India: From Little Tibet through Little Israel to Delhi

We’re now almost leaving India and in our last days in Bombai. We traveled south through the beautiful desert areas of Rajasthan and Gujarat, where we felt, after more than a month traveling in India, that we finally arrived in India. But first we had to get there through places that were imagined abroad and brought ready-made to India…

Upper Dharamshala, also known as McLeod Ganj, also known as Little Lhasa and also known as where the Dalai Lama lives…

I knew that the ride from Manali was going to be tough, up and down and round and round. And this time I took some motion-sickness pills. So I got completely stoned and slept the whole way.

Quickly after we arrived in McLeod Ganj, we found Iohi’s sister with her friend on the main street of the town.

McLeod Ganj is the paradise of bored Europeans or people from the US that want to save the Tibet. You have where the Dalai Lama lives and his  monastery,and there are many activities and volunteering related to Tibet; and of course the “Save the Tibet” and Dalai Lama memorabilia. If you check the wiki travel page of the Dharamshala, you have a whole section with excruciating details explaining how to force a meeting with the Dalai Lama, “the dream of a lifetime for many people”. I have nothing against Tibetans or Tibetan Buddhist, but it’s a bit over the top. It’s just fashionable to “Save the Tibet”, when in fact they are not having such a bad time in India. If you go to Calcutta or many places in the West Bengal and Bihar states, you’ll see poverty beyond your imagination, Indian people without food, living and dying on the streets. But I guess they are in a really tough situation and it’s nicer to volunteer with healthy people and in a place with nice view.

And it has nothing to do with Tibetan’s autonomy, it’s true, they deserve an autonomous country, and they have been oppressed by the Chinese government. But who in China hasn’t been oppressed, intellectuals, artists, Falung Gong, ethnic minorities, homosexuals, you name it, it has been oppressed. And I haven’t meet Europeans trying to save the Uighurs and give autonomy to China's Xinjiang Region, and they deserve it as much as Tibetans. Well, of course, Buddhism is still more fashionable than Islam…

Tsuglagkhang Complex, Dalai Lama's monastery

At the Dalai Lama's monastery

From McLeod Ganj we moved to a quieter and smaller town just above it, Daramkot. It’s a backpackers bubble without all the Tibetan paraphernalia, but not so different from Manali: lots of Israelis, charas and tourist food, on the brighter side it’s less crowded with shops and people, and you can see the green mountains from the whole town. 

On our last day we walked from Daramkot to McLeod Ganj through another backpacker town: Bagsu. Bagsu is pretty much Little Israel. If you take South Tel Aviv neighborhoods and you put them in a slope you’ll get Bagsu. You have signs in Hebrew, falafel, Israeli shanty-hippy style clothes, people selling and making stuff completely unrelated to India but that the Israeli shanty-hippy community loves such as Australian didgeridoos and Jamaican dreadlocks. And of course you’ll find people that got stuck there for weeks and can think that Tibet is in Goa, complain that they can’t find the traditional chai as they drank it in Israel or look at a trash bin and say “this is magical”. This is India as Israelis want India to be, just as they imagined it from home, and Indians built it for them.

If you're shocked, read what the swastika really means

And the thing is I love Tel Aviv and specially the artsy South Tel Aviv neighborhoods, I also like very much falafels and I even find didgeridoos quite cool (and I have nothing against dreadlocks). But I love South Tel Aviv inside Tel Aviv inside Israel, not its bizarre image in India (and by the way I plainly think it’s quite stupid to travel to India to learn how to make a didgeridoo, especially when you have to carry the rest of the trip an excessively large and heavy piece of wood)

While we waited to aboard the bus back to Delhi we talked with a Hindu girl from Delhi who traveled to Tushita (near Dharamshala) to do some kind of retire with a Buddhism workshop. She told us that half of the people also there were Israeli and she even told us the well-known joke about Israelis in India:

An Indian guy asks an Israeli tourist how many people are in Israel. The Israeli answers 6 millions. The Indian guy replies: “No, not how many Israelis are in India, how many in Israel!?”

Delhi

After a smooth bus travel we woke up again in Delhi. We stayed in the same place as last time on the extremely noisy Main Bazaar street. We spent only one day there and most of it went by trying to get information about how the hell we travel to Shekhawati region in Rajasthan. Shekhawati region is at the northern part of Rajasthan state and Rajasthan is at the south of Delhi. So we supposed it should be easy to get there. However, it’s a bit out of the beaten track and most of the transportation goes to more famous spots like Jaipur, Jodhpur, Udaipur, etc.

