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Published: July 30th 2007
All a flutter
Tibetan prayer flags, Leh So, after two weeks of R & R in Glasgow and London it was time to get back to the 'real world' of global travel and become reacquainted with smelly Delhi. I was last here nearly 10 years ago, but very little has changed in Pahar Ganj - the de facto traveller ghetto - although the begging lepers have moved to another colony (something to do with police and big sticks me thinks) and there are slightly more services for tourists. The main bazaar is still a total shambles with cows wandering in and out of the traffic chaos whilst dropping their guts and sniffing piles of rubble. Still, I don't really blame them, they must be nervous wrecks after listening to the incessant blaring of horns all day, enough to liquefy anyone's bowels; I'd probably need a nappy within a fortnight....
Delhi is definitely the most poverty-stricken place we've been to - even worse than Addis in Ethiopia - there's no getting away from the streetkids, the lepers, the disabled, the homeless, their radar picks out tourists verry quickly whether you're walking along the street or sitting in the back of an autorickshaw waiting at traffic lights, there's
no escape from those grimy pleading faces and snotty noses....but what can you do? You've got whole families living on traffic islands as the world whizzes by uninterested for pete's sake. It's a hopeless situation that only the Indian government has a chance of rectifying, perhaps they'll be able to create a functional welfare system within a couple of decades....
Needless to say, we didn't hang about in Delhi for too long - it's not a place to linger in and I'd seen all the major sights before - but just long enough to go see Bruce do his wink in Die Hard 4.0; you walk through a metal detector and are then frisked on entering the cinema, it's a "soft target" according to the Manager....
Leh sits perched on the Tibetan plateau, a wee town surrounded by monsterous peaks, and you certainly feel the altitude after zooming from near zero to 3,500m within 45 minutes; we had a dull cerebral throb for our three day stay and were quickly breathing out our backsides after any light exertion. Consequently, we didn't do anything too strenuous - not really in our nature is it? - other than checking out
Budding salesman
This handsome shikara vendor-in-the-making was a tad shy, needs to work on his re-hash.... a couple of monasteries (buddhism is in pole here) and admiring the snow-capped peaks gleaming in the sun. For Jom it was the best scenery of the trip - it was glorious - but the ambience wasn't quite up to scratch for me, too many identikit tourists clad in Northface gear (mainly short-termers out to do a specific trek) and the ubiquitous car horns; I'll plump for tranquility every time....
Our flight to Srinagar gave us a birds-eyes view of the Himalayas at their jaggy best, but it took forever and a day to get airborne, such is the heightened security when flying into Kashmir; everything is checked, identified, scanned then checked, identified and scanned again, in between a couple of frisking sessions, what a palava. One older Indian gent took particular offence to the 'up-close-and-personal' nature of the body searches, apparently one of the soldiers accidently got to grips with his ding-a-ling! He certainly made a big song and dance about it whilst everyone else tried not to wet themselves laughing....
Srinagar (1,750m) is all about chilling out on a Raj-era houseboat on the beautiful Dal Lake, waxing lyrical about the encircling mountains, getting chauffeured around on
Poseurs
Just wait til puberty kicks in.... a
shikara and generally being verry lazy, ideal. But that's not the first thing that enters your mind on leaving the airport as you're immediately faced with armoured personnel carriers, checkpoints, bunkers and nervous-looking soldiers standing at 50 metre intervals; you quickly realise that the city is no stranger to grenade-lobbing and that the Line of Control (the 'border' that splits Indian and Pakistani Kashmir) isn't a million miles away.
Houseboats originated in the Victorian era as a canny British solution to a tricky political problem. The British liked Kashmir as a cool bolthole from the stifling summer heat but the local Maharaja wouldn't allow them to buy land to build upon, to prevent them assuming power; naturally they proceded to build houseboats, the style of which has hardly changed since 1888. We actually gave Dal Lake the rubber ear - hordes of Indians gravitate towards the tackier end where the houseboats are moored - and stayed in the much mellower, more backpacker-oriented Nigeen Lake instead. Our boat, the
Kilona was a real beauty: spacious rooms with high ceilings and ensuites, mountain views, dining room, lounge (with cable!) and an open-air chillout space, 5 star deluxe as they say.
