Intrusion

A couple of months ago I set mouse traps in the hot water tank cavity. The mice who run around under the floor, making noises at night, had made a nest in there.

When I didn't catch anything, I made a deal with them. I'd let them be, as long as they stayed behind walls and under the floor and didn't come further. I don't like to use poison.

But the day after I arrived back, I found this in the bathroom. A mouse had chewed its way in through the skirting board overnight and the floor was covered with sawdust! And for what?


War is now on. I filled up the hole with steel wool and expanding foam and from now on will show no mercy. Grrr.

Returned

I'm now back in London and mountains, monasteries and 12 rupee lassis feel a world away.

After I wrote last from Dehra Doon I spent a couple of days in my friend Nandu's village and loved it. Nandu's family has gained two buffaloes and a cow since I last visited and are now selling milk to the whole village. Throughout the afternoon, people would turn up from all the nearby houses to collect their milk and have a chat.

While I was there, I took a day trip to Rishikesh to see old friends, get more clothes mending done and go for a haircut and shave plus face and head massage (for just over a pound!). Catching up with old friends was great, particularly an old lady who I wrote a short biography of for an assignment when I studied there years ago.

Yashuda's family migrated from Calcutta 30 years ago and she sells flowers on the ghat. When I arrived there, another flower seller recognised me and told me where to find her. After a happy reunion, she packed up her stall and invited me to her place for tea (and lunch which I declined - I had already recieved several other offers!).


Yashuda and her husband live with their four children (and their respective families) in a four room house. In addition, they have a steady stream of visitors staying with them from Calcutta. I felt terrible that they didn't have any tea ingredients in the house and someone was despatched for milk, tea and sugar as soon as I arrived.

If Rishikesh and Dehra Doon were all about seeing friends, Delhi was all about eating and shopping. After the limited range of food in the mountains I went a bit crazy. I'd been craving yoghurt and on my last day there I managed to drink 9 lassis! I feel very much at home in Delhi and have several favourite hotels and restaurants.

The lassis in one shop were so good that I didn't care when the guy making them added tap water and scratched his toes before throwing in a handful of ice. A little bit of dirt from the air had settled on top of the yoghurt and there was a hair in my glass but I was enjoying the lassi so much (my 2nd at that sitting) that I forgot to take it out!

This trip definitely was my best holiday in India yet. Not getting sick made a huge difference. I can't believe that all these years I've thought India made me sick when it was actually just the rotis, naans and parathas. Travelling to such a beautiful area really made the trip. It was the perfect combination of relaxation, exercise and scenery.

But meeting fantastic people was the best part. I had so many invitations for chai, meals and accommodation (many of which I politely declined) that I struggled to spend any money at all. Apart from expenditure on presents, I think I spent 200 pounds or less in a whole month. And I didn't bargain at all for anything!

My Hindi hasn't improved much over the last few years but I think my general conversation ability has. And conversation is so much easier in India where it's perfectly acceptable to ask all kinds of personal questions of a complete stranger! I also realised that having much more liberal religious views (than when I first went to India 8 years ago) has made relating to people so much easier.

I'm really going to miss the interaction and sense of community. I spent five minutes chatting to the lady in the dry cleaners today and she named all her celebrity clients (I'm in good company!). I wasn't so successful in the post office where I freaked the staff out a little with excessive friendliness. It's going to take a while to settle back in!

The descent

I'm now in Dehra Doon, well and truly out of the mountains. It's hot and I'm stinking.

My trip down Kinnaur was a lot more adventurous than the trip up. And I managed to do it without stopping in any place mentioned in the Lonely Planet. With mixed success.

After getting the bus from Spiti to Kinnaur, the first village I stopped in was Spillo, a pretty non-descript town by the river where buses stop for meal breaks.

I spent an afternoon and a morning hiking up to two spectacular villages on the hillside above, Khanum and Labrang. Both had amazing views back towards Kinnaur Kailash.


Khanum had an ancient monastery. It had been renovated not too long ago but the prayer room (which I couldn't photograph) was at least hundreds of years old (the lama thought 1,000).


And Labrang had an ancient fort.


Lamas in both villages showed me around the monasteries and fed me cups of tea. One even gave me a bag of dried apricots and almonds (both local) to go back down the hill with!

I then headed off on foot for Lamba, a village in a remote valley which I knew nothing about. I had been assured by several people that there would be a place to stay there. After seven hours on foot, I arrived to find out that it was little more than a settlement for migrant road workers!

I stopped in a little restaurant in a hut, run by an old Nepali man. It was almost dark when I arrived and luckily he offered me a space on the floor of his hut.


I spent a really interesting evening sitting around the fire in his little restaurant while he dispensed wise advice to the young migrant workers from poorer parts of India. They were smoking a lot of marijuana so I'm not sure how much advice sank in. He didn't seem to mind.

It started raining heavily during the night and the hut was very draughty. I was very grateful that very little water seemed to get through the holes in the roof! Some time in the early morning I heard noises which I think was some kind of small animal coming in to shelter from the rain.

In the morning I paid the old guy a hundred rupees (he asked for 40 - i.e. 50p for dinner, accommodation and a lot of cups of chai!) and got a ride in the first vehicle leaving the village. I had been hoping to hike further up the valley but the weather was really misereable.

I then headed to Roghi, a village on a steep slope with incredible views. It was misty when I arrived there but the locals entertained me with tours of their apple orchards and an old holiday house left by the British.

And they plied me with a lot of local alcohol. Each time I finished a glass there was another type that I had to try because it was better for some reason or other. After finding out that the last type I tried was 50% alcohol, and then finding out I couldn't walk very straight, I insisted that I couldn't take any more.

