Bad Blogging Skills and Project Update

Well darn, this is embarrassing-- I just noticed that my last entry was in October.  I'm back in the States now, recovered from amoebas, and working furiously away at all of the incredible words and scribbles and images collected in India.  Some of them are shaping up into pieces for the book, some are turning into very personal poems that will be part of a collection I hope to have finished by 2014. 

Shivani and I are currently creating postcards and packets of goodies for those kind people who supported us in starting this project, and hope to have those mailed out sometime in February. 

Here is a little writing snapshot from our brainspaces:

An excerpt from writings on Dah-Hanu

Bursting silk flowers and greenery,

a jaunty angle of black wool atop crow hair;

apricots picked and basketed, the hat slips

a little, loops of brightly dyed wool and papery red

flowers tremble with the movement—

gently set aside, rows of silver needles glint

amongst green blades and fallen fruit.

More photographs and excerpts as the book progresses coming soon!

Rajasthani Travels

So we had to make the trip to Rajasthan a quick one, due to time and money constraints.  Shivani will be returning for the shooting portion of the project in January or February.  Overall, the trip was extremely successful!  In fact, we had to ask our friend to stop taking us to new places because we had more stories than we could keep up with.

Unfortunately, I fell sick again (or my sickness flared up, as it were) and was unable to move around much for a few days.  For the first two or so days, we pushed on and went from village to village, and when it got too bad or the heat was too much, some very kind people let me take naps on their beautiful woven beds.

We went to visit some weavers and I got to examine this beautiful loom, where the father and son of the household were working on a bolt of shawl fabric made from wool, working it in a zigzag pattern.  They also had a gorgeous spinning wheel made out of a bicycle wheel!  

The day before I started to become really ill, we took a camel cart out to a village in the desert- a few hours ride each way, and our friend and guide Ashok told us stories that he learned from his mother while we rode.  He was full of great stories, and I have quite a few recordings of him telling us with the sounds of the camel cart in the background.

The day after we took the camel cart ride, we headed out for a few days to some more remote villages in the Bikaner and Jodhpur regions.  The first day we visited the two main Bishnoi temples, which is the community that Ashok belongs to.  I was pretty ill this day, but was still able to appreciate the sights!  We met some of his relatives out in their field, where they were staying in a small building nearer to the crops, and then stayed the night at his father's house in the village where he grew up. 

The next day we met with loads more people, ate the most beautiful watermelons, and found at least ten more stories.  The day finished with meeting an amazing Bishnoi storyteller, poet, and record-keeper, where he showed us the few-hundred-year old record and storybook for the community, written in Pingal.  We heard stories, history, and poetry for a few hours in the evening with him.  I was really unwell at this point, however, so afterwards we decided to make the 5 hour haul back to Bikaner town so that I wouldn't have to be in the car at all the next day.

After the 5th or so day that we were in Rajasthan, I became too sick to move around at all, and spent a day and a half recovering in the most beautiful little hotel. I'm so glad we decided to make that miserable drive back late at night, and I didn't have to move at all the next day! Thanks to our amazing friend Rituraj, we got hooked up with a deal at the most beautiful little hotel (which used to be the prime minister's house, or somesuch).

Trans-Himalayan Trekking

I’m not going to go into too much detail about each day of this trek, partially because I’m still processing it, but also because it’s difficult to relate the reality of such an experience to anyone who wasn’t actually there.

We spent the first few days at Tsomoriri, unable to get started walking because we couldn’t find a horse guy (the one who was supposed to come with us OR any others).  But the lake was beautiful, and we spent the time camping and exploring the area.  The lama in the region was doing a puja in the hills where many of the nomadic Changpa people were camped, so we also went up to see what that was about.

After some time we managed to find a really lovely ghora wallah named Padma, who had seven horses and two wives.  We really struck gold with this guy—he was wonderful, really kind, and had beautiful horses.  The poor dude actually ended up having to run off after his horses multiple times during the trek, because they would decide in the middle of the night that the grass they had seen the day before was much more appealing.  So Padma would get up before dawn, find the horses gone, and have to go back the entire day’s worth of trekking (in less than half the time it took us to walk it) get the horses, and bring them back before we left in the morning.  What an exhausting, difficult life!