Jom's favourite view of the trip
Leh is rather pleasing on the eye.... Everyone (us and six Israelis) stayed half board (for about 15 quid a couple a night) and the 'Houseboy' (Abdul) did all the cooking and tea-making, when the Israelis would give him a chance that is; they're not backwards when it comes to their grub, forget all that Indian muck and make us meatballs and kebabs was the refrain! I do like people who're straight-to-the-point, no messing around just tell-it-as-it-is and all that......but the houseboat owners were a tad less impressed by the loud confrontational style, was rather awkward at times but entertaining to watch nevertheless, another reason for travelling. Our days were spent reading and crusing through the backwaters collecting lotuses, or watching our middle eastern pals buy everything on offer from the floating salesmen: papermache boxes, jewellery, saffron, furniture, whatever - the vendors quickly learned to ignore the parsimonious pair in the corner and home in on the indiscriminate splatter-cashes. However, we did make our most substantial purchase of the trip so far in the shape of a 100% silk Kashmiri carpet - 700 knots per square inch to those in the know - which we're going to use as a wall hanging; 200 quid only buys
What were the chances....
....of bumping into the gaffer of our local beach cafe in Palolem (Goa) seven months later in the Himalayas?? Small world.... you a 3" by 2" so it's either that or a very posh doormat!
Our journey to Dalhousie was a royal pain in the archie; on jetting into Jammu (an instantly depressing place) we got stranded at the fly-ridden station for several hours as the Indian PM was visiting to receive an honorary degree and the local authority thought it was a cracking idea to close all the roads - and hence all the departing/incoming buses - to make life easy for him. Total transport infrastructure meltdown but that's India for you. Anyways, we eventually got on a train to Pathankot, helped ourselves to a free upgrade (guard turned a blind eye) and let the carriage whippersnappers hear some Scissor Sisters for the first time, cheesy smiles all round. And then it was time to forget all about any daft notions we had had to catch the bus up the precipitous road to Dalhousie and catch a taxi instead, happy days.
Dalhousie (2,000m) - they pronounce it "Dalhowsey" - is a typical hill station but without the masses of dope smokers who frequent Shimla and the Kullu Valley further east. In fact, we didn't see any other white
Good wrist action
This old duffer spun his wee wheel for hours on end, good karma faces in three days, only brown ones, so obviously all the clones go the the aforementioned locales for their thrills. It's always refreshing to escape the backpacker melee for a few days - not so easy in India - and see how you cope going native, we lapped it up. Our room had a beautiful view - when not obscured by dense fog - a lovely wee sitting room where we had our various refreshments throughout the day, and the in-house grub was delicious home-cooking to boot. It was long lies, leisurely strolls and watching Indian tourists ride donkeys and eat candy floss, interespersed with a spot of reading and some Taj Mahal tea, the simple life.
The bus journey to McLeod Ganj was absolute murder, we're talking six hours of blind hairpins every 50 yards on a single track road, with passengers chundering left, right and centre, and the sun beating down for the duration, painful. And then you've got the local populace who have have nigh on zero regard for personal space - what's rightfully yours naturally belongs to them - so you've constantly got to be on 'shoulder and elbow alert' to sense any encroachments; you
give em an inch and they WILL take a mile, no questions asked, before you know it your arse is out the window! In a perverse way, I actually quite enjoy the gladiatorial nature of the interaction, it's true colours to the fore, no facades.
McLeod Ganj is famous as the home of the exiled 14th Dalai Lama (aka Tenzin Gyatso), the spiritual leader who fled over the Himalayas from Tibet in 1959 after the fall of the Tibetan resistance movement (China invaded in 1950). After founding a government in exile, he rehabilitated the Tibetan refugees who followed him in agricultural settlements, created a Tibetan educational system to teach traditional language, history, religion, and culture, and supported the refounding of 200 monasteries and nunneries in attempt to preserve Tibetan Buddhist teachings and the Tibetan way of life. Unfortunately, he didn't grant Dom n Jom an audience as he'd left two days before for Europe....otherwise I'm sure he'd have been delighted to make us a cuppa!
