First 6a lead (tough): January 11 at the Cobra Wall
Best hammock: tied for the bungalow hammock at Danny's, and Jace's hammock on our very own, very wobbly bungalow porch
First 6c lead (tougher): February 6 at the Keep
First hot shower since 2010: February 15
First time driving a motorbike: February 17
First time served chicken feet in this lifetime: February 19
First load of laundry done in a washing machine instead of a sink: February 23
Best non-Thai food in Thailand: the falafel and fish taco cart in Chiang Mai
Time it took for someone to try to scam me in India: Less than two hours
First bucket shower ever: March 3
First Indian yoga class: March 3
Most unlikely place for French lessons: an ayurvedic restaurant on the banks of the Ganges
Number of times scammed by street kids: twice, but only once that really mattered
Number of train ticket purchases required to actually get a berth on the train to Dehli: three
Days abroad: 96
Hours spent in travel to get home: 38
First hug from my mom since last year: April 6, 3:30pm Mountain Time
Date this blog was launched: December 29
To date:
27,610 words published (And there’s still so much I couldn't seem to fit in... )
1,590 page views from readers in the United States, Austria, Thailand, India, Germany, South Korea, Denmark, France, United Kingdom, Malaysia
Thanks, all of you, for following along, and for your comments, emails, etc.
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
Monday, April 4, 2011
On foot
“Does your mother have land?” Jango asked. “Does she keep animals?”
He doesn’t mean her cat and my cat and dog.
Jango is my guide on a four-day trek through the lower Himalayas that wanders through valleys, up and down hill sides, passing through villages shrugged onto the shoulders of those hills, and will end with a push up toward snowline. After a day of walking upstream alongside cattle and small herds of goats, we were headed steeply uphill to a mountain temple that has a place we can sleep for the night, and stopped for a break halfway up. I snacked on tea biscuits while Jango grilled me about my family. No, I said, we don’t have much land. And we don’t keep animals.
He had already asked about my family. I described our pieces—the step parents, half-sister, and step-siblings. He tried to line it all up from my father’s perspective—a former and a current wife, two daughters, one from each, then shook his head, muttering, “My God…”
That night, when he called his wife and children, he put me on the phone with his wife to say hello. It turns out, “Hello. How are you?” is all she could say. She never went to school, he explained.
Over the four days we spent walking through villages and valleys together, he explained a good deal to me I might never have spotted or been able to ask without a guide at hand to quiz. He explained that the women in their saris squatting on a hillside were gathering mud to plaster on the walls of their houses, and that the shaved heads of two children we find making their own sleds to ride down a grass knoll means that someone has recently died.
Someone else must have declared by now that if you truly want to know a place, you have to see it from the view granted by your own feet. You have to slow down and take a path that meanders. Ours went in and out of valleys cut by streams that whisper of centuries of monsoon seasons, the boulders all rolled to smooth edges and polished nearly white. The houses we walked by were mostly plaster walls, some painted blue or yellow, but most off-white or gray. Their metal roofs looked to be held down by rocks, their laundry and the occasional satellite dish the only ornamentation. When we started uphill, I could look down on the villages below us in tableau. Those stacked houses, built up the steep ramp of the valley, and the women and children busy with work and play across them looked like one of those 
sets for a play that shows a multi-storied house in cross section. Scenes play out with the characters moving around, above and below one another, blissfully inattentive to each other while the audience looks on, seeing all.
The landscape rotated from one hillside to the next, some pine forests with carpets of tan pine needles on the ground, looking as dry as some of the forests in Colorado. The next hillside would see us walking through a carpet of blooming rhododendrons, everything green with those pink and red blossoms for punctuation.
But it’s the faces of the people that were, of course, the most truly surprising. The excited, staring school children at first, and that gave way to even more wide-eyed village children. Families coming down at night to perform puja, to pray and make an offering, at a temple—the temple being the spring that provides clean water for the village. They kicked off their shoes, thanked the gods for providing, then sat in the cool evening air by the stream, looking out over the valley.
