8000 feet up

Hello all.

Sorry about the typos in the last post. I was in a big hurry to get out of Delhi and get on the road to Dharamsala.

Yesterday was a pretty crazy day. After six hours of sleep, I packed back up and caught a taxi to the domestic airport to see if there was any chance I could fly to Himachal Padesh. I figured it was worth a chance, since overland travel of any kind is so uncomfortable. No dice. A competing small airline was on strike and so the little private air carrier Jagson Airlines, the only one that flies to Kangra Airport in Himachal Pradesh, was booked solid with a waiting list of people trying to get north.

After waiting a almost an hour for a taxi, I finally landed one and sat through an hour of Delhi trafic to get to New Delhi train station, where I hoped to get a train to Pathonkot. The station was nuts, and a really nice guy directed me to a travel office in Connaught Place, the center of Delhi, where I could get a train ticket. A quick fifty cent ride in a 3-wheel autorickshaw brought me to the office, where a kind and well informed government agent explained to me why it was impossible to get a train ticket due to troop movements and religious pilgrims clogging up the Jammu mail express for the next week solid. At that point I was feeling like I'd made some big mistakes in my planning and maybe I had come all this way only to get stuck in Delhi without ever seeing Rinchen Tsomo and Dharamala again.

The agent informed me that it was possible to hire a taxi all the way to Dharamsala, and that he could have me there that evening. Well, that sounded pretty good. Just after I finished my last post, I was introduced to Ravikumar. We climbed into his little Maruti sedan and filled up at the gas station for the long ride ahead. We departed at 11am.

Ravikumar negotiated the clogged, debris-strewn streets of Delhi (a city area of 12 million inhabitants, all of whom are crossing the street in the middle of traffic every few minutes) like a pro. Just as we reached the outskirts of Delhi, we blew a tire, so we spent a half hour at a dhaba/service station, which gave me a chance to buy us a couple of cold Limcas and a cream-cheese tomato sandwich (it is so easy to be a vegetarian in India), my first food of the day.


Back on the road, we weaved north through traffic that was a mix of army tucks, oxcarts, three-wheelers, donkey carts, diesel heavy trucks, herds of cows and sheep, bicyclists, camel carts, wild dogs, goats and even one cart pulled by an elephant...all of this on the main highway! We spent a third of the time playing chicken with oncoming traffic in the other lane, and another third of the time on road surfaces so rough that at one point the radio fell out of the dashboard. All along the road in Haryana were farms and brick kilns belching black smoke into the already very hazy air.

As we crossed into Punjab the air cooled a little from the mid-eightees of Delhi and Haryana, and the road side was often lined with groves of what looked like sycamores, beehives, honey stands, and great stacks of brilliantly colored oranges. We stopped for a lunch break at around 3pm in a dhaba (open-air roadside restaurant, kind of like a Mexican palapa) for daal makhani and roti bread right out of the tandoor, brushed with ghee. We ate with our hands, pinching little slices of fresh sliced onion with our roti before using it to scoop up the spicy daal. We drank bottled water with our meal, and we felt a lot better after having eaten something. The water helped dilute the thick layer of road dust and exhaust fumes in my throat.

At five-thirty in the afternoon we saw out first hill in an otherwise flat trajectory so far. I was so glad to see hills, but before long the novelty would wear off in a big way. As it got dark, we climbed through the little villages of Himachal Pradesh, where the rivers run colder and bluer than the still, green water of the plains. Driving in the dark made things even more exciting (euphemism) since now we had to miss pedestrians, animals, and vehicles that for whatever reason had no lights whatsoever. The deeper we got into Himachal, the more winding the road was, climbing constantly toward the Himalayas.

We stopped for chai in another dhaba around 8:30pm, both of us getting road-weary. We finally threaded our way up a one-lane road whose edges dropped into black nothingness until we reached McLeodganj, Upper Dharamsala at just before 11pm. We checked in, I tipped Ravikumar and thanked him for all of his hard work driving all day, something I could not have done to the end, even though I love long car trips, then I rolled out my sleepsack, put in my earplugs to block the barking of the wild dogs, and drifted off...

I write this to you from a small Internet shop in Upper Dharamsala. I awoke at 6:30 am but let myself lie around reading and looking out the widow at the Kangra valley adn the Tsulag Khang, the Dalai Lama's residence and temple, until 8am, when I got dressed and walked up the road a way to the Tenyang coffee house. I ate a boiled egg, two slices of brown bread and chai for a dollar. Some Tibetan monks and nuns ate at the tables around me, along with a couple of French women who were debating the pan-Arab movement. It was odd to use my French in such a remote corner of India, but I guess Dharamsala attracts a rather eclectic bunch of tourists...

After breakfast I watched some monkeys try to steal fruit from a stand along the road, then I went to a Tibetan travel agent to hire a ride back to Delhi which, as I expected, will cost half as much as the ride here. Since I will be hauling an extra bag filled with thangkas and prayer wheels and things to raise money for Inside Dharma back home, I do not want to mess with a bus, train, or tiny airplane, even if I could get a ticket for any of them...

I changed some dollars for rupees at the bank this morning, re-learning a cultural lesson that was hard to get used to at first when I came to Inda in 2004. The idea of lining up and taking turns is not a universal practice, and so I participated in a minor mob scene at the teller's window for about a half hour just to change my money. No violence, no hard feelings, just no discernable order to things...

And so here I am at the Internet shop, a tiny storefront with about a dozen outdated computers hooked up by modem. I have been here an hour, so I will pay my Rps 60 now and give up my spot to go fnd some thugkpa and veg momos for lunch.

I am looking forward to meeting up with Rinchen and her daughter this evening.

Happy Valentine's Day.