We went to the Governmental Tourist Information, to a private travel agency and to the Rajasthan Tourism Development Corp. and they kept saying that they don’t know or gave us information that proved it wrong. After a whole day walking and riding autorickshaws from station to station we almost gave up.

We went back to the hotel and I did what I know how to do: I looked in Internet. I think that by this point I should get a degree in Internet Searching. Anyway, I found a strange combination taking reserved seats in the AC three tier coach of the train to Loharu. Then we had to wait for 40 minutes and take unreserved seats in a local smaller train to Nawalgarh. It was quite easy and a nice ride; and even locals from Shekhawati were a bit shocked that we managed to arrive from Delhi (and not from Jaipur) but that’s another story.

When we finally sorted out the transportation issue, it was already evening. We decided to at least take a quick glimpse at Old Delhi. We managed only to see the Red Fort from outside and we started to walk through the open market just before it began to close. It was a complete chaos and there was a traffic jam, a bike congestion and even a people congestion. If you’ve ever been to an open market on the closing time, you know it’s pretty busy. But this was as if on top of the closing market, some shops had decided suddenly to swap places, and then also most of the neighbors from the buildings over the market decided it was their moving-day. And to that, you can add maybe two demonstrations going into opposite directions. Ah, of course add many cows to the picture. But this wasn’t the case, it just looked as if all this was happening, and actually it was the regular closing time of the market…

Yunnan province: treks, buses, minibuses and other adventures

So I finally wrapped up our last experiences in China while we recover from an endless food poisoning that mixed with flu in India.

Lijiang

So from Lugu Hu we traveled to Lijiang in Yunnan province. Our friends Juan and Rebeca had booked accommodation in a hostel in Lijiang for the four of us and we were supposed to arrive there together. But we didn't. Their bus tickets were over-sold and even though the guy from the station managed to get them inside a tour bus that drove to Lijiang, we arrived in different parts of the city.

The cute rather small old city of Lijiang I knew from my previous trip seven years ago grew becoming a monster. More and more traditional buildings were built to accommodate growing masses of Chinese tourists. But of course, it wasn’t enough and walking through the crowded rambling streets of the old city with our backpacks was an excruciating task. Lijiang old city is divided in different areas with street names that repeat; and we got deeper and deeper on the wrong street with the correct name, tumbling people, listening to the different karaoke music and soloist voices from the pubs around overlapping. After one hour walking, around 8pm, we arrived to the right number of the wrong street and we were pretty desperate. By then we got a message from Juan and Rebeca with the hostel phone number and we entered to the first karaoke and begged to call the hostel. Eventually a guy from the hostel picked up us, and we walked for half an hour until we arrived there and finally met Juan and Rebeca for dinner.

That’s the whole extent of my second visit to Lijiang: on the following morning the four of us took actually the same bus up to Shangri-la (at 3200 m height).

Shangri-la (originally Zhongdian)

Chasing some of the tourism of the prosperous Lijiang (and Old Dali), officials declared the Tibetan city previously known as Zhongdian, the location of the fictional place Shangri-la (described in the novel Lost Horizon by James Hilton).  It may be the case that the writer took inspiration from the writings of explorers who visited the Deqen prefecture (where Zhongdian is located), but several places in China, Tibet and even Bhutan also claim to be the real Shangri-la. But, anyway, here they went far enough to associate the city previously-known-as-Zhongdian with the fictional Shangri-la, an idyllic permanently happy land isolated from the outside world. The name of the city was changed.

And it worked. Besides, the Tibetan city became also a Western outpost: lots of expats, international initiatives to promote local handcrafts or to develop the area, and good Western food including real pizzas, pasta, yummy yak hamburgers, yak steaks, real salads. There is even a cheese shop! With excellent yak cheese! As much as we love Chinese food, it was a nice break. (And this last week in India we were craving those hamburgers!)

Even before we were close to Shangri-la we heard about Marco, an Italian guy that moved there and opened an Italian restaurant. We, of course, went there for our first meal and ordered some pizza and salad. As soon as Marco takes our order, he starts rambling in Italianspanish about fake Tibetan monks, tourists kidnapped by the Chinese army and how his restaurant isn’t in the Lonely Planet guide because he isn’t an evangelist. And then he starts to tell the history of his life: seven years ago, he married a Chinese Naxi woman, who now works with him, and opened the place. In the flow of the unclear Italianspanish that doesn’t stop, I hear something about him being a nurse. And then I remember!! I met him seven years ago in another Tibetan town called Xiahe. We even shared the room! By that time he was an eccentric 40 years old (single) backpacker, but as crazy as now, he was trying to teach English to the Tibetans to help them moving to India.

