james.lostintransit.net

Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaahrain airport is all white tiles and black burkhas.  All I can see of the women is the whites of their eyes, and frankly, I think even that may be overstepping the mark.  I have 6 and a half hours to kill waiting in this incredibly expensive airport (where I think they fine you for sneezing and/or incorrect breathing), with only my Indian valium addiction for company.  

In between trips to the phone (I am trying to contact three different people in London to see if I can stay with them tonight - none of them answering), I chat with the Costa Coffee man from Kenya.  He flew over here in hope of a better life, only to find out that this tiny nation is exhorbitantly expensive, and his employers have got him by the short-and-curlies.  So it goes.

ndiaindiaindiaindiaindiaindi until all i can hearsweatsmellfeeltouchtaste is a whirlpool of voices heat beggers eyes monkeys mosques flags wires redandneon stories holding this monstrous nation together as it staggers, drunk, in the monsoon.  A giant, concensual hallucination, a Kashmiri carpet of trickery and love, crumbling me slowly from the inside like a block of the finest Manali gold.

Yesterday a man from Punjab, a Sikh, stared at me from across the main street of Pahar Ganj, tufted eyebrows bristling in ambush beneath a red turban.  He crossed the road, put a piece of paper into my hand and asked me to think of a colour.  I decided against green and went with purple.  He pulled out a sepia picture of his guru and showed me.  Then his face changed: it smiled and turned wistful at the same time.  Dark eyes reflected.  “You were going to choose green but you chose purple.”

Fortune-teller, beggerman, seer, conman, babu, sadhu, fakir… names given to people we don’t understand but who understand us.  Thank, babaji.  I had already made the decision to go to Europe for the next two months some hours earlier, but it was you who opened the box in my mind and handed it to me (with - was that pity? - in your eyes).

Man in the street

Gave me some paper

Gave me a choice

Said see you later

Choice already made

Paper’s in the hand

Sadhu, sadhu

How’d you understand?

Electricity in these parts in a precious and capricious commodity which comes and goes at will, so this will be a brief post.  Rhys and I are in Leh, a wonderful Buddhist town in Ladakh, right in the north of India.  Today’s Ladakhi word-of-the-day is joolay!, a kind of one-size-fits-all number which means hello, goodbye, thanks and you’re welcome.  (In fact I suspect it means whatever you want it to mean, and Ladakhis can discuss the upper echelons of philosophy using only this word.)  It’s marvellous to be back in an area dominated by Tibetans.  Their peaceful natures are a world away from the mad, manipulative intensity of the Kashmiris.

Tomorrow we strap a tent, food, clothes, and two 5-litre jerry cans of fuel onto the back of our Enfield Thunderbirds for a trip into the Nubra valley.  To enter the valley we must cross the highest motorable pass in the world, Khardungla, 5600 metres above sea level.  We have to leave at dawn because the pass is only open in our direction until 10am; in the afternoon, traffic heading to Leh has right of way.

Right, I’m off to shave my head and get “HORN PLEASE” tattooed on the back in henna.

Well, we’ve been in Delhi for over a week now, enjoying the heat, the touts, and the cricket, although not necessarily in that order. I’ve been riding an exceptionally noisy Enfield around town for the last week and really enjoying it. Time for some first impressions.

The traffic is crazy in a different way to Hanoi. If I had to put my finger on it, I’d say Hanoi’s traffic is predictably unpredictable, while here it’s unpredictably unpredictable. Driving in Hanoi can become quite a Zen-like experience, as the traffic flows calmly along the streets with everybody expecting - and accommodating - frequent random acts of vehicular madness. Here everything might seem normal, until a three-wheeled autorickshaw (you know the car Mr Bean drives?) tries to take a turn too tightly and flips onto its side right in front of you. Or two cows loom at you out of the darkness as you charge down an alley. I think the range of differences between the types of vehicles / animals on the streets play a large part in this: cows, autorickshaws, pedal-powered rickshaws, 50-year old scooters, new Mercedes, snarling Enfields, ‘HORN PLEASE’ buses and foolhardy pedestrians all engage in an orgy of dust and danger. In short, it’s great fun.

