Leaving Dharamkot for a thali in Manali

As T kept repeating mantra-like in the run-up to our departure (though we’re struggling to make it work as well with other destinations – ‘a lassi in Varanasi’ is the closest competitor so far, answers on a postcard guys).

Morning chai stop in Dharamkot

So we finally upped sticks and left Dharamkot/McLeod on Tuesday morning and, getting attached quickly (will have to shake that off in the coming weeks), I felt sad to leave even after our 10 days. Which is more than long enough to establish your little routines and haunts: breakfast at Ajit’s chai stand at the head of Tipa road, watching the local children line up in the school yard and the old guys drink their morning chai watching the world go by, while rickshaws sporadically groan up the steep slope to drop off their charges of baggy-panted, dazed tourists fresh from the night buses; 10-1pm yoga for the second half of our stay, structured and serene in the Himalyan Iyengar Yoga Centre hall, a steep 5 minute climb down the hill from Paul House, our abode (no apostrophe nor, indeed, any eponymous manager); afternoons spent wandering down to McLeod or just relaxing around the villages. The mist-enveloped hike up to Triund, which put into stark relief exactly how unfit I am after a certain elevation. And the food… Malai kofta and Chilli capsicum paneer, Tibetan momos and thupka, miso and fried tofu, pizza in Dharamkot’s Trek and Dine when Tobes stopped tutting at me (as though we all sit around eating compulsory fish and chips and Sunday roasts at home in the name of authenticity?!)

So even after a short time I will miss all these things: monks on iPhones and iPads; rolling hills that look different at every time of day – mist and rainfalls that start and end in a second, now you see the mountains, now you don’t; random mix of resident and visiting (short or long-stay) Tibetans, Indians, Europeans, east Asians, north Americans, Antidpodeans – pretty much everyone on every kind of stay or way of life. And Trek and Dine in Dharmakot, Welcome Café in upper Bhagsu, Lung ta in McLeod.

The yoga was perfect, a good move and, aside from the quiet, my main reason for settling on Dharamkot rather than in town itself. 15 hours across 5 days, starting at a very civilized 10am, with the only laws outwith the studio itself that we – absolutely – eat at least 2 hours before class (varying success) and that we – try – to limit our consumption of alcohol, joints or any other intoxicants (easily achieved). Which seemed an odd way round for the stringency to work but I guess they work with their externalities, set just below traveller-occupied mountain villages.

The iyengar model was developed by the centre's founder Sharat, who evolved his method after decades working within his Pune BKS Iyengar training: with the fundamentals a strict focus on the feet and all postural alignment understood to stem from their correct positioning ('No local movements' as our teacher Pedro warned), together with an emphasis on keeping the trunk open and uncompressed. So if 2 centimetres is all you can tilit without restricting your breathing and compressing your torso, that's where you stay. And it was just what I'd hoped in terms of structure and discipline, to try and focus my distracted mind and kick off a regular practice while we're away.

Ultimately, though, it was not quite for me. Too stringent, almost no deviation from set sequences and asanas - generally a little puritanical. As Pedro admits 'All yogis are crazy... 5 hours of practice a day, you have to be'. He wanders among us cracking the proverbial whip as we groan through our 20 successive backbends; 'Man, I came here to find enlightenment,' he commiserates, 'and this guys keeps making me do all these things.' ('It's funny because it's true,' sniggers a long-suffering Israeli classmate). Pedro is a stern, distant kind of a guru, who like many with a natural authority and gravitas elicits mirth to the power of 10 whenever he does crack a grin and venture into whimsy. 'This is why you have eyes, not potatoes', is a favourite, lazy feet as 'dead fish' is another. He is also scathing on matters yogic and social networking: no one is to take pictures in the hall, 'Many tourists take pictures of themselves in the asanas and put them on Facebook - "oh look, I did a course, I am a big yog.i"' I try but cannot imagine Pedro on Facebook. It's like picturing Gandhi in a clown wig.

And maybe I have already been around the baggy-panted banana pancake crew too long but his lectures talks on consumption, credit and over-reliance on technology, delivered as we strain for 10 minutes in a contorted pose, are chiming. In that obvious but not always fully recognised way. The inability to be still without planning ahead or obsessing back, in particular. So that calm, focused room and its eternal entreaty to pay attention to our feet and find the meeting of our butts was just perfect. We will Pedro, we will.

