Happy Holidays 2008

The above picture is from Poland when I was there in February 2007. It has been decades since I have had a wintry Christmas, but childhood memories from Southwestern New York State have not yet faded and despite the lack of snow in Los Angeles, Christmas and snow are synonymous for me.
This has been a year. The election. The economy. While there is always the possibility of an apocalyptic end, I suspect human beings will continue to muddle along for a while yet. While things are bad now. I am not sure that the early 21st century is even in the running for the 10 worst eras on the planet. So this is my cheerful holiday message. It has been a lot worse. It might not get a lot better soon. I'm currently reading Barbara Ehrenreich's Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy and my advice is put on some music and dance. If you can't get out of bed and dance, dance in bed, in your memories and dreams if nowhere else. My New Year's resolution is to dance more. Not post-modern art dance, but turn-the-music-up-and-boogie dance.

Osbey and I aren't doing much for Christmas this year. We did put up our artificial tree. The tree at the left is the little tree Ben Teller and I put up in India in New Delhi in 2006 when we were staying with our friend Veronica. The Indian middle-class tends to do Christmas and all the ex-pats do so it was easy to find a tree and ornaments. I might be going up to San Carlos again after Christmas so I am not sure what Osbey and I are doing about our annual little holiday get together. I've made another resolution and that is to spend all future winter holidays and birthdays abroad. As I get older, I find the emotions brought up by these festivities almost too intense to bear. Therefore, I intend to run away.



















No holiday greeting from a grandfather is complete without pictures of the grandchildren, so here they are, Kyla on the left of the picture and Chloe on the right. I'm pretty happy when I can forget that I am by nature and heritage a gloomy Swede. I hope that you are pretty happy too.

Terry/Luke

Home/Farewell to Ladakh

I arrived home about 2 p.m. Los Angeles time last Wednesday afternoon. I was a little wobbly after ten weeks away, thirty hours of traveling and a thirteen hour time shift. In spite of that, I am all in one piece, at least as healthy as when I left, and very pleased with my travels. It was a wonderful trip. Although many things did not go as planned, I always landed on my feet and had many wonderful surprises.
The trip had five parts. The first two, studying Hindi in Nolunna and then in Mussoorie, I have covered. The third, Ladakh, has only one installment left to go. Yet to come is my car ride through the Spiti and Kinnaur Valleys, and my last few days in Delhi.
This was a great trip. Except for Delhi, I was in parts of India I had never seen before. Some of them, because of constant clouds and rain, I haven't seen very well yet. I have clothes still airing on the back porch because the damp invaded them. They have a weird smell that even laundering doesn't entirely remove. I'm hoping the Los Angeles sun will do the trick.
So Ladakh. It is an amazing place. First of all, the altitude alone makes it an interesting place to visit and the walking, hiking, trekking, climbing possibilities are inexhaustible. However, I am more of a sedentary traveler -- except for my overnight, I mostly stayed in Leh, the capital, except for a few excursions with other travelers I met. For the last couple of days, I was supposed to go to the Nubra Valley which is a day's ride over a very high pass away from Leh. Unfortunately, one of the people I was to travel with became sick so the trip was canceled. Instead, a hired a car by myself and took a ride west along the Indus valley to see some monasteries. The road is reasonably good and the landscape gradually changes, the valley becoming narrower and the mountains more variegated. It had rained a little the previous two days down in the valley, so there was beautiful, fresh snow up on the mountain tops. The first morning we stopped at Likir monastery. Unfortunately, it is one of those gompas that has melded into a large, mysterious gompa of which I have no recollection of the individual parts except for a painting on the side of a window in the library showing the ascent of man. He starts as an apelike creature crawling on the ground beside a gray elephant. As the man and his companion elephant ascend a mountain, the man becomes more and more civilized eventually adopting monk's clothing and the elephant becomes whiter and whiter until only his back heels are gray. Then the elephant is all white and ascends a pathway in the air and the monk flies circles around him finally ascending so high the elephant is left behind.
Shortly after noon, we arrived at the guest house in Alchi which was filled with the usual complement of French tourists. After a good Indian vegetarian lunch, I wandered over to the monastery. Unlike most, it is built on the plain, not on the side of a mountain. It consists of a series of buildings and stupas that border the Indus river. The apricots were ripe and in one courtyard, people were pitting an enormous pile of them. The apricots were laid out to dry, and the pits were saved to be turned into oil.
The Alchi monastery is very old and the prayer halls are dark and it took awhile before my eyes adjusted, but eventually I began to see and I turned off my flashlight and the images seemed to float in the semi-dark. In one the halls there is a small window through which you can see the head of a very large Buddha seemingly detached from any corporeal support. There is much sculpture at Alchi, but the walls of each room are covered with murals -- mandalas, Buddhas, bodhisatvas, demonic looking guardians, processions, enormous panels of 1,000 Buddhas, and purely (I think) decorative elements. While the tour guards exhaustively turned the buildings into art museums, I tried to escape them and find myself alone in some dark corner. Some of the paintings are about 1,000 years old, painted long before artificial light so the painters knew that some of them would be scarcely seen. Viewing seems to have low on their list of priorities, creation and existence being much more important.
After the monastery I walked in the fields surrounding the village. I am beginning to think I would like to live around farm animals. I have never cared much for house pets but I like being around working animals. I also love to look at crops growing in the field. And the sound of running water. Although Ladakh is very dry, there is usually a stream of snow melt running within earshot. If I ever move from where I live now, a will look for a place with farm animals, gardens and the sound of water.
The next day we went to Lamayuru which has a spectacular setting in a heavily eroded canyon. I do not remember the interior very well, but there was a stupa surrounded by prayer wheels and I followed an old woman around, turning the prayer wheels after she did. I liked that.
Then finally, we came to Basgo which I almost didn't visit. It is not one of the more commonly visited monasteries. There is a lot of climbing involved, but it is worth the effort. The paintings have been recently restored and they are very well done. With my taste for ephemeral art, I am not usually in favor of restoration, but these prayer halls were well done and it was nice to be able to see the images clearly. In the last hall, an elderly monk was sitting chanting by a huge prayer wheel. He kept insisting that I turn the wheel, but it was very heavy and hard work. I would give it a turn or two and then stop and then he would gesture to me to keep turning it, which I did until he stopped chanting and left.
Then it was back to Leh and my wonderful guest house run by a gracious Ladakhi family who gave me a shoulder bag with "Om" embroidered on it as a going away present.