On foot, I can see that in India, anything can become holy. A rock, a tree, a watersource. What has become sacred is then marked with tridents and ribbons, paintings of gods and goddesses on tiles affixed to nearby rocks.
I can taste the generosity of the people—the prasad, blessed food from that water temple puja, a crumbly, bright yellow sweet, which is shared with Jango and me because we are there watching. For a steep kilometer, I listened to shouting over the valley, the kind of calling is asking for only an echo as the answer. I looked up, expecting children and preparing to dodge the rocks that would be thrown to test gravity—because while you’re testing a science like echoes, why not also check gravity’s pull? But
at the top, we found not children, but three women, perched on an outcropping and looking out over the villages and valleys we had just traversed. They fell quiet as we sat near them, no longer bold enough to shout just to hear their voices echo. We sat and rested, and while we were resting, they got up, collected bundles of sticks three times as big around as they were, helping one another get off the ground once they’ve slid the straps to these bundles over their shoulders, and started walking down the trail. Though we rested only a few minutes more, we never caught up to them on the trail.
Jango wore track pants, a short-sleeved button-down shirt, and started the first day in steel-toed workboots, which he later traded for blue plastic sandals. It made my fastidious attention to having the right kind of socks feel a little ridiculous. And of course, then we were passed by women in beaded and sequined saris—they herd their cattle in these saris, crouch to do laundry in the stream in these saris, and walk the paths we’re “trekking” on with baskets of pinecones and bundles of sticks balanced on their heads in these saris, sandals on their feet.
Again, my attention to my own gear seemed all too finicky.
He cooked a lunch of rice and curry that’s part peas, part peppers, and part wild vegetables he picked as we walked. Jango has been guiding treks in the area for over 20 years. He pointed out walnut trees, lemon trees, mint and nettles as we hike. And he waits patiently while I snap photos.
“How many photos you take?” he asked.
“I’m only at 40-some,” I replied.
Our first river crossing was on a bridge built in 1963 that should have been retired well before its 40th anniversary. The first half was sheet metal covered in a layer of asphalt. The metal had rusted through in sections. The second half provided more solid footing, but tipped severely downstream. Jango stepped up to it, looked back at me, and said “One at a time.”
After he was past the midway point, a huge boulder that provided the center stabilization for the bridge, he signaled me across, and waited patiently as I snapped photos of this myth of a bridge.
We spent a night at his sister’s house. She fixed dinner sitting cross-legged at her kitchen hearth, though there’s a pair of gas burners on the counter. Her son, Rishu, fetched flour and milk for her as she needed them, rinsed and stirred the rice cooked over a gas burner, then squeezed in next to me on a blanket near the fire. She made dal in a pot that had been simmering at the back of the hearth since we walked in the door, made chapatis on a skillet over the fire then finished them off by rolling them in the ash at the edge of this small, square fireplace. They puffed up when they got near the embers, and she pulled them out with bare fingers, slapped them against the plaster hearth, and put them in a round, plastic dish lined with a dishtowel, a lid on to keep them warm. I studied this wondering if it would be possible to duplicate it at home with only an oven for toasting.
The next morning we hiked along a ridge though rhododendrons that eventually give way to massive pines.
We stopped for chai when the first rainstorm hit, but were camped out, fixing lunch, when it began to snow. Rishu, who is in training to become a guide, kept a blanket wrapped around his shoulders and huddled near the fire when he wasn’t running errands for Jango. I crouched next to the flames when it became too cold to keep writing. Jango put on a fleece jacket and seemed impervious to the biting wind, the tumbling flakes, even the very idea of hypothermia.
After the storm broke, we fetched water from the stream there because there was no water where we were headed. We arrived at Triund, a set of English-built cabins on a ridge of high alpine meadow. Auxiliary tea stalls sat in the meadow, and busy with day-hikers. We stopped long enough for a cup of chai with the caretaker of the forest rest houses, dropped our heavy bags
there, and then headed up toward tree line. Rishu came empty-handed; I brought a camera and a bottle of water; Jango carried his radio, playing hill music, he said, the whole way up. When we reached the snow, he sat down and waited while Rishu and I ran up a ridgeline, then skated back down.