To moving on. Having decided on the 6am public bus rather than the overnight tourist 'deluxe' - you know, to see the scenery and feel smug - we were in bed by 10 on Monday night. Sometime after midnight, through our Israeli-party-proof earplugs erupted a frenzied barking. An immense canine caterwauling backed by a ferocious thunderstorm, T eventually staggered up to peer out at 4 plus local dogs going mental on our side of the balcony. All local, well-fed dogs - used to rainy Dharamsala weather, no rabid pack - going thoroughly bonkers. 'I feel like it's an omen' he said. And as we rise at 4.30am, the din - somewhere between dogfight and storm-craziness - having continued right outside the door, that seemed correct. I discovered the Peace Cafe had given me raging food poisoning (less than 2 weeks in, the old Immodium and Dioralyte regime kicks in..), the continuing storm had us soaked to the skin by the bus stop, while delays turned a 9 hour bus journey into a 12 hour trip...

The journey picked for its scenery, street-life, people-watching therefore passed for me in an acutely uncomfortable haze, contorted and - ahem - clenching for life and dignity the first half; then head lolling like a stoned Alsation as a dehydration/hunger headache descended for the second. 'Manalimanalimanali' bellowed the ticket collector at every stop as we clattered past another town. An hour and a half passed just outside Mandi for an accident ahead, everyone bounding off then back on as the driver slammed his foot down to overtake 7 static trucks at a time, honking his horn down in a ceaseless 'Coming through, coming through, get the f*** out the way!' Once through, he took no prisoners to reach town by nightfall, and we crashed onwards, whistling round precipitous bends, pausing seldomly - once, understandably, for his whisky pick-up on the outskirts of Manali. It had been a long day all round.

Manali, which we reached just after dark in the pouring rain, besieged even as the bus was still moving - ''Leh ticket-saffron-charas-rickshaw??', was this morning, 2 days later, bleached with sun. The hills could be in Scotland, muted hues of greens, browns and greys, expectations of heather with every gaze. Stunning expanses of blue skies with snow-capped peaks are in stark relief and as freezing and drenched as we were our first night, we could burn in 10 minutes as we sit blissed out over breakfast on the rooftop of our guesthouse. It's pretty glorious and I could easily not move today. Set across a beautiful valley ringed by mountains, Manali is a mecca for trekking, paragliding, hiking, biking, rafting and lots of other exhausting worthy leisure pursuits. We could easily spend a week but our eyes are locked on Laddakh and by 2.30am tonight we'll be on our way.

McLeod Ganj/Dharamkot 2

Three little old ladies are painfully climbing the temple stairs, wrinkled and bent double with age, conquering their own Himalayan mountain to get to the Buddhist altar. Still at the top they chatter and cackle in their brightly patterned Tibetan dress. One fiddles with her hearing aid, damn technology. Given their age, it's likely these ladies crossed the high mountain passes to escape Chinese occupation of their homeland, along with over 100,000 other Tibetans. If I can manage stairs at their age, I will be a lucky man.
 
Inside the temple, the low chanting of the monks is mingled with the rustle-thump-rustle of prayer ablutions as the supplicants crouch, flop and slide to be belly down and prostrate before their gods. And their are many gods. 722. And many shrines to the many gods. Not forgetting the shrine to the Dalai Lama, laden with chocolate biscuits and fruit juice. Apparently, the Dalai Lama likes nothing more than a bourbon cream and some Tropicana after a heavy day's praying.
 
We spin the prayer wheels before descending to the courtyard where the disputation takes place. Animated debate as one stands, one sits. The standing one monologuing, while pointing, gesticulating and rocking - and always the clap! as he feels he lands a strong point. "And that's how the Buddha taught it!" Clap! The sitter nods or shakes their head, or asks a question or makes a small point. And the disputation continues under the weighty supervision of senior monks. 

Before we'll leave Mcleoad Ganj, we'll also visit the Tibetan museum which details how it is monks and nuns similar to these who have hung themselves, ritually stabbed themselves, or self-immolated in despair at Chinese rule.

 

The next day the cloud hangs low over the misty mountains. We head up to our local little chai stop for a quick breakfast. Then the ascent. Rocks slivered with metal crystal line the path up, the fatal drop to our right softened by its verdant hues and the multi-coloured prayer flags strung across the tops of trees: so high in the branches it seems only some  flying Buddha could have put them there. Approaching 3000m high, the waterfalls, the butterflies, the stunning view down the mountain cannot distract from our burning thighs and breathless chests. And at the top? Nothing. The mist encases us, and we can see only as far as a chai stand, where a sweet milky brew and some vegetable curry mixes with some traveller chat to pass the time. South African Ben sails the Caribbean in winter, the Med in summer, ferrying tourists on catamarans around the islands. But here he's building on his yoga. So we chat and descend together.
 
We strike up conversation with some locals half way down the descent (at another chai stand: they are everywhere. To be clear, there were four at the top of the mountain we climbed). To rub in how weak and flabby our Western bodies are, as we plan to leave together they wave us on. No, No, they say - you go on - we have to carry these! And what we thought were mounds of grass, are...  well, they're mounds of grass but each of the three will carry about 20kilos of grass on their backs down to the lower pastures. They take a last toke on their joint before loading up as we leave them behind.