My Beautiful Trekette

I am safely back from my hike a little way's up the northern flank of the Zanskar Range which is just north of the Great Himalayas. I had a driver/guide and we drove for about an hour and a half over a very bad road until we could go no farther. Then he walked with me for about two hours or so up along a stream to a village called Rumtuk. It has somewhere between 10 and 20 houses. It's hard to tell because they are all sort of intertwined with one another. They are usually two or three stories high with room for cattle on the ground floor and a prayer room on the roof. I had arranged a home stay at a house in the village. We arrived about noon and I was completely wiped out. I'm not sure how high we hiked from the valley. It was a gradual but steady climb. It was high enough for me to detect a change in altitude. I had a headache most of the night. I slept for a little and then had rice and vegetables for lunch. Then the driver went back to the car because there was a threat of rain and he was worried about where the car was parked. I slept again and when I woke up I discovered the only door was chained from the outside so tightly I couldn't open it. I went up to the roof and discovered a place where I could put a ladder I found there and climb down. I wanted to walk in the village and the fields. The village's fields are quite extensive. Each field is about the size of one to three average American front yards. The fields are often but not always surrounded by stone walls. The ground is full of stones and they have to put them somewhere. The cattle are tethered in the paths between the fields grazing on the grass and weeds that grow there. A woman and a boy about two or three came to move their calf. The boy found me quite exotic and smiled shyly. Then he put on a great show of helping his mother reposition the cow, shouting at it and trying to slap it on the rump although he hit his mother more often than the cow. The setting was beautiful. The valley here divided into several smaller valleys or gorges. It is a major trekking stop and there is a large campground just below the village. A few trekkers wandered up the only street to an old palace but not many. The valley walls were mainly a soft sediment which had large flows of scree down the sides or a more solid composite stone which eroded into jagged shapes and crests. My Israeli friend Talma said they looked like baby's teeth. Maybe a baby dragon. They looked sharp and ferocious to me. They are a dark grayish-brown with large patches of a reddish lichen brightening them up.
About four one of the two daughters, both in their twenties, came in and started cooking. She had turnips and was slicing the greens and cutting up the turnips. She also had a small plate of already-chopped onion and a green that could have been scallion tops or something else. The family had a bottled gas stove on which they boiled water for tea and a metal-covered mud stove for cooking almost everything else. The other daughter came in and kneaded dough for noodles. It was the same dough as in the other Ladakhi meal I had, but this time instead of bow ties they made a rope and twisted off small pieces, roughly cube shaped. These were put in the broth with the turnips. I think there was some turmeric in the broth, but it was very lightly spiced. The turnip flavor came through bright and strong. It was simple but tasty. Afterwards, we had a small hard white candy that seemed to be made from fermented milk. It had a very grainy texture and was only very slightly sweet. I was not crazy about it, but one of the daughters ate a lot.
The family that was there was a mother and father, a grandfather, and the two daughters. Other people, including a couple of pony men drifted in and out. The older daughter and the mother then took turns churning butter. It is a long process, taking at least two or three hours, but they took frequent breaks. They used a large metal kettle to hold the milk. There was a vertical churn which was supported by two pieces of wood with a hole in the center which were fastened by rope to one of the support poles of the kitchen. These kept the churn vertical. They they wrapped a piece of leather around the churn several times and pulled it back and forth. It made a very satisfying sound. During one of the breaks, the small boy who helped move the cow wandered in during one of their breaks and started to try to churn. Nobody paid him much attention. He couldn't manage the supports so the churn stood at an angle, but he did a credible job of making it turn. Then the mother gave him something to drink. Fruit juice perhaps.
I sat there until about eight o'clock, listening to Ladakhi, and watching people wander in and out. Between six and seven, there was Ladakhi news on the radio and they had two small transistor radios but they took a lot of shaking and moving around the kitchen from spot to spot to make them work.
The bed was comfortable. There was a thick comforter, and I slept well.
In the morning, I had a fried egg and chapattis for breakfast. The chapattis were just like in the plains but they didn't toast them in front of an open fire after they were baked on the griddle.
Then I walked back down. For the first hour I was by myself. I had a little trouble finding the path. I started out on the pony track and then realized my mistake. I had noticed the day before that a while before the village the ponies went down to the stream bed which required the pony man to do a lot of jumping across the stream. I didn't want to do that so I went back and found the people path. It was a great walk. On the way up, I was working too hard to really take in the scenery, but on the way down, I knew where I was going and and the leisure to stop and look around. The valley constantly varied, now wider, now narrower, now mostly rock, now mostly scree. The dust from the scree causes lung problems and whenever the wind blows the locals usually cover their noses and mouths with a scarf. They also do this when working around the open fire in the kitchen because the smoke also causes lung problems.
After an hour, I started meeting trekkers who seemed a little startled to see me walking alone. Many of the guides stopped me and told me my driver was waiting for me. Apparently he had told many of them to look out for me.
I feel that I am a very fortunate person. Even if it was only a two hour hike, I was very happy to be walking among the mountains at the top of the world all by myself.
My trip to the Nubra valley was delayed because Talma had a bad headache and it seemed a bad idea to head out across the highest motorable pass in the world. We go tomorrow so I leave Ladakh on the 9th instead of the 8th. Ladakh is a beautiful place and I have met a lot of great people here, both local and foreign. At my guest house there have been a lot of French people so I have spoken a little French which was fun. One of the French women works here in the summer for a travel agency working with French tourists. She knows a little Hindi, or as they say here, Urdu. So I have spoken that a little with her and with the guest house staff who come from Manali on the other side of the mountains.
I might not blog again until I reach Delhi on the 16th, but I might get a chance to report on the Nubra Valley before I head down the hill.

