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…

More of north India: Four day trek in the Spiti Valley

Spiti Valley –If they look like Tibetans, speak Tibetan, they aren’t necessarily Tibetans.

So we were in Manali, at the end of the tourist season, and we couldn’t find more people to share a jeep to Spiti Valley. So we took the 6am local bus and traveled for 10 hours. It was one of those buses that sometimes you see in pictures of India with people hanging from the doors and people seating on the roof… But it was rather empty and since the bus stopped at every town and village, some people even got down at the beginning of the journey. We ended taking 3 seats each and sleeping most of the drive.

Local bus

On the other side of the green mountains around Manali, we found a pretty impressive desert mountain valley right before Tibet. It had Tibetan mud houses inhabited by people who look just like Tibetans, speak a language that sound just like Tibetan, practice Tibetan Buddhism and eat momos and thukpa. But they aren’t Tibetans, they are Spitians. They are indigenous from the region, and they happen to be the guys that ended up living in the Indian side of the border (before there were any borders). The main difference from the Tibetans (at least from the Tibetans that live in China outside the Tibet(an Autonomous Region), that is, the Tibetans that we met) is that they are way more focused on agriculture than livestock and they are somewhat influenced by Indians food and clothes. We had plenty of different experiences with the Tibetan people (check all the Tibetan posts), but it’s not that we are so much into Tibetan culture, or that we are trying to stare at the Tibet from every cardinal point. We didn’t have the best of the experiences in, say, Qinghai province in China, and I even got into a quarrel with a Tibetan monk on our way back from Spiti. But these people happen to live in the highest and most beautiful mountains where the heat of the summer is converted in breeze and bright sun during the day and chilled nights. And we liked that. And I have to say that many of the Spitians made great hosts (and many speak a great English).

So let’s go back to the story, we arrived in Kaza at 3800 m above the see level. It’s a small and dusty place with ugly concrete buildings but it’s the main town and commercial center of the valley. Besides that, it’s tourist friendly and it has many guesthouses and tourist restaurants (not that this is a good thing) and even though there’s no phone signal in most of the valley, there are internet and call centers. We wanted to start a four day trek in a near village, but we were informed in a very helpful travel agency that local transportation only got there twice a week –the day after the following day. Then we went to the headquarters of ecosphere, a great initiative from three NGOs (MUSE, SSS and STAG), that promotes sustainable livelihoods and eco tourism, between other things. They are the guys that trained the people of the really tiny villages to receive foreigner tourists and provide them a “home-stay”. They also put signs explaining either about the villages, or about the solar panels they installed and even how to use a dry-ecological toilet. There we got some more information and recommendations for our trek from Komic to Dankhar going through Demul and Lhalung.

Then we sat at the only bakery. (It was of course a “German bakery”, who knows why they call the Western bakeries that way). We found ourselves surrounded by Israelis and an Iranian Jew who was angry that everyone was speaking Hebrew and he couldn’t understand. In fact, some of the Israelis were complaining –in Hebrew- that they kept finding Israelis and that it didn’t feel like traveling abroad. An Israeli couple got interested in our four day trek and wanted to join us; and two after-army Israelis (which were unlike the ones we met before in Manali –see the previous post) offered us to join them in a one day jeep excursion to the villages of Ki and Kiber the following day.

So at midday of the following day, the two friends, another Israeli couple that they met on the way and we traveled by jeep first to Kibber and on the way back to Ki.

Kiber is a very small village with around 80 houses and an old gompa (Tibetan monastery); it’s only 16 kms far from Kaza but 300 meters above it. We wandered around, saw the monastery and sat in the local restaurant/guesthouse. Ki is an even smaller village with a huge monastery. We were invited in by a very talkative and cheerful monk who explained us a little about the monastery and showed us the room where Dalai Lama once slept. He laughed all the time and from time to time he talked Gibberish-Hebrew. After the small tour and an optional donation, which he really earned, he offered us tea and tsampa (balls of roasted barley flour) and tried to learn his words of the day. He took a brochure from some NGO and asked us about the meaning of indigenous, provide, support and autonomous.

Ki Gompa

On the way back to Kaza, the four guys asked us about our four day trek and decided also to join us.

So the following day we were supposed to be us and other six people starting the trek. We ran into the first couple (from the bakery) on the (only) street and they said some lame excuse about why they’re not coming. That left us six people. The second couple came to the bus stop to say that they aren’t feeling well; the girl developed altitude sickness during the night and hardly slept. That left us four people: us, and Adam and Omer -the two post-army friends

From Komic to Dankhar

So we took the local bus around 2 pm and we arrived in our first stop, Komic (4500 m), one hour and a half later and around 800 meters higher! We were received by Kunga and his great family in their mud house and gave us a room in the upper floor with an amazing view. After seeing the stuffed tiger on the entrance of the local temple and its interior (well, not all of us, Iohi couldn’t enter because the entrance is forbidden for women – I suspect this is because the image of guy biting the ass of other guy), we went back to our home-stay. Kunga prepared Indian food: dal, vegetable curry, rice, pickles and chapattis and answer all our questions about Spitians and Spiti Valley. We learned that the workers that were building more mud houses outside were actually Nepalese immigrant workers! Who could imagine that farmers living in mud houses had workers doing their hard work! During the night Adam and Omer hardly slept and started to go one by one all the symptoms of altitude sickness. We were supposed to walk up to 200 meters higher before going down to Demul at 4300 m above the sea level, so they decided to quit and return to Kaza by jeep. That left us: the two of us trekking alone.