We stayed in Shangri-la some days, we wanted to do a trek “near” in Yubeng, but the weather wasn’t good and then Iohi caught the flu so we waited, hanging around with the couple we met before. They were volunteering in a school teaching English to the kids, and Iohi also eventually joined them.

Rebeca and Juan teaching English (Iohi was of course taking the pic)

Finally, we headed to our trek, and we even got an authentic Spanish chorizo colorado from Arturo who was leaving China. Thank you Arturo! We ate it with the parmesan yak cheese in toasted Tibetan bread during our trek!

Getting to Yubeng

So this is how you get to the “near” trek. You take a bus to Deqin, which takes from 6 hours to any uncertain amount of time depending on the conditions of the roads and on your luck. Then you take a minibus to Felai Si which takes around 1 hour. In Felai Si, there’s nothing but a nice view, so you sleep there and you take a jeep on the morning that takes another hour to Xidang. And then you can start. Piece of cake. Should I add that is a mountainous way and there are landslides and flooding all the time?

So fearing crowded minibuses we took the 7:40am bus and after 2 hours it stopped. We were three hours there until we understood that the bus was going to continue going only at 8 or 9 pm (yes pm) when the road was going to be cleared.

The first bus on our way to Yubeng

So yet again we left the bus and, with two Chinese couples, we took a minibus which was able to go on alternative narrow and muddy roads, where we got stuck every now and then.

Then at 9pm, when we were only a couple of hours from our destination, the axis of our car broke in the middle of nothing, and we had to move again, this time to jeep crammed with Tibetan monks. We arranged a price to Felai Si, but when we arrived in Deqin, the nice driver wanted to drop us unless we paid more.

So we paid more and then we arrived to the lousiest hostel belonging to the Youth Hostel association.

The following day it rained a lot, so we didn’t start the trek. It was so cloudy that we even didn’t see that we were surrounded by snowy peaks.

Yubeng trek (under the Meili Snow Mountain)

On the next morning we had an amazingly nice day and the snowy peaks were everywhere!

We arrived in Xidang on the morning and we started to walk up the muddy trail. Five hours later we got to the peak and we started to walk down to Upper Yubeng, the upper part of the town (at 3150 m).

Both Yubengs, upper and lower, are places which seemed to be taken from a painting. Surrounded by mountains, these small Tibetan villages with wooden and mud houses lack cars and seem completely unreal. 

In Upper Yubeng we had dinner twice on an open terrace from where the rainbow was present every afternoon.

We walked all day from there to a glacier over a half frozen lake. We drank there the best water we had ever tasted, straight from the ice in the mountains to a waterfall.

Then we moved to Lower Yubeng (which was slightly lower than the other Yubeng at 3050 m), as beautiful as Upper Yubeng, where we stayed in a room with view to the woods and a stream of water. We saw yaks and mules through our balcony and we used the first day to recover ourselves.

Our view

The next day we walked to waterfalls where we drank exquisite cold water again (yes, water can be exquisite) and on the following day we left.

I'm the blue dot

The way back from Yubeng

We took another path with two Israeli girls. It was a shorter path and without going up. For a couple of hours we walked following a river between small villages. Then we walked in a single line on a narrow trail which had a stream of water on the left near a rock wall and a very high cliff on the right. We even had to put the feet in the water when the trail was narrower and muddy or grab from the wall! The view was amazing and was scaring as hell! 

This was before it gets scary (and then we didn't take pics!)

After walking another couple of hours we reached the point where we should have easily found minibuses to Felai Si. But there weren’t.

We ended up in a construction site where we called everyone working in all the hostels around using the phone of one of the workers. It seemed that there were problems with the road again and we waited halves of hour for five hours for the minibus that didn’t arrive.

Then we caught a minibus that was going down to our direction and we cancelled the last minibus we called. But we didn’t realize until late that he was supposed to pick up a group of six Chinese that were below us. They weren’t happy to be crammed and travel with us but the driver was (he really robbed us with the price). So we contemplated again an endless Chinese quarrel until we begged the only English speaker to let us go with them to Felai Si.

We arrived to the same lousy hostel, but this time even lousier, the electricity was cut. Anyway, it was worth while; I guess that all the effort that implies arriving there makes Yubeng a rather clean, quiet and beautiful place. And we stayed there four nights, because we had already plane tickets from Kunming, but we could easily have stayed much more time, just sitting there on the nature.

We went back on the following morning to Shangri-la anyway, and we met again our friends. From Shangrila to Kunming, we suffered again with the transportation.