Last Days in Leh

I am nearing the end of my time in Ladakh. Tomorrow I will take a walk to a village and spend the night and then return. The following day I spend two days in the Nubra Valley, a part of Ladakh northeast of Leh reached by a very high pass. Then on the 8th I start my way down to the plains through the Spiti and Kinnaur Valleys.

After the acupuncture treatment I wrote about in my last blog, my left leg was sore. It is better today. I rested a day, then had a fairly strenuous day of clambering around the palace. Now I have rested for two days and am ready to take my three or four hour walk to the village

A few days ago, I joined a French family who is staying at the same guest house as I am and we went to Phyang Monastery where they are having their annual festival. It was very hot and crowded and there were a lot of other tourists there. We stayed a couple of hours. In better conditions, I would have stayed longer. I liked the dancing. It is very simple and very repetitious, but the costumes and masks are great, and given more time and less distraction from the audience, I could have entered into the spirit of it. As we left other tourists were leaving and more local people were arriving so maybe it is better in the afternoon. The music consists of Tibetan trumpets (they sounded like reed instruments) and lots of cymbals and some drums. It was amplified and did begin to get in the blood.

The French family is three-generational and very sympathetic. I even spoke a little French which was fun if terrifying. I am calmer about speaking Hindi although my Hindi is worse than my French.

After the dancing, I came home, took a long nap and then read. I am reading five books right now. All more or less about Ladakh. I have almost finished Andrew Harvey's Journey to Ladakh, which is a description of a trip of spiritual discovery he took to Ladakh in the early eighties. It frequently makes me crazy, but there are good things in it.

Helena Norborg-Hodge's Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh also makes me crazy. She arrived in Ladakh when tourism first opened in the 70's and she has done a lot of good work here including founding the Women's Alliance of Ladakh. However, she has a simplistic view of the separation of East and West and somewhat distorts Ladakhi history to make her point. While the difference in scale is enormous, Ladkh has been a trading crossroads throughout its history and has never been the unified, almost Utopian society she depicts. Nevertheless, she has good things to say and her account is an interesting of one traveler's response to Ladakh and of what the rest of us might learn from this area.

Then I am reading two books about travelling in the Central Asian mountains. One is about "The Great Game," the competition between Russia and Great Britain for control of Central Asia and India. At the end, Russia got Central Asia and Britain kept India. The game involved Russian and British spies, often in native dress, wandering around the mountains, surveying and investigating the local economy and looking for a route between Central Asia and India that an army could cross. The only possible route, it turns out, is the one between Pakistan and Afghanistan, which is still a source of contention, although with different parties in play. The other book concerns trans-Himalyan trade routes centering on Ladakh. Ladakh has never been as isolated as we sometimes think. There has always been local trade between Tibet and the plains, and the long-distance trade routes connected Ladakh with St. Petersburg, Shanghai and Teheran.

I've been purifying my own water since I came to Ladakh and have been congratulating myself on my success. I have not been sick. Now I discover I have been drinking "government water" which has had some sort of treatment, the locals are unclear as to exactly what it is, but it is what everyone drinks, although my landlord filters it again. I am not stopping my purification treatments. Somehow drinking "government water" does not inspire me with a lot of confidence.

The longer I am in Ladakh the more time I spend just sitting looking at the garden, at the mountains, at the women yesterday who were stripping leaves from a leafy plant. They then spread the leaves on the roof outside my door, drying them for use in the winter.

Two nights ago, my landlord called me into his kitchen and fed me butter tea and "local food." The local food was a mutton stew with potatoes, spinach, and whole-wheat noodles that looked like and were about half the size of bow ties. It was very tasty. Half-way through he poured a white liquid in it which I think was thinned, partially fermented yogurt. He said "delicious" as he poured, and it was.

I waited in line for half an hour at the ATM. Locals, probably working for hotels, take five cards at a time into the booth. I understood this by listening to two men speak Hindi. I was very proud of myself, though between Hindi, French and English, I am barely able to speak or understand at all.

I hope to blog one more time before I leave Leh. Then for a week, I will be in fairly remote mountains and I don't know if there will be Internet access or not. I will try to blog briefly from my friends' apartment in Delhi.

Three-day Sightseeing Bachanalia

More or less, by accident, I have gone far over my sightseeing quota.

Saturday morning I was going to climb up to the palace, have a leisurely look around and call it quits for the day, but I my way I passed the Lala Cafe. There is a poster on the door of my guesthouse advertising walks of the old town starting from the Lala Cafe but I could never find the Cafe. Suddenly, there it was so I went in and a walk was about to start in a half an hour so I waited. The walk is conducted by LOTI, Leh Old Town Initiative, which is a local non-profit dedicated to the preservation and renovation of Old Town in Leh. Old town is built on the hill below the palace and has been crumbling into ruin since owners were leaving their houses and living elsewhere. LOTI will renovate their houses for them on a fifty-fifty cost basis but leaving the owners with full title to their property. Many owners have taken them up on this. LOTI tries to keep the exterior as it was while making the interiors inhabitable. They also have renovated other buildings such as an early traders' mosque. They are also installing covered drains throughout the old town. The drains are just channels in the middle of the sidewalk, and LOTI has deepened and cleaned them and covered them with a metal grill which in addition to improving drainage makes walking safer.