It appears that most folk go to McLeod Ganj in search of spiritual enlightment - it doesn't have much else going for it - or 'to find themselves'. What a load of mumbo
Leh palace
Potala-like jumbo hocus pocus dipplodocus. These jesters are having a laugh - all my friends found themselves at least a decade ago - they're there to get stoned, do heehaw all day and think they're cool by association cos Master Gyatso lives in the neighbourhood.....when he isn't hobnobbing with world leaders or signing his autobiography. Or perhaps they're hoping Richard Gere will pop in for a singsong. They need to have a word with themselves, the hippies and the Beatles departed India a long time ago, they're waaaay behind on the cool curve....
And so to Amritsar on another bus from Hades. I tell you, if India wants to stake any kind of claim to being a developed nation to go with its fat GDP, it's got to learn how to build (and repair) roads, it's hardly rocket science is it?? The roads in the north are a real shambles: potholes galore, bumps in all the wrong places, one lane when at at least two are required, sort it out. It's no surprise that around a dozen people are killed in road-rage incidents every day, should be a lot more by my reckoning.
Amritsar (
Pool of nectar) hosts the
Golden Temple, the most sacred shrine in Sikhism. In June 1984, Indira Gandhi (the Prime Minister) ordered the army to beseige the temple to capture a group of armed militants holed up inside, a move which had disasterous repercussions for her personally. During the four day seige, the temple suffered severe damage and 492 civilians and 82 soldiers were killed. Many sikhs were outraged at the desecration of their holiest shrine and their alienation had dramatic consequences; in a revenge attack in the October of the same year, Indira Gandhi was assassinated by two of her sikh bodyguards (who were later hanged in 1989). Revenge is sweet eh? Spooky but true, the night before her death she told a political rally:
"I don't mind if my life goes in the service of the nation. If I die today, every drop of my blood will invigorate the nation." Well her blood certainly invigorated the nation all right, as 1,000 people are thought to have died in the ensuing days as Hindus took their revenge on Sikhs.
The Golden Temple is a very holy place with pilgrims prostrating themselves from all angles - you can feel the serenity in the air
- and a stunning sight, but what impressed us most was the local hospitality; anyone is welcome to stay in the Temple's accommodation block for free and 30,000 meals are provided each day - on the house - for those who fancy a wee nibble. Actions speak louder than words and all that. We had to don bandanas and walk around barefooted, and were also coerced into having our photo taken at least twice each by Indians who were obviously impressed with white skin, our tan must be fading....
As a tourist destination, the north of India has a lot going for it, especially for those who like the great outdoors: magnificent views in abundance, beautiful places in which to chillout or go trekking, a wee bit of history, some Tibetan culture and, perhaps most importantly, it's pleasantly cool during the summer.....if only they could fix the roads. It's also given us a cracking festive holiday idea for the future: a week skiing at 4,000m on deserted Kashmiri slopes followed by a week lazing on a Goan beach to bring in the New Year, try doing that anywhere else in the world, pure unadulterated genious....
We've been back in Delhi for a week now - seems like forever and a day and then some - waiting for our Uzbek visa to be processed. The Tajiks were very prompt and issued theirs within half an hour but the Uzbeks are dragging their heels, hopefully we'll get it on Monday and then we can jet out of this sweaty midden on Tuesday, insha'Allah. We decided to ditch Pakistan as it's been rather fiery over the last couple of weeks - at least a couple of hundred deaths - so it'll soon be goodbye curry and hello sashlyk!
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Annika
non-member comment
Wow!
Hi Douglas and Julie! I'm really yealous! It sounds like you're having a great time! At the moment I'm working in a hospital and it's really interesting! Hope to hear from you again! Enjoy your time travelling! greetings Annika