We were just getting back to the rest houses, looking down on a cricket game being played in that high alpine field (India had won the Cricket World Cup the previous night), when the sun broke through the clouds at last.
The peaks I had been looking at under a banner of gray all day were at last dressed with sunlight. It carved out the planes of their rocky faces and illuminated the patches of snow. I scanned for a clean line up, and saw nothing promising on their broken sides. They’re jagged and fierce. I sat on a rock, Rishu next to me, where I could watch the clouds peel back from them.
He doesn’t mean her cat and my cat and dog.
Jango is my guide on a four-day trek through the lower Himalayas that wanders through valleys, up and down hill sides, passing through villages shrugged onto the shoulders of those hills, and will end with a push up toward snowline. After a day of walking upstream alongside cattle and small herds of goats, we were headed steeply uphill to a mountain temple that has a place we can sleep for the night, and stopped for a break halfway up. I snacked on tea biscuits while Jango grilled me about my family. No, I said, we don’t have much land. And we don’t keep animals. He had already asked about my family. I described our pieces—the step parents, half-sister, and step-siblings. He tried to line it all up from my father’s perspective—a former and a current wife, two daughters, one from each, then shook his head, muttering, “My God…”
That night, when he called his wife and children, he put me on the phone with his wife to say hello. It turns out, “Hello. How are you?” is all she could say. She never went to school, he explained.
Over the four days we spent walking through villages and valleys together, he explained a good deal to me I might never have spotted or been able to ask without a guide at hand to quiz. He explained that the women in their saris squatting on a hillside were gathering mud to plaster on the walls of their houses, and that the shaved heads of two children we find making their own sleds to ride down a grass knoll means that someone has recently died. 
Someone else must have declared by now that if you truly want to know a place, you have to see it from the view granted by your own feet. You have to slow down and take a path that meanders. Ours went in and out of valleys cut by streams that whisper of centuries of monsoon seasons, the boulders all rolled to smooth edges and polished nearly white. The houses we walked by were mostly plaster walls, some painted blue or yellow, but most off-white or gray. Their metal roofs looked to be held down by rocks, their laundry and the occasional satellite dish the only ornamentation. When we started uphill, I could look down on the villages below us in tableau. Those stacked houses, built up the steep ramp of the valley, and the women and children busy with work and play across them looked like one of those 
sets for a play that shows a multi-storied house in cross section. Scenes play out with the characters moving around, above and below one another, blissfully inattentive to each other while the audience looks on, seeing all.The landscape rotated from one hillside to the next, some pine forests with carpets of tan pine needles on the ground, looking as dry as some of the forests in Colorado. The next hillside would see us walking through a carpet of blooming rhododendrons, everything green with those pink and red blossoms for punctuation.
But it’s the faces of the people that were, of course, the most truly surprising. The excited, staring school children at first, and that gave way to even more wide-eyed village children. Families coming down at night to perform puja, to pray and make an offering, at a temple—the temple being the spring that provides clean water for the village. They kicked off their shoes, thanked the gods for providing, then sat in the cool evening air by the stream, looking out over the valley.
On foot, I can see that in India, anything can become holy. A rock, a tree, a watersource. What has become sacred is then marked with tridents and ribbons, paintings of gods and goddesses on tiles affixed to nearby rocks.