The walk is great. Their is a a lot of clambering and climbing up steep hillsides on only the faintest of paths, but I got to see the insides of many buildings I never would have seen and I learned a lot about Old Town's past, present and possible future. The towns are built on the hillsides to preserve as much arable land as possible. The chapels, and other religious edifices are beginning to blur but I took a lot of pictures until my camera broke and I hope they will jog my memory.

Yes, my camera broke. It suddenly stopped responding to any commands, and no troubleshooting has helped. So even though my landlord offered to loan me his camera I decided to go cameraless for at least two days. On Sunday, I joined an Israeli couple I met and their Israeli Chinese Medicine Doctor for a tour of Shey Palace and Hemis and Thiksey Gompas. It was my first ride outside of Leh and the landscape is stunning. The mountains seem taller than in the city and they go on, range after range. I believe Shey Palace has not been an official residence since the mid-nineteenth century when the Dogras, I believe, invaded Leh and deposed the king and moved him to Stok. Before that the king divided his town between Shey and Leh. I remember little of Shey Palace except the climb to the roof and my first panoramic view of the Indus Valley. Up until this time I had been impervious to the landscape of Leh. I thought it was beautiful, but it didn't get under my skin. That morning, the green fields along the river, the bare ground beyond and the variegated mountains worked together to lift my spirits and make me happy to be alive. Hemis is perhaps the most famous of the monasteries in Ladakh. It has a spectacular setting in a deep canyon with steep walls splotched with red from lichens. As we approached it we passed some women sitting by the road spinning thread and selling very small socks that wouldn't even fit the smallest of us. They were friendly and the children were charming and we went on our way. The monastery is many-storied and it was the first place I saw Tantric paintings of a demonic looking male being holding a female being across his hips in an intercourse position. It turns out these are usually in rooms where the guardians of the temple are kept but they can turn up anywhere. There was a set in a room that was basically a library. Here Talma suggested that we mediate for 15 minutes which was a great idea. I was beginning to flag and sitting for 15 minutes cleared my mind and gave me enthusiasm for the rest.

If Hemis is the most famous monastery, Thiksey is the most photographed. It is right and pours down the hill like a small Portola. In Thiksey there is a great room where the guardians are kept. It is small and dark and all the images are veiled and it looks very ancient, very elementary.

By the end of the day, I was exhausted but I signed on for another palace and two more monasteries the next day. The palace is at Stok where the king and his family are now resident. There is a great museum which includes the state rooms. It is not as spectacular as the museum at Hemis monastery, which is the best museum I have been in in India, but being laid out in the palace rooms, it is very interesting and some of the objects, especially the jewelry are very beautiful.

Then there were two more monasteries to go. Up until now we had been southeast of Leh, now we headed west on the Srinigar road. We saw Spitok and Phiyang. The sounds and images that are most present now are from Phiyang were a group of monks were in the middle of a seven day prayer sequence with drumming and small boy monks blowing trumpets from time to time. The wall paintings here were dark and hard to see but worth looking at with the sound of the chanting in the background.

Then back to Leh, where the Israeli doctor gave me an acupuncture treatment for pains I have been having in the hip area. He has a great beside manner. He has been traveling for months finding clinics to volunteer in where ever we go. He was at the monastery school at Spitok for a month so the head of the school invited us in for tea and we met some of his patients in the monastery. Yesterday, he didn't go with us into monastery but stayed at the cafe which is by a small dispensary and he helped treat a monk who had sprained his ankle playing football and another patient and then he went out and treated our driver.

Tomorrow I am taking it easy. All I have on my schedule is the Women's Association where they show a film on Ladakh in the afternoon and the Ecological Center which has information on Ladakh and a shop with articles from local craftspeople.