We thought the problem was the unreliable minibuses, but official buses were also uncomfortable and got stuck. We thought the problem was also being far from the big cities but the sleeper bus we took to Kunming, capital of Yunnan province wasn’t a joy either. It was roughly like sleeping with thirty more smelly guys in the same moving bed. Twelve hours later we arrived in Kunming.

Kunming

In Kunming we enjoyed our last days in China, a rather big but quite city with the perfect weather: it’s at an almost-tropical latitude but with a 2000 m altitude. We mainly got ready for our next destination, India, and of course we acted in a movie.

All the pictures are in Iohi's picasa.

Spicy Sichuan province

From Kanding to Moxi

So I was saying before that we decided to go to Chengdu through Moxi. In our hotel, we were offered to join an excursion to Moxi for roughly the same price than a minibus ticket. So we joined a group of young people from all over China.

The trip started with soup for breakfast that we politely declined, so the guide (which was also the owner of the hostel) got immediately everyone out and led us to take hot soy milk with fried dough instead, which Iohi even liked.

This guy really knew very special places to see on the way to Moxi: there were no Chinese tourists in July! (which was amazing), and the places were clean (astounding as well) and in every place we ate something different.

We went to hot springs where we boiled eggs in 90 C degrees water and warmed up our legs –but that water wasn’t 90 degrees... And our guide had some laughs asking me and Iohi to pick up the cooked eggs with two wooden sticks from the hot water. At this point we felt to have completely mastered the chopsticks, but the task wasn’t easy at all! Then we were driven to a field from where we reached a beautiful lake that I assume it was the cleanest place in whole China. And there we sat and had yak yogurt.

Possibly the cleanest lake in China

Later we drove over 3800m and we saw the snowy peaks of the Gongga mountains all around us before we reached the Yanzi Gou red stones, rocks covered by some kind of red microorganism. Before we arrived in our final destination, we stopped to eat cold noodles with a super spicy sauce prepared on the moment and served with bread to extinguish the fire. We ate the noodles with some real bamboo sticks that he had cut to use as chopsticks!

Spicy cold noodles

And then we finally got to Moxi that surprisingly was hardly the highlight of the excursion. They were kind of building the town when we got there! Virtually every person of the city was repairing either the facades or the streets. Even it seemed that the main attraction that day was to see how they pour asphalt on the main road.

We originally wanted to see there a national park where you can walk over a glacier, but the place didn’t make a good impression on us. Having bad experience with national parks we decided to skip it and we just traveled to Chengdu, capital of the spicy Sichuan province.

Chengdu, warning hot!            

We finally arrived in Chengdu and I have to say that it was hot, very hot. We were finally on the sea level, and we had a too warm reunion with the summer we were avoiding for the last weeks. We also met again the high season, everything was crowded. Even the hostels were pretty much full of Western people.

In Chengdu, we finally stopped asking for shaola (less spicy): it didn’t help, we either received the same (I think that sometimes even spicier) or we get plain food without spices or salt. And of course we got used to the mala, the lethal combination of chili and Sichuan peppercorn that I described in the last post. We discovered that dan dan noodles have to be eaten spicy.

The famous Dan dan noodles

We visited the Jin Li night market and we ate everything we saw there. Well, we didn’t eat rabbit heads, but we did try, some other day, sliced spicy rabbit together with a dish of eggplant on fish sauce and of course, as always, rice.

But we did more stuff than just eating in Chengdu, we also went to tea houses!

After these experiences, we decided that we had to take cooking classes in that city. We found out about the existence of the Chengdu Museum of Sichuan Cuisine, which had a restaurant and cooking classes. It was actually in outer Chengdu, it took us half day just to get there, we first went to the wrong bus station, and then we had to take 3 different intermediate distance buses. We arrived there starving, so we first enter to a kind of fancy restaurant inside the museum and the food was … not special at all, only expensive. In any place on the streets of Chengdu you could have something better for half the price. The kitchen was a big industrial place and the cooks looked sad and bored. The lessons consisted of learning how to prepare one dish, and it was kind of expensive. We didn’t want to have cooking lessons there, even the food wasn’t that good and the actual museum… was also only one room.

Leshan and Emei Shan

From Chengdu, we did two side trips before coming back to take the train. We went to Leshan and from there to Emei Shan.

Leshan has an amazing park from where you can contemplate both the Grand Buddha, a 71 meters high buddy, and also millions of Chinese people contemplating the Buddha. The Buddha, which is the largest one in the world, is quite impressive but the whole park has many different Buddhist carvings and it’s pretty interesting, and importantly it’s big enough to dilute the quantity of Chinese tourists.