The first day we spend hiking along the lake, and I got two feet full of blisters from my hiking shoes.  It turned freezing and sleety toward the end of this day, and the mountain wind drove the icy rain nearly horizontal for the last hour of the hike.  We set up camp at the end of this massive lake, but one of the tents turned out to have gotten broken or undone (it was never clear exactly what happened) so it took us a few hours to rig a useable camp—but in the end the helper, Andgu (who was only eighteen and whom we all referred to affectionately as Nono, which means “young one” in Ladakhi) managed to get the tent up using twine and string.  This was the best we could do for the tent for the entire trek, but the other option was that four people slept in one two person tent, so we managed.

Let me take a minute to say here that in our guide for this trek, Gyaltso, we were blessed with some sort of beneficent spirit.  Not only was he a kind, patient, tough guide with a great sense of humour and huge wealth of knowledge about the plants and wildlife of the area, but he was also a master cook!  Every meal was a feast on this adventure, completely in contrast with the roughness of everything else about the journey.  Porridge and omelettes and chapattis or fluffy pancakes for breakfast, packed lunches, and dinners with three types of veggies, curries, rice, and for the first few days, fresh fruit for dessert.  Not to mention how much tea we drank!

The second day was a river crossing— with the freezing river up just above our knees and rushing current, we used a rope and rolled up our trousers and fought our way across barefoot. 

The rest of the days sort of blur together until the pass—weaving through the immense mountains, across dry river beds and piles of red and purple stones, freezing nights and hot sun, thin air that made the going slow on my part.  We are all sunburned and windburned and tanned probably beyond recognition.  Most of the days, for the 6 to 10 hours of walking, I was alone in my head and the landscape because my pace was much slower than everyone else’s.  This was one of the most intense parts about the whole adventure.

On the fifth day we crossed the pass, which I was very bad at.  Parang La pass is 5600 meters, and I completely panicked at the lack of air.  The first part of the crossing is climbing up a glacier, which started out pretty slippery but thanks to a lot of fresh snowfall the night before, got easier to manage the further up we went.  Then there is a valley of snow where the glacier slopes steadily upwards, before tilting sharply up towards the top of the pass.  This was the really gruelling part of the crossing, as the fresh snowfall now made it difficult to walk, with each step sinking down above the ankle into blinding powder.  This is when I really started to lose it, as my panic at not being able to breath began to make me dizzy, and I fought with the urge to vomit, a headache, and blurry vision for the last hour of the climb.  Gyaltso stuck with me and talked me through each step, and I crested the pass about ten to twenty minutes behind the others. 

We topped the pass at about 10 am, and then continued to hike until 5 pm to find a camping spot where the horses could find food.  Down the mountain, through valleys, and straight up a plateau.  Basically, we did the next day’s hike as well.  The benefit to this (besides not having poor hungry horses!) turned out to be that we got to the village of Kiber a day early, and were able to spend an extra day there.

The village is beautiful, and because of the extra day there it turned out that we were present for the ceremonial horse racing before the harvest.  The oracle of the area gets possessed by the local dev (in this case, two different spirits actually came into him) and he dances crazily and ecstatically, pouring arak and chang all over the ground before the horses take off.  We stayed on the hill above the fields until the sunset, watching the horses race and perform various feats down in the valley and along a ridge between two mountains.  Then we found some arak of our own and had a little final party with Gyaltso and Nono in our camp.

Yesterday we took a jeep to Manali, which is a ten to twelve hour drive (but only 180 kilometers, if that gives an indication of how non-existent the roads are) and had blissful showers and collapsed into beds at a guesthouse run by a friend of Shivani and Munir’s.

My first thought as we came down out of Spithi valley into lower Himachal was that I couldn’t believe how happy I was to see trees.  Forests of pine trees, moisture in the air, beautiful wooden houses—the type of mountains and mountain towns I was familiar with!  And the trees!  Our guesthouse/cottage is surrounded by apple orchards, so this morning for breakfast I went and picked myself some tangy, crunchy apples.  Resting here for a few days.

Here are a few photos of the pass to tide everyone over until I can upload all of the trek pics:

 Climbing up the glacier at the start of the pass.

Across the plain of snow.

 Looking back down the glacier to where we camped. 

 Coming down from the pass into Himachal Pradesh.  Goodbye Ladakh!

One step and two, hold tight- let go!