First Days in Ladakh

Ladakh is one of those places everyone tells you that you are going to love, so I came here with a bit of a chip on my shoulder, but it has quickly fallen off. Ladakh is beautiful, Ladakh is interesting, Ladakh is seductive and it is comfortable. However, it is hard not to feel at least a little guilty about being here as one of the tourists who is rapidly changing Ladakh.
Leh is in a valley surrounded by mountains that don't look all that tall because the valley floor is already at 12,000 feet. But behind the first circle, one can see the tall Himalayas and they indeed to look tall. The valley is a desert with an ancient system of irrigation that keeps parts of it green. The rest of it looks rather like the bleaker parts of Nevada, except there are people here and the incredible mountains.
The first day here, I slept most of the day adjusting to the altitude.
The second day, I saw one stupa. I took what was supposed to be a short walk and extended it to see a stupa from either the 11th or 15th century. It is in ruins although the it has been surrounded by a modern retaining wall. I resisted clambering up the crumbling stairs and passageways in the upper part because I was alone and I didn't fancy spending the night with a broken leg there. It seemed like a haven for all sorts of creepy-crawly things.
Today, I saw two gompas as the Buddhist monasteries are called here. I was tempted to see a third, but decided that might be stretching it in my present condition. Tomorrow, I might be ready to see three of something. Or maybe not. My rule as a tourist is always to avoid seeing one thing a day. Today, I avoided seeing the palace. I walked up there to see a cultural performance that the owner of my guest house dances and sings in. The performance is just outside the palace so I am saving it for another day.
The palace is amazing it is 7 or 9 stories tall, attached to the palace. It was built about 30 years before the big monastery in Lhasa whose name is at my fingertips, but I can't produce. It climbs up the hill in the same fashion. I have a good view of it from my room at the guest house, but the side from the town is even better. I'll write more about the palace once I have seen it.
I saw my second gompa by accident. I was climbing up the rather steep hill to the palace when I heard drumming coming from the gompa and decided to take off my shoes and sit in the doorway and rest while I listened to the monk chanting. Eventually a young boy came up and sold me a Rs 20 ticket so I felt free to stay and wander around. The main room of this gompa is large, high and unadorned except for paintings of the thousand Buddhas on the walls, and a large gold statute in the center. Tibetan Buddhism is too complicated for me. There is an endless procession of Buddhas and other beings. I am not going to worry about it. I wasn't sure I was going to like gompas, but after seeing two, I think I do. I just don't want anyone to explain them to me right now. When I get home I might do some reading, but now I just want to sit and look and take the occasional picture.
The sky is very blue here. The clouds are very white. The sound of water is everywhere from the small channels of water running down from the snow melt to provide drinking water, washing water, and irrigation water. Yesterday morning, my landlord was watering his garden. He broke down the wall of the irrigation channel so that some of the water flowed into his garden and then by taking away a pile of dirt here and putting a pile of dirt here, he guided the water through channels in the garden until it was all water. I had read about this, but it was amazing to see. It is very simple and very effective.
It is not all ancient. I heard a power saw yesterday, something I never heard in India although I saw men sawing huge beams by resting them at 45 degree angles against a sawhorse and then slowing sawing down the middle from the top, a process that takes days. There is a lot of money now in Leh from all us tourists and and an amazing amount of building going on. I wonder where the sustainability point is. There is no longer any East and West. We are all now having to make the same choices about what we need, what we want and sustainability. My landlord is very concerned about his twin daughters and the other children in Ladakh. He teaches elementary school and he is afraid the culture might be lost in a generation.
I am more optimistic. There will be changes, but I suspect Ladakh is a place like Bali that will be able to sustain its culture while still entertaining hordes of tourists. However, Bali is geographically better situated to handle the onslaught.
Enough politics. Today for lunch I asked the men from Manali to make me dal, vegetables and rice. It was delicious. I had been missing that simple meal. In the evenings I have been having chicken biranyi which is really chicken fried rice. It is very sustaining and very good with whole cardamom pods in it -- o.k., it's not exactly chicken fried rice.

Luke in the Big City

After an uneventful ride down the mountain and a very noisy train ride filled with returning vacationers, Anna and I arrived in Delhi. It was hot and muggy, the scene at the train station was as chaotic as usual, but once the hotel man picked us up and we were driving the short distance to the hotel, I became very happy. I love big cities. I love Delhi.

This is spite of the fact that when I arrived at my friend's apartment where I was staying until I left for Ladakh, the houseboy had had a family emergency and I had to wait on a very hot stairwell until my friends arrived. Once they arrived, I went to sleep as quickly as possible only to be awakened in what felt like the middle of the night to be told we were going to a party. I dutifully got up, made myself as presentable as I could and went off to a gay party where I remet some of the people I had met a year and a half ago on my earlier trip. They are activists of various sorts, very bright, very well-educated, very energetic and very inspirational. They give me some hope for the future of India.

I had two days in Delhi. The first day I just got some business done and then we had a great meal at my friend's house. The second day I did some shopping, had a great massage from my friend's masseur and a talk with the houseboy about being gay in India if you don't belong to the upper middle class (and even there it is not easy).

Then I had a nap and headed out for the airport to meet my friend Caroline so we could go to Ladakh together. Unfortunately, she had failed to get a visa so was turned back at the airport. Fortunately, a Swiss Air representative found me and I got to talk to Caroline by phone. Then I made my way to the domestic airport and waited for my 5 a.m. flight. I was a bit of a wreck, but the flight is spectacular. My window faced the rising sun so my pictures didn't turn out well, but the mountains are very close, very clear and very big.

I was met at the airport and taken to a very nice guest house. I have a room apartment with a great view of Leh palace. But the Ladakh story will have to wait for the next blog.

P.S. This is the report on the great Kashmiri dinner I had in Mussoorie at my friend Anna's friend Vikram's parents' house. There was awide range of dishes. My favorite were potato balls which I think were steamed and then deep-fried so they had a crispy exterior and soft interior. They are a very sophisticated version of French fries. Anna and I had been eating simply for five weeks and this was a great change. The food was great, the house was beautiful and filled with amazing objects, and the hosts were very cordial and charming.

Studying Hindi at Landour Language School

Although I regret not being able to finish the Hindi course at Nolunna, I am grateful that I had the chance to study two weeks at Landour School. Landour is a town contingent to Mussoorie which during the Raj was a hill station where government employees could avoid the summer heat. Landour attached itself to Mussoorie and was one of the two hill stations in India that attracted Americans. The Americans were usually missionaries so there are many churches here.

I am staying at Ivy Banks from which the school is a very steep walk up the hill. After a little not so subtle coaching from Anna and myself, we have abolished international food in the evening and have very tasty Indian food at both lunch and dinner. The other day I saw fresh ferns in the market and bought them and the cook (who is also the manager) prepared them very well. Last night we had potatoes which a very thin bean mixed in. They seemed even thinner than Chinese long beans. I didn't detect much flavor but their crisp texture was a good contrast to the potatoes. Last night we had taro leaves wrapped around dal flour dough and steamed and then fried with spices. That was very good too.