The touts are pretty annoying. Since we’re staying in the Main Bazar in Pahar Ganj opposite the train station, we have to run the gauntlet several times each day. Beggers, hawkers, sellers, buyers, ‘Excuse me sir!’ men, tricksters, con-men, women with babies and sad expressions - they ambush us from all angles. Luckily Rhys and I have stumbled across a couple of tactics to deal with them. The first - and believe me this is not as barbaric as it seems, it’s a war out there - is to gently angle your walking trajectory so that your opponent, if he/she wishes to continue walking alongside you, will make close acquaintance with an oncoming cow/Enfield. This technique only works in extremely crowded areas but boy does it work.

The second option is, modesty aside. nothing short of sheer brilliance. When street urchins or beggers come up to you and ask for money/bread/water, start to sing at them. Just simple a capella will do; lyrics aren’t important; classical tunes are good (Chariots of Fire and Fleur de Lys work nicely); and a good harmony (thanks Rhys) can not only stun your hawker into bemused silence, but turn all the beggars in the street into your captive audience. Rhys pointed out yesterday that it was not unreasonable to ask them for a small donation after such a performance, a practice we’ve since adopted, albeit with limited success.

The sights have been many and varied. Raj Ghat, where Gandhi was cremated, is a green oasis in the concrete jungle. The Red Fort and Jana Masjid mosque in Old Delhi are stunning. (In fact all of Old Delhi’s interesting - it’s the Muslim heart of the city, so it has a very different flavour to the rest). Connaught Place embodies the upward rush of India’s middle class with its swanky cafes and boutique shops, and is a good place to escape the heat.

But I must give a special mention to the Sulabh International Museum of Toilets, a space of waste on the outskirts of the city. Nothing could be better on a hot afternoon than wandering through a lovely air-conditioned gallery hearing a lilting female Indian accent telling me how Thomas Crapper was not the original innovator behind the flush toilet, or that the Americans invented a spectacularly unsuccessful and energy intensive toilet known as the Incin-O-Let, or that the erotic French Poet Eustrog de Beaulieu wrote thus:

“When the cherries become ripe
Many black soils of strange shapes
Will breed for many days and urgents
Then will mature and become products of various colours and breaths.”

Couldn’t have put it better myself.

We dropped into Firoj Sah Kotla stadium last night to watch a spirited Delhi side dent the Mumbai Indians’ chances of a semi-final berth.  Just getting into the ground proved interesting: our autorickshaw driver was clearly quite taken with the Ben Hur chariot scene, and then we had to dive into a heaving mass of bodies which was slowly crushed through a tiny gate.  We still arrived in time to hear Sachin’s thunderous reception from the Delhi crowd, who whooped and whistled and danced gleefully every time he hit the ball.

Surprisingly, it wasn’t the big opening guns of Gautam Gambhir and Virender Sehwag which proved the difference in the end, but a determined effort by the middle order.  After wobbling at 4-89 in the eleventh over, Tiwary and Dashan played intelligent innings to swing it back Delhi’s way.  Karthik and Maharoof were cool as fridges in the last over to win it with one ball to spare.  The crowd went ballistic and promptly invaded the pitch.

But the real action was in the Caribbean, where Daren Powell and Fidel Edwards tore into the Australian batting line up with a ferocity not seen since the last days of Ambrose and Walsh, to leave them 4-17 at stumps.  Glimpse of the future or flash in the pan?

See the man in the corner

With the twinkle in his eye?

He’s a dreamer he’s a poet

And he’s ernest and sly

He knows what he’s doing

Though he doesn’t know why

If he knew his own future

He would certainly cry.

Had a delightful time trying to buy tickets for the overnight train to Varanasi. We’d crossed the border into India - India! - had a chai and a samosa, and squeezed into a small metal heating box which doubled as a jeep for the two-hour ride to Gorakhpur. I went to the Reservations Counter at the recommendation of a friendly head-waggling fellow. After a 45 minute wait (Rhys and I did it in shifts) I was politely informed that the computer system was down. After another 20 minutes I reached the front of the queue, only to be head-waggled that I had to go to the Current Reservations Counter.

The Current Reservations Counter was a small room around the corner filled with arguing men, and a small queue of people with desperate, pleading eyes waiting to have their hearts broken. This was, I later discovered, its natural state, although the internal arguments varied in their ferocity throughout the evening, from bristling moustaches all the way to use of knives and incendiary devices. After I had politely stood watching the furious remonstrations going on behind the grill for twenty minutes or so, I was told that contrary to initial appearances, the Current Reservations Counter was closed at the moment, and I should return to the Reservations Counter. This advice was given by a man who was holding - and intermittently stroking - a black receipt book, clearly an artefact of great importance.