I can taste the generosity of the people—the prasad, blessed food from that water temple puja, a crumbly, bright yellow sweet, which is shared with Jango and me because we are there watching. For a steep kilometer, I listened to shouting over the valley, the kind of calling is asking for only an echo as the answer. I looked up, expecting children and preparing to dodge the rocks that would be thrown to test gravity—because while you’re testing a science like echoes, why not also check gravity’s pull? But
at the top, we found not children, but three women, perched on an outcropping and looking out over the villages and valleys we had just traversed. They fell quiet as we sat near them, no longer bold enough to shout just to hear their voices echo. We sat and rested, and while we were resting, they got up, collected bundles of sticks three times as big around as they were, helping one another get off the ground once they’ve slid the straps to these bundles over their shoulders, and started walking down the trail. Though we rested only a few minutes more, we never caught up to them on the trail.Jango wore track pants, a short-sleeved button-down shirt, and started the first day in steel-toed workboots, which he later traded for blue plastic sandals. It made my fastidious attention to having the right kind of socks feel a little ridiculous. And of course, then we were passed by women in beaded and sequined saris—they herd their cattle in these saris, crouch to do laundry in the stream in these saris, and walk the paths we’re “trekking” on with baskets of pinecones and bundles of sticks balanced on their heads in these saris, sandals on their feet.
Again, my attention to my own gear seemed all too finicky.
He cooked a lunch of rice and curry that’s part peas, part peppers, and part wild vegetables he picked as we walked. Jango has been guiding treks in the area for over 20 years. He pointed out walnut trees, lemon trees, mint and nettles as we hike. And he waits patiently while I snap photos.
“How many photos you take?” he asked.
“I’m only at 40-some,” I replied.
Our first river crossing was on a bridge built in 1963 that should have been retired well before its 40th anniversary. The first half was sheet metal covered in a layer of asphalt. The metal had rusted through in sections. The second half provided more solid footing, but tipped severely downstream. Jango stepped up to it, looked back at me, and said “One at a time.”After he was past the midway point, a huge boulder that provided the center stabilization for the bridge, he signaled me across, and waited patiently as I snapped photos of this myth of a bridge.
We spent a night at his sister’s house. She fixed dinner sitting cross-legged at her kitchen hearth, though there’s a pair of gas burners on the counter. Her son, Rishu, fetched flour and milk for her as she needed them, rinsed and stirred the rice cooked over a gas burner, then squeezed in next to me on a blanket near the fire. She made dal in a pot that had been simmering at the back of the hearth since we walked in the door, made chapatis on a skillet over the fire then finished them off by rolling them in the ash at the edge of this small, square fireplace. They puffed up when they got near the embers, and she pulled them out with bare fingers, slapped them against the plaster hearth, and put them in a round, plastic dish lined with a dishtowel, a lid on to keep them warm. I studied this wondering if it would be possible to duplicate it at home with only an oven for toasting.The next morning we hiked along a ridge though rhododendrons that eventually give way to massive pines.
We stopped for chai when the first rainstorm hit, but were camped out, fixing lunch, when it began to snow. Rishu, who is in training to become a guide, kept a blanket wrapped around his shoulders and huddled near the fire when he wasn’t running errands for Jango. I crouched next to the flames when it became too cold to keep writing. Jango put on a fleece jacket and seemed impervious to the biting wind, the tumbling flakes, even the very idea of hypothermia. After the storm broke, we fetched water from the stream there because there was no water where we were headed. We arrived at Triund, a set of English-built cabins on a ridge of high alpine meadow. Auxiliary tea stalls sat in the meadow, and busy with day-hikers. We stopped long enough for a cup of chai with the caretaker of the forest rest houses, dropped our heavy bags
there, and then headed up toward tree line. Rishu came empty-handed; I brought a camera and a bottle of water; Jango carried his radio, playing hill music, he said, the whole way up. When we reached the snow, he sat down and waited while Rishu and I ran up a ridgeline, then skated back down. We were just getting back to the rest houses, looking down on a cricket game being played in that high alpine field (India had won the Cricket World Cup the previous night), when the sun broke through the clouds at last.
The peaks I had been looking at under a banner of gray all day were at last dressed with sunlight. It carved out the planes of their rocky faces and illuminated the patches of snow. I scanned for a clean line up, and saw nothing promising on their broken sides. They’re jagged and fierce. I sat on a rock, Rishu next to me, where I could watch the clouds peel back from them.
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