I like the teaching here। I have two teachers। One is Mr. Datt. He is the director of the school and is very soft-spoken. He often uses philosophical examples to illustrate grammar points, which I like. The other teacher is Mr. Rai. His unfortunate duty is to drill me on verb tenses. I know the grammar but I cannot make the correct words come out of my mouth. My most common mistake is saying "मैं है Main hai," instead of "मैं हूँ Main huun." This means "I " and you learn it on the first day of Hindi, but I still cannot make the verb agree with the subject when I am speaking. Both of the teachers are just a little younger than me and we get on very well. Although the majority of students here are of college age there are a number of us who are over forty and there is one other, who like me, is almost 70. Those people who are hit by the India bug are hit hard. Everyone here has an interesting story about why they are studying Hindi. Many people are going to work in India, but others, like me, just want to know a little more about India.

Landour is beautiful, even though it is very wet. It has rained, at least a little, every day I have been here and some days it pours. This morning while I was washing my clothes after my shower, I looked down and there was what I thought was a leech on my leg. It didn't look like the leeches that attached to me at Nolunna, being browner, longer and with small horns like a slug, but I thought it was a different bread. I ran to Anna's room, collected her, and we went down to the kitchen for salt. We went outside and the staff gathered around and Anna applied the salt. The creature fell off and Anil, the manager/cook, announced that it wasn't a leech, and indeed there was no blood. After a leech falls off there is a lot of blood because they contain an anti-coagulant. So it was a slug after all. I didn't know slugs crawled on to people. I got one leech sitting in the garden at Nolunna studying, and the other when I went hiking in the mountains. I thought I had covered myself well the second time, but the leech found a way in. It had fallen off before I discovered it, but my leg and pant leg were all bloody. The fortunate thing is that flies and mosquitoes don't seem to like me as much as they do others.

I started to talk about the beauty of Landour and became distracted by leeches. There are tall deodar pines (I thinks that what they are) and some of the paths wander among the steep, green forests. The clouds come and go. One is supposed to be able to see the Himalayas from here, but so far all I have seen in the distance is clouds. Once or twice it has been clear toward the plains and I have seen Dehra Dun and, in the distance, the Ganges flowing out from Hardiwar. In the other direction, one is supposed to be able to see the Yamuna, but it has never been clear enough when I have been looking over there.

It is very quiet and clean up here. I will probably come back some time and spend longer here and polish my Hindi. I am not sure if I will ever speak it well, but I am approaching a reading capability in the language.

In three days, I leave for Delhi, and then go to Ladakh. Tonight my friend Anna and I are going to a friend of hers house for dinner with his parents. I am looking forward to it. In Delhi, I am staying with friends at there apartment. The break from hotel and guest house living will be welcome.

Nolunna - Part 2

I have reread my posts about Nolunna and I am not satisfied. It was a very intense experience which I am finding it hard to describe. Since the Hindi instruction was truncated just as I was beginning to get the hang of simple communication, it is going to take me some time to see what I have salvaged from the Hindi experience. Whatever that turns out to be, the human experience makes the time I spent there memorable and valuable.

As I have said before, the Ganges Valley at Nolunna is very narrow. The buildings are built close to the road and form a wall on one side as the ground is dropping down to the river. On the other side the mountain rises very steeply. Nolunna is in a curve of the river so from the property, I could not see either up or down the river. In one of the dictionaries that I was using I came across the word "inspissated" which means "concentrated" as in "concentrated mango juice." The experience at Nolunna was very inspissated. First of all there is Yogendra, my teacher. He lives in Australia most of the year, but usually comes to India in December/January and July/August and teaches here. He has owned the property on the Ganges for at least ten years, I think, and has become a figure in the life of the villages surrounding him. He also has much more responsibility for his employees than an employer has in the United States. It is a semi-familial relationship. Also, since Nolunna is shut up for much of the year, there is always maintenance work to do on the buildings and property. In addition to this, he has family responsibilities in his family village outside of Delhi which he takes care of when he is in India. Anna, the other student, and I, became interested in and concerned about many of these responsibilities so there was always something to talk about at mealtime.

Then there was the staff. Devindra, his brother Budri, and his niece and nephew Rajma and Hansmukh, all came from the same village a two hours walk on the other side of the river. Anil, who served as a teaching assistant and gave us conversation lessons, was also the main contact with Uttarkashi which was our contact with the outside world. Devindra was in charge of the staff and was the chief cook. He made amazing vegetables. Nothing was fancy. He fried them in a little oil, added a few simple spices and steamed them. They were amazing. While we were there, Budri built an outside clay stove in an open sided hut that faced the river. The first time it was used we had khari (from which the word "curry" comes). Khari is made of lentil flour and yogurt with a few spices and vegetables added. It takes a long time to cook and we all took turns stirring. With it, Devindra made thick chapattis by hand, without rolling them out. They were great. It was wonderful to sit at the table facing the Ganges and eat delicious food. While the food was being prepared, Devindra played the harmonium and sang Garwahli songs accompanied by Anil on a drum.

There were frequently Garwahli song fests either before or after supper, with Rajma sometimes singing, and everyone joining in on percussion.

One evening out by the clay stove we had jackfruit for which I have not yet acquired a taste. It is in season now and it is in all the markets, big, green and prickly.

Rajma was the only woman there. She is about 14 and she started high school while we were there so there was an expedition to Rishikesh to buy her a school uniform and books. Yogendra bought her brother shoes. Her brother, Hansmukh, can neither hear nor speak, but he has a very expressive face and has a repertory of idiosyncratic signs with which he communicates very well. He would often come and talk when Anna and I were sitting out on the veranda in front of her rooms. All of the staff would pass by from time to time, and the others would speak to us in Hindi which was very helpful.