From Leshan we traveled to Emei Shan, yet again a sacred Buddhist mountain (this time not only Tibetan). Climbing Mount Emei is a pilgrimage that Buddhists have done for a long time and in the last decade became very popular among tourists.

You can climb up to the top and down in from 3 days to a couple of hours and it depends not really on your stamina but on how many of the available transportations you take: there are several buses that can get you to upper places and several cable cars.

We realized there that the foot climbing path is actually stairs. So the adventurous hiking trek is basically a huge stairway with expensive tea houses and snack shops on the sides.

We “did” Emei Shan in 4 hours. We obviously didn’t get to the top but we couldn’t stand more time the light but persistent rain that didn’t allow us to see any landscape but stairs and especially we couldn’t bear the crowds of Chinese tourists.

The only memorable part of the “trek” was the fine specimens of Chinglish. There were signs asking for “One step closer to civilization” over the urinals in the male toilet, and “Don’t joke the monkeys” in areas where the monkeys can behave aggressively.

The best of Emei Shan: the signs

Back to Chengdu

Back in Chengdu we decided to eat in the most prestigious restaurant in the city, Ginko. This was our failed logic: if the food everywhere is so incredible tasty, in a prestigious restaurant should be super incredible tasty! But, surprisingly or not, the only incredible thing was the bill.

We ate the famous tea-smoked duck, which wasn’t so different from the Beijing duck for our Western palatals; a dish of Kung Pao chicken, which wasn’t even worth of a picture, and some shrimp which were shrimp.

They did excel in changing our plates five times during the meal, and in keeping my beer apart only to pour me (sometimes) when my glass was empty. From then on, we stuck to the street food…

Xichang – a nice stop over

To get trains out of Chengdu or any other means of transportation came out to be pretty hard. We managed to book a train to Xichang, a nice and small city outside the realm of the guidebooks.

It was a nice experience; we were received by over-friendly volunteer teenagers which gave leaflets (in Chinese of course) about the celebrations they were holding in the city that week. One of them, the only English speaking teenager, felt her moral duty to help us. She not only came with us on the bus, but she also paid (and we fought to pay the tickets!), and walked with us 20 minutes till the hotel. On the meanwhile she practiced also all her English repertoire: from presenting herself to asking where we are from, etc.

The city has a small old area between walls and a nice market, and it’s the home of the Yi_people. By the time we arrived, they had started a series of celebrations that ended with a parade with torches around the city. We were 4 days ahead of the torch parade but we managed to see some kind of rehearsal (but no fire).

Iohi trying an Yi skirt

Lake Lugu

We spent one day in Xichang and then we took a bus to Lugu Hu. Lugu Hu is a quiet lake between mountains on the border between Sichuan and Yunnan provinces. There are several villages around the lake where Mosuo people live. They suppose to be organized in a matriarchal society, but as far as I know, they just don’t get officially married and children are mostly raised by the mother’s family. Their leaders are still men and not women. Anyway, the matriarchal thing serves to publicize the place, and the place is beautiful.

We were in a small village called Wazhiluo, in Wind’s Guesthouse, in front of the lake and with fields of corns, sunflowers and pumpkins everywhere. We planed to stay one or two nights, just to go to other parts of Yunnan province, and we ended up staying 5 nights.

We kept eating amazing food; after all we were still in Sichuan! There were a lot of barbeques and I even ate a frog on the grill! And one occasion we ate in an open kitchen where they served us soup of fresh fish that I choose from a bowl of swimming fish. There, we finally had the chance to see how they prepare real Sichuanese food!

How to prepare a Sichuanese Fish Soup:

You need:

1 handful of Sichuan pepper corn

4 dry red hot pepper

1-1.5 kg Fish

1 small cup of ginger

1 small cup of garlic

4 zucchini

Tons of oil

You do:

1. Clean the fish, leaving the skin and cut it in big pieces.

2. Fry fish with ginger, garlic and Sichuan peppercorn for a couple of minutes in a wok.

3. Add some boiling water just to cover the fish, some salt, stock and the sliced zucchinis.

4. Cover the wok and cook for 20 minutes.

5. Add more boiling water to make it a soup and boil it a couple of minutes more.

6. Serve! (You can add parsley and cilantro at the end; we saw it that way in some other places. You can also replace the zucchini for any other vegetable)

After we walked a lot and we biked almost the whole lake (60 km), and when we decided to just hang out for some more days, we happened to find in our hostel a Spanish-Argentinean couple we met in Mongolia two months before! So we enjoyed the scenery and their company and some days later we traveled together to Lijiang in Yunnan province.

But we didn't ride 60 km in that bike

 More pics in Iohi's picasa.