This caused some concern and distress for the affected parties. Scorching anger and homicidal visions gradually gave way to lethargy and gloom, followed by a strange calm. I may have started to hum very slightly. Rhys and I set up camp with our packs on an abandoned platform at one side of the station. It was warm, with red dust, neon lighting, and a stray dog with a limp who took an instant liking to us. We still had three hours to wait.

Invigorated by a curry I went charging back to the Current Reservations Counter, where a new group of men were shaking their fists at each other. The man with the receipt book gave me a calm, beneficent smile, as if to say: You’re fucked. He told me I had to go and buy a ticket first. His eyes then seemed to widen slightly in response to my own expression - one, I presume, of hysteria bordering on lunacy - before telling me to go to the Booking Counter. Which I did. There, a rotund and sweaty man with good English told me there were no more sleepers available, only Second Class, which looked about as enjoyable as a public enema. I trudged off with my two tickets, hoping that I’d bought them for the right train; there were two to Varanasi, one at 10:45pm, one at 11pm, one fast, one slow, and I had no idea which was which or which platforms they left from.

On impulse, I decided to return to the Current Reservations Counter, and lo and behold! things started to happen. He took my paperwork immediately. “Sleeper?” he enquired in a perfectly neutral tone. I nodded, offered a silent prayer for his immediate and painful death, handed over 160 more rupees, and received my tickets back - with a carefully made receipt from the little black book. As I turned and walked away, a flush of elation started to spread throughout my body in a tingly and rather pleasant way. I walked a foot taller. I had tickets! Against all odds, with seemingly every bureaucrat working there determined to provide maximum resistance, I had two wonderfully valuable tickets in my sweaty palms. We were getting on that train.

We missed the train. It may have been the paneer masala, it may have been the joint, but regardless of the cause we ended up sprinting (waddling viciously) the length of platform 7 on the advice of a friendly policeman. Upon jumping aboard we discovered that our seats were of course taken, and for a mere 378 further rupees we could take a private first class cabin. Which we did. What a wonderful country.

Well, the days here are starting to stretch and blend into each other.  Pokhara is just such a place: set on the banks of a cool lake, with enough outdoor activities to keep you interested, and cheap enough that you don’t notice (or care about) time passing.  Coffee in the mornings, canoing or bike riding in the afternoons, beer and Indian Premier League in the evenings.  Life could be worse.

Question is, when to leave?  Varenassi’s close, and I think it’s our next port of call.  We’ll be cutting it up in the north of India for a good couple of months: then, when Matty heads home and Rhys takes off for Europe, I’ll have a couple of months to navel-gaze on my own.  Where to then?  Am caught between living in Mumbai for a couple of months, going to the Maldives or the Andeman Islands or Sri Lanka, heading to Beijing for some Olympic fever, buying an Enfield and riding overland back to Hanoi…the list goes on.

While I contemplate these deep and difficult decisions (hah!) there’s only one thing to do: watch Warnie and the Rajasthan Royals upset all and sundry.  Go boys!  I’m reading Bill Bryson’s “The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid” at the moment, but it’s proving to be a dangerous book.  Nothing worse than exploding in a fit of tears and giggles while sitting alone at a table in a cafe.  You know how it is: the more you try to hold it in, the more violent it is when it finally erupts through your clenched lips, until everyone in the place is staring curiously at the strange Australian weeping and snorting uncontrollably into his garlic soup.

Back to civilisation! Back to cold beer, cyclones in Myanmar, emails, primaries in North Carolina and Indiana, blogs, samosas in the street, clean laundry, cold beer, bacon, bookshops, Indian Premier League games, motorbikes, steaks, sandals in the street, late nights, cold beer…

Annapurna Base Camp was pretty breathtaking. We arrived after a 2-hour gentle uphill stroll into a huge basin of towering peaks: Annapurna I, statistically one of the deadliest mountains in the world for those who scale the heights; Hiunchuli lurking around the corner; and Macchapucchare, the Fishtail, looming in the sky not unlike Sauron’s forked tower in Lord of the Rings.