As I write now, we have one full day left in Dharamkot/Mcleod Ganj. It's tough walking in epic countryside, with always the threat of mist rolling in and heavy downpours. A casual glance to the side and you may see an eagle swooping on some prey, or a monkey swinging from a tree. The Tibetan influence of peace does seem to have filtered through the land though: all the locals greet us as we walk past. And some people clearly lose themselves under the spell of a slow pace of life up here.

To finish though, I will leave you with some of the yoga teachings we have experienced. Lots of our time has been filled with yoga (three hours every morning). Pedro, our disciplinarian teacher, has been a harsh task master. He has also however demanded continuous and unrelenting attention to the ass. Yes, the meeting of our butts, awareness of our butts touching on the inside and squeezing of the cheeks is something I can now reliably tell you is very yogic.

I will also always remember his wise words: Look, look - use your eyes! That is why you have eyes and not potatoes!

And finally... a monk on a mobile:

Delhi-McLeod Ganj-Dharamkot

So now 4 or 5 days in and have mostly started to catch up with sleep after about 4 sleepless nights either side of leaving the UK. We’re still semi-narcoleptic - with T ready to nap every hour and a half, a bit like a 6ft newborn, bless him -  but have started to ease into things in Dharamkot, a village just above McLeod Ganj at Dharamsala in Himachal Pradesh, northern India. Things are pretty peaceful for the most part and I’m glad to have picked it for our initial 10 days of chilling out, to shake off work and pre-travel stresses and generally ease into India, where we’ll be spending the next 3 months. Having hit the plane already shattered, the long flight via Doha got us into Delhi at around 4am on Friday morning and it was almost 6am when we reached Wongdhen House, a guesthouse I’d booked in Majnu ka Tilla, the Tibetan colony in the north of the city. Never having stayed in this area before, I picked it to simplify getting tickets for the Friday overnight bus to Dharamsala, as they leave fairly regularly.

I love the taxi ride through Delhi at night. This is only my third such arrival but as there’s been a gap of first 10 years and then 4 years, between my trips here, it’s been as exciting every time: first as my initial, slightly bewildering glimpse into the sountry as an 18 year old and the last twice as a reminder of that, re-kindling my excitement and jogging my memory for all the things you forget about a place between visits. The smells, the heat even before dawn. Weird, suddenly familiar banalities like the height and style of a pavement and kerb, the route through town from the airport, skimming Connaught Place and up alongside the back of the Red Fort. Dozens of people asleep at the roadsides: cycle-rickshaw drivers sleeping in their carts, others stretched out forgotten and exposed on kerbsides and in tunnels, perhaps ahead of a day's work, perhaps not; just as jarring and shocking to European eyes as the first time you see it.

Wongdhen House, to be honest, was more rundown than I’d expected for the price, though I’m out of practice and easing back into this. In the sense of re-acclimatising to the balance to be struck between seeking value for money even in basic accommodation and Not Being an Arse about Haggling Over Every Rupee. (And the staggering scale of the latter among (relatively) wealthy foreigners travelling through India can only be experienced to be believed.) Basic never bothers me in rooms, within reason, but rudimentary cleanliness increasingly does compared to when I was younger – as does basic security, privacy and sound-proofing, as an intermittent insomniac. On the latter points I’m definitely more of a stickler now. But the value for money thing is more of an issue too and I’m not entirely sure Wongdhen House delivered there, though will be able to tell better when we’ve spent some more time in Delhi.

So after a humid, pretty squalid 4 hours semi-sleep there (and hoping I hadn’t already appalled T too much as an India-newbie) we headed out to hit Delhi for a few hours before the night bus. We spent a few hours padding the streets of Old Delhi, including the stunning - and really quite serene despite its crowds - Jama Masjid mosque near the Fort which I’d never visited before and was really struck by. Even if it did bring my first few rounds of guerilla Blonde-Tourist-Lady photography (never my favourite India game but generally well-meaning and, for the most part, curiosity rather than lasciviously-led).  

As shattered as we were it was all a bit of a blur, wandering from bazaar to bazaar, thali to cola stop, with our first couple of rickshaw trips – the second of which was a rather manic dash in several wrong directions, with intricate 3-point turns across one-way highways, in the charge of a driver guessing his way. Dropping us off triumphantly, we’d paid up and crossed before realising it was entirely the wrong place. So the usual glorious jumble - which anywhere else might feel like wrong starts but here works out as all in a day’s ramble.

The bus stand for overnight Dharamsala departures is a track round to the side of the main Majnu ka Tilla strip, with a mix of tourists and locals returning home, many of who were Tibetans returning from recent protests in Delhi where a number of monks are currently on hunger strike and others had been jailed, we were told by an English expat who had made her home in Dharamsala 25 years ago after a literary sabbatical that never ended. Only an hour later, due to construction work blocking the bus access route, which required the tour operators and drivers to pay off the police, we pulled out and on our way. We’d ended up on the back row, after some deliberation; notoriously terrible seats on bumpy routes, we were reluctant to delay the journey by holding out.