So yesterday was supposed to be our last day in Leh town, but as a result of torrential rain the past few evenings throughout Ladakh, the horses can’t go and the two main roads are shut.  So, we’re heading out tomorrow instead to begin our trek from Tsomoriri (the lake where a nun riding a yak couldn’t get her yak to stop, and therefore waded right into the lake and drown), where we’ll camp the night and hopefully be able to begin our trek the next morning.  The trek itself is 8ish days, the first day of which we will be walking along the lake itself at 4000 metres.  Towards the end of the trek, there is a river crossing involving ropes and wading across a glacial river, and then Parang La pass, at 5000 metres. 

Leh has been dreamy beautiful, complete with picnics along the river with our friends Tashi Murup and Rigzen, coffee and fruit breakfasts, a visit to the ancient monastery Alchi to look at the thousand year old murals, and generally lots of eating and shopping. 

While some days I feel that Leh is a little too touristy and hectic, I really love this town and our friends here and will be sorry to say goodbye.  With plans in action to come back next year and do some screenings and showings for our book, though, it’s not as hard to leave as it could be! 

Inshallah in 10 days or so we’ll be in Manali, and I will be updating from there!

Dah, Hanu, Beima

What is there to say about living a different life for two weeks?  I’m changed, I’m awed, my horizons are broadened, blah blah blah.  I don’t know about any of those things.  Besides tangible things, I’m not sure what I left these places with.  Or what I left in those places.

In terms of the project, we had a blazing success.  Beautiful stories heard, recorded in memory and in digital space, and then a week and a half of photographing those stories.  Dah and Hanu look like film sets so much that my brain felt like it was looking at a few real things set against a giant green screen, most of the time. 

We ended up choosing three distinct stories to photograph and write, and managed to finish all of the shooting with minimal resources.  Shivani and I even ended up playing characters in the stories, just to take our involvement to a whole other level.

Basically, we chose these two villages because of their interesting history- they’re Dardic people, and come from an entirely different ethnic group from Ladakhis.  The villages in this small area are the only Dardic settlements in Ladakh, so we were interested in their stories and their history.

We started our adventure in the village of Dah, which is a tiny village of apricot groves, grape vines, apple trees, and vegetable gardens set deep in the Himalayas, about an eight hour drive from the town of Leh.  The army actually secured us rooms in the only guesthouse/homestay in Dah (on of the perks of being the niece/friends of a brigadier in the Indian army), and we spent our first few days there.  Dah is set low in a valley, so the height is only about 2800 meters, as opposed to Leh’s 3500 meters.  It was nice to be a bit lower for a few days, as I have not been having an easy time with the altitude.  The road doesn’t actually go to the village- it runs along the shore of the Indus, and then you have to hike up into the village proper along the irrigation channels.

Both Dah and Hanu have a really interesting irrigation system, wherein the whole village is laced with clear streams that are diverted throughout the day to make sure that every field gets sufficient water.  The streams come directly from glacial melts and rivers, so they are clear and cold and give the impression of an abundance of clean water.

After a few days in Dah, we managed to collect the three stories that we ended up shooting.  We then moved to Hanu, where our lovely guide/friend Gyaltson found us a family to stay with for a few days.  While there we learned how to harvest barley, drank chang (a type of rice alcohol) and butter tea, ate sattu (a food made from barley and often stuffed with yak butter), became a little extension to a beautiful family, and found our first hero for photographing in the husband/father of the house—Norzang—who is my age.  His whole family ended up dressing up and acting for us, as well as giving us new amazing stories. 

The village of Hanu is quite different from Dah, even though the Brogpa, the original language of the Dards.  In Hanu, they have lost their language and adopted Ladakhi.  Where Dah is lower and built along the Indus, Hanu lies at about 3500 meters—much-higher—and has a different landscape.  Instead of lush groves set amongst stony mountains, Hanu is a wide open plain which sports many houses and flat fields of barley and vegetables.  You never forget the severe setting of rocky, deserted mountains in Hanu, whereas in Dah it’s easy to think you’ve landed in an offshoot of the garden of Eden.  

While in Hanu, I became repeatedly ill and managed to spend one morning throwing up in our hosts’ garden, contracting a fever, struggling with the altitude, etc.  Also, let me say that it’s not pleasant to have any type of consistent stomach problems when you have to climb up a ladder to use a bathroom that is a hole in the ground.  Granted, the Ladakhi bathrooms are brilliantly set up, where the toilet is simply a hole in the dirt, and after you use it you shovel some dirt into the hole over your business, and somehow they manage to turn all this mess into compost later.  Amazing, except when you’re desperately ill and have trouble getting up the ladder.