In the morning after the snow we could see everything clearly, all the way across the 8km glacier to the Wall - the 1500m+ ice face which the expedition led by Don Bowie, a friendly Canadian climber we hung out with at Base Camp, is attempting to scale. Upon reaching the ridgeline, they must complete a 7km traverse along the top of Annapurna, thrice passing above the 8,000m mark, the so-called ‘death zone’ above which, without adequate acclimatisation or oxygen, the human body cannot survive - if a person were flown to the top of Mount Everest they would die in minutes. We got to around 4700m this time, pretty high by Oz standards (Mt Koziosko is a lick above 3000m), but nothing compared to the places these guys go. They are purists, which means they will be spending 3-4 days without oxygen above 7500m. Having just finished Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, I’m astounded by the physical suffering they will endure up there, as their mental capacity drops to the level of a young child. (Side note: the Chinese have been intercepting and blocking their radio communications as the torch proceeds up Everest).

Now to bring you the exciting conclusion to the Langtang trek post…

7 April, Kyangjingompa, 2pm, 3900m We had a cool and bizarre day, climbing to nearby Cherkhuri and back. We had to wade through deep snow, up to 2 feet. Matty continues to defy expectations by wearing plastic bags outside two thick socks. At one point we were virtually swimming uphill through snow, like salmon upstream, with Mingmar using his elbows. Stopped for lunch at a mere 4650m, boiled eggs and Tibetan bread, followed by Mingmar taking off his shirt and pants and inviting us to take photos of him, wrapped only in underwear and his own lunacy. I still can’t quite believe the next half hour: we skiied down the snow-covered, rock-studded mountain in our shoes. Matty kicked it off by rolling down the hill. Then it was on, with Mad Mingmar leading the headlong rush down the hill, Matty and Rhys stumbling / skidding / falling after him, and me trying to keep up and not think about broken ankles. A 3-hour ascent became a half hour freefall.

8 April, Rimchee, 5pm Long day today - we got in after 4pm after a long day’s descent, and my quads are aching. In the uphill vs downhill debate I’m leaning towards the former.

9 April, Hotel Syabru View, 11:30am Sitting 100m from the river, in the last lodge between Rimchee and our destination, Thulo Syabru. We’ve descended a good 400m or so, and in accordance with our friend Newton, are about to trudge uphill in an equal and opposite ascent. I am playing with my new 10 year-old friend Cheeky Cheki. She has a charming habit - chewing her long-suffering father’s ears.

10 April, 300m above Thulo Syabru, 8am Last night we met the two girls, Astride (French) and Orit (Israeli), and took three blankets up to the pile of rubble on top of the hill on which a new school is being built. We lay on the gravel and watched the stars - until a group of 15 men dressed in dark clothes and carrying sticks of bamboo ran into the moonlit building site. They shone their torches on us and conferred, before their leader told us they were Maoists and we would not be harmed. Later, our host Chirring (great guy!) told us they were ensuring those who had been paid to vote in the next day’s election would discharge their duties correctly, and the sticks were in the event of running into other political parties. We decided that discretion was the better part of valour, shouldered our blankets and clattered back down the stone steps.

10 April, Hotel Sunset View, 12pm, 3210m Just completed a brutally steep 1100m ascent. The sun was screaming at us and our sweat left dark trails in the dirt. Below us, in the village, a wonderfully rough democracy was being born. People thronged near the monastery waiting to join the two bustling queues. The whole thing was raucous, a carnival of new-found freedoms, with no Western cynicism clouding it.

10 April, Shingompa, 3pm, 3400m The forest is illuminated by pointilism, studded with a million tiny promises. The rhododendrons aren’t blood red: they’re a gorgeous, fulfilled, satisfying red, almost painful; the colour you can never create in kindergarden once the paint dries. They nestle among soft green leaves, a yin to the flower’s yang, the kind of green that makes you breathe more deeply. Mingmar said he had never seen them like this before.

11 April, Laurivinyak, 2pm, 3900m Good to be back at altitude. It was a very easy uphill stroll, so it’s surprising to find out we’ve ascended 700m. We’ll stay here tonight, and hopefully the mist which is shrouding the valley will lift.

11 April, Laurivinyak, 8pm, 3900m Walked up to the Israeli lodge, 10 minutes up the hill in gleaming snow, with Orit and Astride, to a Jewish kidush - through a lightning storm. We stood outside watching the light exploding the mountains in purple, before we realised that standing under a small metal platform on top of a hill in the middle of a thunderstorm might have its drawbacks. Two or three minutes after we went inside there was a crash like a boulder falling on the lodge and everything flashed silver and white. Astride was really shook up. I was glad we were praying at the time.