And it wasn’t so very bad, as our first overnighter - though after several sleepless nights and barely 15 hours into India (still hoping the exhausted boy wasn’t regretting getting himself into this), the 10 hours of springing up and down over every lurch under a leaking air-con unit were still a little tough going and it was pretty great to finally pull into McLeod Ganj – pouring rain, swirling mist and beautiful mountain-scapes – at 7.30am. 

A brief taxi up the hill and we arrived in the little hamlet of Dharamkot, a thigh-strengthening 20 min walk up the winding road: one of India’s many Little Israels, making for great hummus and brilliant travel infrastructure amidst the regular ebb and flow of Indian/Tibetan life – if a bit too much 2am chatter requiring some sturdy earphones for old codgers like us...

And after a few chais, a mammoth sleep and one guesthouse move, these have been our views since Sunday morning. A long way from Leyton...

On the brink

Obviously I ended up hitting the road for 7 months of travel  - somewhat over-ambitiously, from both a geographical and financial perspective, aiming to take in some 8 countries - with no clean underwear packed. At all.  Because, you know, that's the real difference between 20-something and 30-something backpacking. You're so much more prepared. No - the real difference is, while once you just had to save up a few months for a cheap ticket, then pack up your (student/home/early flat-share) room before jacking in your temp or part-time job, by this stage you've accumulated some serious stuff: grown-up jobs; flats and mortgages; more direct debits than you're able at look in the face; untold amounts of kitchenware; mango-wood coffee tables requiring much more careful handling than the philistine jostling into a storage unit, precariously balanced between squash bags of duvets and HBO boxsets, than they inevitably receive...

You get the picture. But please don't get me wrong, we're not out to cast off the materialistic shackles of our smug first world woes (if anything happens to that coffee table I will go APE) and we're definitely not off to Find Ourselves, god knows what horrors would lie in store. But we have been far too settled for a while now, very tied to the 9-5 and not very satisfactorily so for either of us. So we're on some adventures for a bit, that's all. To hike up mountains, watch unfamiliar suns rise and fall, ride endless trains and buses, meet weird and wonderful characters we'd never otherwise have stumbled across and drink untold cups of chais, lassis, pisco sours and whatever else the journey throws at us.

So... the best way to hit the ground running was clearly to plan a manic fortnight of packing up our flat, organising its rental. storage drop-offs, farewell drinks, plant-relocations, etc, whilst working the day-jobs right up to the last minute and cramming in a whistle-stop 5 days up north for more goodbyes and assurances of our absolute trustworthiness on matters of Not Getting Killed/Maimed/Kidnapped. Anyway – no underwear. And half of my painfully-culled rucksack ‘capsule wardrobe’ (who am I kidding?) was similarly dirty when we eventually dragged ourselves under-slept (for reasons of varying legitimacy re. travel/work/excessive wine and Southern Comfort consumption) and generally feeling a bit under-prepared to Healthrow at 6am last Thursday.

So what made the cut? Well, in some respects the whole palava is unspeakably more sophisticated and organised than when I first tottered off to India 14 years ago, carrying half my world on my back but somehow no guidebook or email account. Bin bags, for instance. I now carry bin bags EVERYWHERE because they’re useful for EVERYTHING. And there’s a plastic wallet stuffed with plasters, bandages, purification tablets and every other pill known to man (no, not those ones). 

Broadly:

- sleeping bags for cold hills and the like

- hiking books for same

- clothes – varied but streamlined (in my head): couple of warm tops, 3 trousers, one skirt, t-shirts and vests, few scarves for making myself look a bit like a Proper Lady rather than a scuzzy hobo.

- medicinal kits with the usual from  painkillers and plasters to Immodium and  rehydration sachets

- various other sundry from which I’ll spare you. Do ask me if you have a penchant for a list or a timetable. My lists have sub-lists.

Finally, not just binbags for the arrested development 30-something backpacker, oh no! I have also brought some jewellery with which to adorn myself , a travel watercolour set (thanks nfp!) and  - I kid you not – a small bottle of Chanel Chance. I am not a women who wears much make-up or who successfully negotiates a heel without a wedding being involved; I never keep receipts or have much clue what’s happening in my bank account, and I have spent most of the last decade trying to pass off Can’t be Naffed hair styling as Purposefully Unkempt. But I will take my Chanel backpacking and I will not be ashamed. And T has brought proper button-up shirts, a Kindle and bare-foot running shoes. So we are on it, kids. ON IT!

Waiting for some awesome text, but in the meantime, photos:

The Itinerants