So after having breakfast and having Kunga’s wife put a lot of rice in our lunch box, we started to follow up a jeepable road under the bright sun of 4000+ altitude. We were alone most of the time walking up on a moon-like landscape and we only saw far away some shepherds. At that height walking with our bags, water and food was a pretty hard task, but eventually we found some Spitians on motorbikes that point us that the trail to Demul went up from the jeep path across the mountain. Then every step was an excruciating task, we had headaches on and off and even breathing was tough. After 4 hours we were thrilled to see the Tibetan prayer flags that marked the highest point of the trail: 4700 m above sea level.

From there it was a nice and relieving walk down. After one hour or less we started to sea the terraces with plantations of barley, potatoes and wheat, and the people working the land with yaks. Soon we arrived at Demul (~4300m), mud houses on a steeped slope and everyone, men and women, was singing and working. We still don’t understand what they did; they were moving, splitting and all sort of stuff with dried straws.

Demul

  We were led to a home stay by guy in his forties or maybe fifties, it was hard to tell. The situation was a little ambivalent, they were by far the most apathetic family of the trek, but the same night they held some kind of party there so we had the chance to glance at a tipical Spitian celebration and to taste the goodies: some kind of barley spirit which tasted between vodka and whisky, steamed sheep blood sausages that were exquisite, and very tasty recently made mutton meat momos.

Inside the homestay

On the following morning, we headed to what supposed to be the shorter trekking day –4 or 5 hours. So we started an extremely stepped walk down the valley; in less than 2 hours we descended around 1000 meters! First we went down a river until we reached a village of five mud houses called Sanglung. We had there some nice trees to have our lunch (box) and then we peeked in a house until we were invited to have some chai with the local family. We asked regarding our next destination, Lhalung, and the guy from the family did a single hand-movement that pointed down towards the river bank and then west. We were a little puzzled, our printed instructions (from 2008) indicated that the path goes east and then down the river to cross a bridge and then up again to reach Lhalung.

So we went down till almost the river and asked again to a group of workers who pointed east (like our printed instructions). Since we didn’t want to walk up again to the trail, we went off the path and walked over the river bank towards the east. We supposed that we’ll eventually find the bridge right there over the water…

So we walked and walked off the path over the stones and mud on the northern shore of the river for hours. Suddenly we had Lhalung up the hill in front of us, and on the other side of the river. But the thing was, there was no bridge…

We considered many times to cross the river but we weren’t sure how dangerous that could be. So we walked again up and down the river looking for a quieter spot, but the current seemed pretty strong everywhere. The idea of crossing the water vanished when Iohi put a toe in the freezing cold water and we decided just to go back.

Lhalung and below the river we wanted to cross

So we walked to the west all the way back to Sanglung and then continued until we finally saw a bridge. We crossed it and we walked again to the east, this time on the right side of the river. So after 9 hours walking, and just before the sunset, we entered in Lhalung (~3700 m). This little village in the middle of nothing had several home stays, even with signs. We opted for Khabric Guesthouse, where we collapsed on the kitchen floor and drank tea until the evening. We were hosted by the magnificent Tashi and his family, and he explained us that the bridge we were looking for on the east was washed away with the last rains.

Iohi had the chance to master her technique in momo making by helping with the dough together with Tashi’s little girl and we enjoyed of Tashi’s family’s company.

Iohi mastering the momo making technique with Tashi's

daughter

On the morning we walked four and half hours to Dankhar (~3800 m). Dankhar is the most touristic town of that area, but we found it the least interesting. It’s nice when you see it from far, the monasteries and the fort on the steeped mountain over a precipice. But when you get there, it’s only OK. Every other village on our way was much nicer and interesting.

Shichling village below of Dankhar, on our way to the bus stop

Back to Kaza, back to Manali

So we traveled from Kaza to Manali again by local bus. But this time the drive was a nightmare, the bus was very crowded, when 2 people got down, 5 got in. I even got in a quarrel with a Tibetan monk because of Iohi’s seat. I ended up on the back part of the bus with more people than seats breathing all the dust that entered from the open windows.

We stayed for a day in Manali, and then we traveled to Dharamshala to meet Iohi’s sister, Sachu.

On the following morning, we took a minibus to Upper Dharamshala, also known as McLeod Ganj, and also known as where the Dalai Lama lives…

Pictures of Spiti in Iohi's picasa