There is no electricity in either of these villages (except a few hours sometimes in the evening in Hanu), so life is a different process then I’ve been used to.  We bathed in buckets of (literally) glacial water, so baths are few and far between unless you want to catch a cold.  Food comes right out of the garden, and water from glacial fed streams.  Medicine is quickly available in both villages, from well supplied dispensaries.  We got eaten by bugs, and ate loads of apricots. 

I’m grateful for the amenities that come with being back in Leh- occasional internet, cafes, hot water, not having to go to the military checkpoint to charge things, but I already miss the air, the water, the greenery, the remoteness, and our friends.

In Hanu, preparing Norzang for his role as the youngest brother hero, running from the evil witch (played hilariously by Shivani).

Gyaltson helping preperations.

 The Dalai Lama arrived in Beima to give a lecture.  We were there by 5am for the party.

 The sun rose over the mountain right as the Dalai Lama took his seat.  Well timed!  And the party that followed was Dard music and dancing and sweet rice and tea!  Sunrise party!

 Norzang was pretty grossed out by this cow skull that he had to hold.

 Dressing up Otzal and his little brother Singey for their roles as crows.  They weren't happy about the kohl!

 Trash bags make great crow costumes!

Gyaltson prepares for his own hero role.

The mighty Indus.

Our makeshift workshop/eating/drinking space.

The terrace of our guesthouse.

Scouting the view above the village for Gyaltson's arrow shot.

Er, I had to play the magical goddess fairy lady.

Covering Gyaltson in limestone powder.

Final shot in Dah, the magical holy man who gets bathed by the goddess (but we couldn't get him to take off his shirt.)

Jule Ladakh!

It’s been four days, and I have one Ladakhi word- “Jule” (Jullay), which is a beautiful way to say hello...and goodbye, and thank you, and please.  So really, I have four Ladakhi words! 

Flying in was like descending to a magical alien planet- the Himalayas rose up through the clouds, reaching for the plane razors of black peaks cut with rivulets of snow.  Once the clouds cleared enough, the slightly lower ranges stretched in amazing desert shades of brown, tan, purple, maroon, yellow, and green.  The green was from a mineral in the rock- there was no vegetation until we reached Leh town itself, and started spiraling lower into the looming mountain ranges.  The pilot kindly took this moment to tell us that this is one of the most dangerous landings for personal aircraft in the world, because it requires a high level of expertise to maneuver through the mountains.  Thanks, man.

Needless to say, we landed without mishap into the only patch of green in a martian landscape, and were promptly bundled off into an army jeep.  Now, this might not sound like the best way to leave the airport, but in a stroke of luck, it turned out that Shivani’s uncle, a person with considerable sway in the Indian army, is stationed here in Leh.  So, we were picked up by some army dudes and taken to one of the army compounds in Leh, where we were set up (for free!) in guest quarters for family members of the army. 

Basically, for the past three days we have been completely taken care of here in the army mess- sometimes overly so (neither me nor Shivani took kindly to being buzzed awake at 7 am our first morning here by a guy wanting to know whether we wanted our chai yet- no, you crazy person, we’re trying to sleep off the altitude change!)- with three meals a day, snacks, hot water, and round the clock electricity.  However, the price of this is that we are one other people’s schedules, and have to answer to various people's idea of our safety and needs. So we've moved now to a gorgeous guesthouse full of windows, in the middle of a lush garden completely at odds with the deserty mountains it's set against.

On Sunday, the military boys took Shivani and I "boating".  What this really turned out to be was floating gently on a raft for half an hour down the calmest part of the Zanskar.  After this "adventure", Shivani and I commented that we would be interested in a little rougher water, as we both have done some whitewater rafting before.  So a panicked guy with a walky-talky starts trying to move the entire entourage (complete with a truck that folded out into a tea room) upriver so that we could see a little whiter water.  After refusing the first place, because the rapids *still* weren't exciting enough, we finally parked the car on the side of a winding mountain road and scrambled down a slope of scree and wild lavender to a tumultuous part of the river.  

With an escort of five Indian military dudes, Shivani's uncle, and her uncle's friend, we piled into a small river raft with six oars (and one more for steering).  The first few rapids went quite will.  One of the (very attractive) army guys commented on how impressed he was with my rowing (followed by a hilariously pointed glare at Shivani's attempts at paddling on the other side of the raft).  We were doing good.  Then we came to the biggest rapid that we would reach on our excursion.  We hit the surge on the front left side of the raft, which lifted almost vertically, tumbling everyone on the left side over onto the right, and subsequently flipping the whole raft, launching us all into the glacial melt that is the Zanskar river.

