word that the pass is blocked. This entire time there has been no organization or any government involvement in fixing the roads or making sure people were safe. The foreigners were on their own, and thanks to the British Government we had made it out.
12:00 pm: We arrive in Manali, eat a huge breakfast, shower for the first time in 7 days, and fall asleep for the first time in 4.