12 April, Gosainkund, 1pm, 4300m Sitting in a crowded common room, tired, slightly short of breath, waiting for dhal baat. Walked up through the snow today. The path was treacherous in places, with a drop down one side that you wouldn’t want to play with.

13 April, Gosainkund, 8am, 4300m Wonder how Arsenal fared at Old Trafford last night? The sky here is a blue the colour of a Mount Franklin waterbottle; the rocks make the mountains look like Dalmatians. Below our lodge stretches the vast, frozen expanse of Gosainkunda Lake, where people bathe to cleanse themselves before death. It is gleaming in the light and bespeckled with dark spiders. Today we attempt the pass.

13 April, Tharepanie, 6pm F#&!ing hard day. A solid 8 hours and then some, long hard slog uphill through slushy snow, and we arrived just as the weather closed in. Just had a great Mustang coffee - rakshi and yak butter, like a hot toddy.

14 April, Melamji village, 6pm Walked down steep steps born of root and stone to beautiful Melamji, a Helambu village. Dhal baat took ages, dozed in the sun. Sandals and T-shirts. Stuffed. Siesta. Prayer flags on the hill in the mournful dusk.

15 April, Melamchi village, 4pm

The river here behind me

Is speaking to the stones

Of all the things that went before

Of sun, and moon, and bones

The moss that coats these ancient trees

Itself is all alone

And promises that all who come

To this place may atone

16 April, Melamchi village, 8am    Our final hour here, after a nice rest day yesterday.  Last night a man came to visit with sore eyes, and our hostess, who’s always doing five things at the same time as feeding and caring for her newborn, showed us the traditional remedy: a dash of breast milk in each eye.  Rhys’s polite enquiry as to whether the same treatment would be effective for his chest infection got lost in translation.

17 April, Tarkeyghyang  A gentle three hour walk lies ahead of us.  Last night Rhys and I watched a lightning storm blazing in the nearby hills.  There was forked lightning that danced down slopes and left purple afterimages, like lace, and the thunder seemed to take on its own life as it roamed around.

Today is a morning - a morning, a morning - pregnant with possibility, potentiality, hope, unburdened by the sickly blanket of cynicism or realism that can settle later in the day, or the certainty of mediocrity and mortality that comes with the day’s death.  I am nestling in the myriad lines of the prayer flags, defying gravity.  I wish I could collect this feeling and store it in a bottle, pink tinged with glimpses of turquoise, swirling constantly until the cork is popped, and then slowly, slowly, as if it itself is learning to breathe, it uncoils and stretches its slender neck through the gate of its glass prison, a willing and grateful sacrifice, into the outside world.

18 April, The crest of a hill, 2pm  We will reach Melamji Bazar by nightfall and take the bus back to Kathmandu tomorrow. Below, the villages that dot the ribbed hills are scattered in the distant haze.  A patchwork world, clockwork universe, diarama, scale model complete with goat and birdsong sound effects.  The Himalayas are hiding around the last corner. From this eyrie, the hills are laughing gently at humankind: go on, change us, sculpt our surface with farms and fields, plant flags in us, worship us, claim us as your own - we are the bones muscles sinews tendons of this place.  We watched creatures before you spill their blood on us.  Our game is something you cannot know, something your language, and you, lack - not waiting, for it implies intention and finality, things of which we know nothing - and not being, with its passivity and inaction - but something in between.  We cannot show you but you can learn.

In these parts, ABC stands for Annapurna Base Camp, smack bang in the middle of the Annapurna mountain range at an altitude of about 4100 metres.  We’re about to wing our merry way there in about 10 minutes.  I repacked last night - this time I’m taking about half the stuff I did last time.  I’m gonna jog up dem mountains.

In more important news: I have purchased a silly hat which possesses magical powers.  If these computers were just a few decades younger I’d upload them and show you The Topi in all its glory, but you’ll just have to take my word for it instead.  It is simply magnificent, and when I wear it I look like a Dr Seuss character.  I have gotten more amused grins and comments of “topi ramrosa! Nepali dai!” (beautiful hat!  Nepali man!) in the past two days than you can imagine.  Not only does this stunning piece of headwear confer additional charm and charisma upon the wearer, in occasional high winds it can be used as a rudder.

Namaste: I greet the light inside you.   See you in two weeks.