Now, I saw all of this happen in slow motion.  The raft coming towards me, everyone rolling and falling, and that tipping point where there was no question as to whether the raft might stay upright.  And then I was under the raft, tangled with other people in the dark violent water, scrambling to find the side that I could push myself out with.  Luckily, I was facing upward, and was able to pull myself along the underside of the raft until I found the rope on the edge, and hauled myself out and above water.  I don't know how long I scrambled to stay attached to the raft, swallowing icy sandy water and clinging to the rope, trying not to panic but also very aware that this river could kill me- especially as I was drinking and inhaling so much of it.  When I had caught up enough on breathing to look around, I managed to make out most of the men that were with us also clinging to the raft- two were even managing to scramble on top of it- and the sight of Shivani's uncle, calm and clinging to the raft, was enough to momentarily reassure me.  Then I realised that Shivani was nowhere to be found.  Shivani's uncle seemed to realise this at the same time, and we both turned around to see her floating some fifty yards behind us, riding out the rapids in her life jacket.  The military convoy was meanwhile driving along the river, dropping useless ropes from a bridge in an attempt to help Shivani, and generally panicking.  They didn't even get any photographs of us overturned! 

We finally got the raft turned back over once we were through the worst of the rapids, and managed to retrieve enough oars to get us to the unloading point downriver.  At this point, we're just happy to be alive, shivering and coughing up river water, laughing and shaking. 

The rest of that day and some portion of the next I spent in bed with a fever and nausea- apparently the result of being dumped in glacier water, going into shock, then baking in the mountain sun.  But now I am healed, and even managed to stay up till 2am last night for a Ladakhi wedding!

I'll post another update in the next day or two full of photographs from all of these things!! I don't have time to upload them today, but there are some amazing things to see, so keep checking back!

Junglee is My New Favourite Word (and the jungle fever didn't kill me)

So now we know, vividly, first hand, the-spider-bites-all-over-me-will-tell, why people vacate the jungle during monsoon season.  Bugs EVERYWHERE!

We stayed at our friends' lovely lodge on the edge of Kanha national forest, where people go on safari in the correct seasons (NOT from June-September, when all sane people run for higher ground).  The lodge is called Flame of the Forest  , which is also what the Palash tree is sometimes called.

Some notebook thoughts and scraps from our week in the jungle:

7/11- The biodiesel plant makes bubbles!  You break the cupped leaf from the tree, snap it at the node, where the leaf and stem join, very gently peel the leaf downward so a little windowpane of iridescence forms, and then blow flurries of tiny bubbles!

Purple orchids hang from bahera trees in clusters like bright grapes, or a violet wisteria.

7/12- We are sitting on an old piece of canvas ripped from a bag, on the dusty ground next to the stoop of a village house. A mahua-tipsy uncle uses threads from his white scarf to secure the tobacco leaf that he has spiral rolled into a bidi.  A few people are crowded around us, a little boy's nose is running snot all down his front.  They slice open a raw wild onion, the flesh is greenish-white and bitter hard.  Baked in the fire, coated with soot, knobbly grey outsides smoldered in coals until the insides sunrise pink and orange, some of the bitterness sapped away.  We smoke, we eat the bitter roots.

At the end of the week, we had come to think that most normal people didn't seem to care so much about stories- often they just wanted to complain.  I would turn my recorder on, and Shivani would talk to them, and one person would get going, and she'd lean over to me and roll her eyes and say "complaining" and I'd turn the recorder off.  Apparently I recorded one 80 year old grandma talking about how difficult it is for her to poo these days.

We also heard personal tales of confrontations with tigers and leopards stealing in through windows at night to take puppies, legends of banyan trees, learned how to tell from the ants if rain is coming or going, how to identify bird calls, what a black cobra looks like, and a set of new constellations from a farmer-shepherd who loves Kabir. 

Somewhere in there we got some amazing full stories about fireflies and Rakshas (monsters) and helicopter contraptions and food always getting the girl.  

Upon returning to Bombay I promptly succumbed to a fever, and this is also my excuse for taking so long to update the blog.  I will have to be better in the mountains, because we will be in Ladakh for a month.  I am one excited tumblin weed!