I really am going to miss the apricots, fresh and dried, and the apricot wine!


The weather did clear up on my last night and the views were fantastic.


I sat on the rock in the foreground of this photo and watched the sun set on the mountains.




Roghi is on the old high up highway to Tibet, (built before a new one was blasted into the rock face next to the river) and I walked several hours on the old highway to get further down the valley.




After walking through a forest, passing more abandoned British holiday houses and a couple of villages, I took a shortcut down to the new highway and got on a bus out of Kinnaur.

I've spent most of the last couple of days on buses. Speed on mountain roads is frustratingly slow, particularly when you have to pass through congested little villages. I've taken my last bus now - I spent a couple of hours in a queue this afternoon for a train ticket to Delhi at 5am on Thursday.

Still in Spiti

I'm back in Kaza again, Spiti's big town. I made a mistake last time I was here, I needed to apply for an inner line permit to travel back to Kinnaur and didn't realise that the day I was planning to do it was a Sunday. So I'm here again.

I've spent the last couple of days going for long walks up mountains in the morning and then crashing at the monastery in the afternoon. I don't think I've ever been so fit. And on top of that, I'm clearer of celiac symptoms than ever. It must be the diet of rice, dal, vegetables and occasional fruit and yoghurt. Plus plenty of chai. At the monastery it's like chai is on tap.

Every time I walk I say to myself that I won't do anything that difficult again. And then I do something harder the next day.I went over 5,000m yesterday and the day before. You can see the start of the path I followed going up the hillside below.


I'm handling the altitude fine but the camera is not so healthy. I pulled it out to take pictures of some mountain goats yesterday and started screaming when it wouldn't even start. It now seems to be taking pictures but the viewfinder isn't working. Luckily I made a second sighting of mountain goat things. Without the viewfinder, however, I didn't manage to zoom in on them.


As much as I'm loving it, I need to calm things down a bit. My hands and face have had a bit too much sunn (despite incredible precautions) and don't match the rest of my body. And with the exercise and diet, I look like I'm auditioning for 'The Machinist II'. I can't afford to lose any more padding because roads here are really bumpy. In a bus yesterday passengers forced a crazy old saddhu to get off the back seat and move forward. As soon as he did, the seat flew off the frame and landed on the floor!

On the same bus trip, we drove past a field where 100+ people were standing in a circle. Our bus stopped to watch them and it turned out they were doing the hokey pokey/cokey!


There were a couple of foreigners there so I guess they were to blame. Earlier that morning I was walking towards a mountain village when a kid started shouting from the top of a cliff. I stopped to listen and realised he was singing 'Inky pinky ponky'. I have no idea who to blame for that!

And the monastery has also provided plenty of ridiculous moments. There's a French girl staying there at the moment and we're having a lot of fun sharing observations. It really is the Fawlty Towers of monasteries, it's a lovely place with lovely people but it's incredibly dysfunctional. The young lamas seem to run wild. I sat in on prayers this morning and they were playing and giggling through the whole thing. The ones nearest me were even playing with a very realistic looking toy gun!

Being a Hindi speaking foreigner often makes me a confidant and at the monastery it's particularly true. Several of the younger lamas have told me that they find monastery life pretty boring but think that it is better than doing farm work in their village. Monastery life is weird enough when you've chosen it yourself but even weirder when you were thrown in at a young age. Lamas can get released but their family needs to pay a sum of money to the monastery. I guess that plenty must do this because there is hardly anyone there between the ages of 20 and 40.

Anyway, I leave Spiti tomorrow and I'm going to miss the place incredibly. Lamas at another monastery in the valley have asked me to come back next year to teach and even with my misgivings about the system I'm considering it. The monastery is gorgeous.


And the view from the monastery is just as amazing.

Spiti

After a couple of epic bus trips, I've made it from the green Kinnaur Valley into the dry Spiti Valley. Each place I stop at seems to be more beautiful than the last.

My first stop was Nako, a town in the transition between the two valleys.


I managed to rent a room with a local family, fantastic except that electricity and water supply were intermittent at best.


I also did some more work on my herding skills. This time it was goats and I was quite pleased with my efforts. I was on a long walk when I ran into a goatherd who insisted on carrying my bag - in return for conversation.


The walk was stunning. Incredible new views lay around each corner but after walking five hours I was hungry, thirsty and exhausted and forced myself to turn around.








I moved on from there to Dhankar - a town towering over the Spiti River with an (almost) 1,000 year old monastery stuck on a rocky outcrop. Dhankar is quite a climb from the road which travels along the bottom of the valley and I was lucky enough to get transport up.


The monastery guesthouse seemed so luxurious (snow views, delicious food and occasional hot water and electricity) that I decided to base myself there and do the rest of the valley in day trips.

It's a little village. The only guesthouse is in the monastery and the guesthouse contains the village's only shop. The monastery is also the only place to get food, which comes only at set times. I've been very content just sitting around watching the light change throughout the day.














The monastery kitchen is a fun place to hang out and I'm guaranteed to get offered a cup of Tibetan salty tea.


I also love watching the goats and sheep get driven down from the hills at the end of the day.


And then watching the locals use various methods of rounding them up. Mostly, it's the grandmas job to lure their own goats into their pens with bits of bread. This girl had a more aggressive approach.


A huge advantage of Dhankar is that there are only a couple of other tourists there each night. I've now split from my little group and a lot of the other tourists around here are particularly annoying. About half the tourists here are from one country and they have a bad reputation. I've witnessed enough unpleasant behaviour to understand why.

So this is where I turn around and head back the way I came, stopping at smaller places along the way. I'm only just over halfway through the holiday but I know the next two weeks are going to go incredibly fast! I should be back in Kinnaur and online again in about five days.