Well, I'm still unsatisfied with this blog. The remoteness, the vitality, the strong sense of village life, the power of the Ganges, all of this is left out. One afternoon, Anil gave me my conversation lesson while we sat next to the Ganges. He said, in simple Hindi, that at the source, Gomukh, the Ganges is a baby, when it skips by us at Nolunna it is a child, at Rishikesh it enters puberty and reaches adulthood at Hardiwar, as it crosses the plains it matures until it reaches old age at Calcutta and finally dies into the ocean. It is a sense of powerful, childlike beginnings that I am left with when I think of Nolunna.

Studying Hindi at Nolunna

As you know, I came to India to study Hindi for five weeks at a place called Nolunna above Uttarkashi which is about two-thirds of the way from Rishikesh to Gangotri near the mouth of the Ganges. As you also know, my stay there was truncated, but I had a great time and now I am going to tell you about it.

A couple of years ago my friend Ben Teller found this place called Himalaya Hindi House on the Internet. It seemed too remote for him, but to me it seemed perfect. It is located on the banks of the Upper Ganges and is taught by Yogendra Yadev, who teaches at the Australian National University in Canberra. He owns this property called Nolunna. Unfortunately, this is probably the last year he will teach there as his program is now accredited through ANU and he will teach in a more accessible location that can accommodate more students. I feel very fortunate to have been there.

The drive up was long and winding. Anna, the other student, became ill the night before we left Rishikesh to head up the mountains, but she bravely decided to come with us. We started a little before 11 in the morning and arrived at Nolunna just after 6 p.m. having traveled a little more than 90 miles or not quite 15 miles an hour. Because the monsoons are here, landslides are frequent in the mountains. We had to take a detour to go around one, and two days after we arrived there was a bad one just down the road from us in which the driver of a vehicle was badly injured. Coming down the mountain, we passed a bus that he slipped off the round in a bad patch and plunged into the river with only two survivors.

Although we were very tired by the time we reached Nolunna, I knew at once I had come to the right place. The buildings are about 200 feet from the river and the roar is constantly in our ears. The grounds are filled with a great garden filled with flowers, vegetables and fruit trees. Nolunna is small, sandwiched between the river and the road. The road is the only way up to the mouth of the Ganges so as I sat at the dining table I could see the tops of the heads of saddhus going up and down the road. The far side of the river is a hill that goes straight up for a few hundred feet. It is covered with ferns and low bushes and tall conifers that only have branches at the top. The river is not wide here but very fast and when it is not raining, it is a cloudy grey as it comes from a glacier. When it rains, the river turns a muddy brown. I can see the river from the veranda of my room. The valley we are in is so steep it doesn't get much direct sun, so I spend most of the day an the veranda, studying Hindi and swatting flies.

The first three days it rained almost constantly and clothes were taking two days to dry but after that we had only intermittent rain and some days when it was actually sunny for an hour or two.

I quickly settled into a schedule. I woke about 5, meditated for half an hour and then tea arrived at 6. After tea, I usually took a walk unless the rain was too bad. Mostly we walked the road because the one time I walked the path in the hills, I got a leech. We kept waiting for dry weather dry weather so we could walk the hills, but it never came. I had already had another leech find me when I was studying in the garden. Both times I didn't find the leech until it was full and fell off. The first time it fell into my sandal and I thought it was a big bug, but Anna recognized it immediately being an experienced mountain woman who has lived in Colorado for 20 years although she grew up in England. Leeches are painless and carry no diseases but they are repulsive and messy. After they fall off the wound bleeds for quite a while.

By the time I came back from my walk and the hot water had arrived in a bucket. I washed myself and then my clothes, and then we had breakfast at 7:45. Breakfast was either a whole wheat version of cream of wheat or semolina with hot milk and tea. I usually had a banana with my second bowl. Then I had an hour class from 8:30 to 9:30 and two half-hour sessions, one at 11:00 and another at 12:00. In between I did my homework and then we had lunch at 12:30. Lunch was rice, roti, dal and a vegetable. Most of the garden vegetables weren't ready but the green beans were delicious. We also had ferns and tree mushrooms gathered from the forest. Both were great. We frequently had ferns, but the mushrooms were harder to find and there never seemed to be enough of them.

At 1:00 it was nap time. Then after my nap it was more study until 3:45 when I had an hour conversation practice with Anil, one of the staff. By this time I was usually tired and I loafed until supper and 6:45. We hung out together and Devindra, the head of staff and main cook, sometimes played the harmonium and sang Garwalhi songs accompanied by Anil on a drum. The only woman on the staff, a girl of 14 sometimes also sang. Then about 8 I headed down to my room and was asleep before 9.

I really liked the routine and sleeping with the sound of the river in my ears. At night, beneath the roar, I could hear a low, thundering sounds which was made by rocks pounding against each other as they were carried along in the stream.

I promised my son to keep each blog to about 800 words so I will stop here, but I have more to say about Nolunna.

Sudden Changes

I believe this was posted without any content. Here is the real thing.

Last Tuesday evening, my Hindi teacher, Yogendra Yadev, heard that his brother in Delhi was very seriously ill and he needed to be with him. 14 hours later, Anna, my fellow student, Yogendra and I were heading down the mountain toward the plains. Everyone was in shock and I had no idea what I was going to do with the next two weeks. When we heard the news, Anna and I decided we would go with Yogendra as far as Rishikesh, at the foot of the mountains, stay in a comfortable hotel, and decide what to do. Anna was hoping to stay with friends in Mussoorie but had to hear from them if they could accommodate her. I had no idea what I was going to do.

Yogendra dropped Anna and I off at the Hotel the Great Ganga in the mid-afternoon and proceeded on to Delhi. We heard from Yogendra later in the day and by then he had heard that the doctors had ascertained that his brother has cancer in both lungs and in one the tumor was fast-growing and already so large that it has collapsed his lung on that side. Anna and I took hot showers, appreciated the dryness of our air-conditioned rooms and had very tasty paranthas (fried bread) stuffed with fresh cheese. Then we had a walk through Rishikesh. Once you escape the usual hurlyburly of an India city, Rishikesh is a very pleasant town on the Ganges with pleasant tree-shaded walks along the river and holy men of every description everywhere. After the mountains, Rishikesh, which is at the foot of the hills, seemed very warm and the moist-heat drained me so we retreated to our air-conditioning.

By the next morning by head had cleared somewhat and I decided to go with Anna to Mussoorie. She arranged with her friend who manages a hotel there for me to stay in it. The Padmini Nivas Hotel was built in 1840 by an English colonel and then went into the hands of a maharajah of a small independent state and now is a heritage hotel with animal heads glumly down at us from high on the walls of the public rooms. The public rooms are in a pleasant state of decrepitude but the hotel rooms are very comfortable. Mine had an enclosed veranda with a basket swing from which I had brief glimpses of the lights of Dehra Doon between the clouds.

After I settled in, Anna took me to the language school and I had an interview with Mr. Datt, the Head of the school. He is very charming and fit me in to an already busy schedule. I will have one hour with him and one hour with someone else if that can be arranged. I will know my class times Monday morning. The school is in old stone buildings next to an old stone church which is being remodeled to hold more class rooms.

Then she took me to Ivy Banks Cottage a short way down the hill from the school. This is important because the hill is very steep and my sea-level lungs are not up to them yet. They could fit me in and I have a very clean, dry, large bedroom, a bathroom with hot water from a geyser (pronounced "geezer"), and a small but light and airy sitting room that looks out on a garden which should look out on a great view if the clouds ever lift. I have three meals a day for $17.50 a day. After four meals, I think the food will be good. Lunches are great. They are simple India food: some variety of beans or lentils ("dal"), a vegetable, rice and rotis (also called chapattis, plain whole-wheat flat bread baked on a griddle and then toasted in front of an open flame). The evening meal seems to be international and will probably be more of an adventure. Last night we had momos (Tibetan steamed, stuffed won tons), a spicy noodle dish with cabbage, and a tasty chicken soup made with cilantro and canned chicken (much better than it sounds). The Korean students at the next table asked (in Hindi) what the noodles were called, and the waiter said "chow mein." We all laughed. They weren't quite out vision of chow mein. I have to work on breakfast. Today I had an omelet and porridge. The porridge was good and the omelet so-so. I will have to see if they do anything Indian in the morning.

Today is Sunday and I have been in Mussoorie for two days. I am getting used to the altitude and I am looking forward to classes on Sunday. I realize this blog plunged right into the middle of things, but I am back in civilization and have easy access to Internet (if a half-mile hike down a steep hill and then back up can be called easy). My next blog will describe my experience at Nolunna studying Hindi.

Luke

Another Short Blog

Dear friends,

I had two blogs written out in my journal and then I left the journal back in Nolunna. Next weekend, if I get into town again, I will plan on spending time on the Internet and give you a full report.

I am very happy here. Nolunna is a great place for me to study Hindi. It is situated between the Ganges and the road up to the mouth of the Ganges. The Ganges is narrow here but it is dropping rapidly with great force and the sound of the river is constantly in my ears. The principal sound is the rush of water but underneath that, if you listen carefully, in the booming of rocks hitting against each other.

The monsoon has arrived here and the first few days were very damp and gloomy, but ever since we have had at least a little bit of sun everyday, although it has continued to rain from time to time.

I have two hours of instruction a day plus an hour of conversation. All the staff are helpful so I have a lot of chances to try Hindi outside the scheduled times. Nolunna is like a small village of about 10 people. The number varies from time to time. The food is great. It is very simple. We have a grain porridge of some sort for breakfast. For lunch we have rice, flat bread, dal (different kinds each day -- either lentil-like or bean-like), and a vegetable. Supper is the same as lunch except we have no rice and usually have a sweet pudding of either semolina or rice. In addition to the usual vegetables we have had delicious ferns and mushrooms.

My fellow student is now waiting for me, but I might get a chance to write more later today. If not, next weekend if there are no landslides or other blockages of the road.

Luke

Safe in India

I'm here. The last two or three days before I left, I couldn't imagine why I wanted to do this, but now I remember. In spite of the heat and humidity I am happy. I had my haircut today by my favorite barber in the whole world and he remembered me. I had my shoes shined by my favorite shoeshiner in the whole world (my shoes hadn't been shined since he last did it in January 2007) and I'm not sure if he remembered me. He was training his son at the same time he was shining my shoes and he was a little distracted, but he still did a great job.
I flew from Los Angeles to Newark. At Newark, the plane was 15 hours late in departing due to a storm in the Atlantic. They put us up in a hotel but by the time that was arranged I only managed four hours of sleep. Fortunately, the plane was not that full and I had three seats to myself so I could stretch out. I slept intermittently, read Vanity Fair, and studied Hindi.
Why Vanity Fair? Because Jos Sedley, Amelia's brother, and Dobbin, Amelia's second husband, both spend time in India and the Empire spreads its shadow over the book. I first read Vanity Fair in college when I was about 20 and wasn't much interested in India or Empire. Now I am amazed how the Empire colors 19th century English fiction. I've also recently read Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone and Dickens, Edwin Drood.
I've been working on a blog for months about "going native," and this reading is part of that project. Perhaps something I might have something interesting to say about it, but right now I am struggling with sleep deprivation, heat and humidity. I am now going up to my air-conditioned room and perhaps by the next time you hear from me I will be cooler and better rested.
All I really want to say tonight is I'm here, I'm happy, and already it has been worth the trip.