Manali

Independence Day in Delhi was celebrated with kites, cakes, and sandbag gun emplacements.  While the cakes were decent, I wanted the hell out.

The pickpocketing had been the final straw on my tour of the large northern cities and I needed to get away. The mountains of the Himalaya, with their Raj-era Hill stations, seemed like heaven compared to the scorching dusty streets of Delhi in August.

I celebrated by watching ‘Gandhi’ on TV and eating a pensive Afghan breakfast with my refugee neighbors.  There was a bus leaving for Manali at 6pm, hopefully with my name on it. The ticket had been bought and paid for before being lifted along with the rest in the Chandi Chowk bazaar.  Stay in bed and wallow, or pack, walk, bicycle, metro, tuktuk, to the bus station only to be turned away for not having my paper and have to come all the way back.  If I took too long I would probably lose my room to another refugee.

A one ruppee coin was flipped. Heads or Tails not being accurate to this minting, it was ‘thumbs up’ or ‘lion’.  The lion came up and I began the process of packing, as I had on average every three days for the last six months. It’s a mindless process by this point, and it can be done up in about 5mins, allowing for maximum sleeping in.

Riding on the back of the hotel owners electric scooter, we dodge crowd’s, and cows, on the way to the Jang Pura metro station.  Which, for a measly 15r, efficiently whisks me across town to the Himachal Pradesh State Bus Terminal. Leaving at 6pm, I take my time to stock up on essentials for the 16hr ride.  Samosas, without chole (garbanzo sauce) unfortunately, for the sake of bus eating. Apples, four big ones for a buck. Bottle of water, bottle of coke, and I was all set.

The ride was as pleasant as one can imagine a rough monsoon rutted road through the mountains can be. Having taken the time to track down the official state bus office in Delhi, a feat due to it’s near ignominy down a tiny side alley, I now rode in style. The AC Volvo bus tore through Independence Day traffic. Our speed indicated we were the biggest thing on the road. Thus entitling us to intimidate other traffic from our path with a blast of our mighty horn.

Bad sign.

It grew dark and with no view out my massive window I retreated into my bootlegged movies. The new episode of ‘Breaking Bad’ waited for me like a gift. If things got real bad, should we roll off a cliff in the Himalayas, while waiting to die or be rescued I could finally see if Hank understood the ‘W.W.’ inscription.

I awoke to a terrifying sight. The sun was rising and it illuminated a sheer drop only inches from the wheels of our still-hurtling bus. Passing police checkpoints and roadside shrines we slowly worked our way through the foothills of the Himalaya.  Snow capped mountains, the likes of which this city boy has never seen, rose into the clouds all around.

If these were just the foothills, it made my knees ache to think of the real thing.  But it was beautiful nonetheless. After the sewage-furnace of Delhi, the alpine chill was a godsend. The equivalent of talking a bus from Vegas to Aspen.

Arriving at dawn in Old Manali was less than thrilling. It was dreary and cold, having either just rained or was about to. I split a tuk with Rachel the Aussie to the top of the mountain so we wouldn’t have to haul our gear in the thin air. Best $.75 I’ve spent. Even at this modest height in the mountains I was feeling the change in air from the steamy soup of Delhi’s slums to the thin charras tinted air of the Kullu valley.

Two things grow prodigiously in the Kullu, apples and ganja.  The apples are picked haphazardly and made into pies and juices.  The ganja is rolled between the hands, often of children, into sticky black lumps of hashish. The famed ‘Manali Cream’, who’s export has spawned so many ‘Locked Up Abroad’ episodes.

Working my way from farm to farm, guesthouse to guesthouse, I hack and duck my way through fields of wild marijuana plants in search of a passable $5 room with a view.  A Nepalese family takes me in and I wind up with hot water, a TV with HBO (once I run the cables), and a balcony for only 300r a night.

Homemade Hard Cider

There’s not much to the town. Even less in low season. Settled by hippies in the sixties, Manali then became an Israeli stronghold. Signs in Hebrew dot the town, and many of the hikers I pass wear what I’ve dubbed the ‘sport-yarmulke’. A mini-yarmulke the size of a coaster strapped to the head with a small string. A strange look, but their way of reminding themselves that even here at the top of the world, god is still above them.

My interests at this point, having crossed the length of the subcontinent from south to north, were simple – relax.  Four months of temples, trains, and tuktuks had blunted my adventurous spirit. I was content to putz around the town from cafe to cafe making friends and proudly playing the ‘brash-american’ in political and historical discussions.

The characters that populated this small mountain town felt plucked straight from a Coen brothers movie.  Japanese Yakuza hash smugglers mingled with pith-helmeted Brits – cheekily trying to relive the Raj-era extravagances.  Everyone moving somewhere else shortly, and wanting to either live in the moment by dangling off a cliff or be completely removed from it over a couple joints in a dank cafe.  I fell smack in the middle.

(Nerd note: The name Yakuza, for the Japanese mafia, comes from an ancient card game named Oichokabu . Ya-ku-za means 8,9,3. The worst possible hand in the game. So this group came to call themselves as the ‘bad-hands’ of society.  Info courtesy of Junichiro. A young smuggler for the mafia I met over a game of chess.)

Content to read on my porch and admire the view I burned through reading material.

Reagan’s autobiography as we’ll as both the Bush’s.

‘War’ by Sebastian Junger. An amazing book about the Afghan war and the psychological effects on the young soldiers manning remote outpost ‘Restrepo’ in the Korengal Valley.

‘American Colossus – Triumph of American Capitalism 1850-1900’. A tough book to read in these times of financial turmoil. It lays out the trajectory that has created, and subsequently destroyed the American economy.

‘Band of Brothers’ by Stephen Ambrose and the accompanying book by Easy Co. Commander Dick Winters. The later is possibly the most succinct tutorial on leadership I’ve read. Doesn’t matter if the objective is destroying the guns at Brecourt on D-Day or running a library, those points are salient.

The Shiva Garden cafe, my favorite hangout due in no small part to the spinach and cheese momos.  Pong, the seven year old waiter, would later run me survival momo’s up the hill to my room when I was sick. The place felt like a pirate hangout, incongruosly dropped into the mountains.  It was great for reading and people watching.

Pong – Bringer of Deliciousness

Master of Karate

I became friendly with an elderly Japanese woman named Ro, who spent her days drinking tea and knitting baby-clothes, pausing only temporarily to roll another spliff. The incongruity of this diminutive gray-haired grandmother knitting baby-booties enveloped in a cloud of hash smoke will stick with me.

Ro introduced me around to various miscreants and malcontents that tend to wind up stuck in places like Manali.  One that I would wind up spending a fair bit of time with was an elderly Indian named Baba-ji.  Meaning ‘father’, Baba was the undisputed elder statesman of the cafe. His seat, tactically picked to be able to holler to pretty girls in the street, was never occupied by anyone else, out of respect.

Baba-ji was, to me, a microcosm of India, embodied in the flesh of one 60yr old with a flowing gray beard.  At the same time spiritual, generous, kind, cheap, and cruel.  He dispensed life’s wisdom to enrapt euro backpackers over gallons of black tea.  A fixer of the highest order, his Rolodex (a pack of business cards bound with a rubber band) could procure anything from trekking guides to 4×4 jeeps, and enough Molly to keep the Israeli New Years party in nearby Kasol humming.

A chameleon, his sharp eye and quick lines belied a seasoned con mans game, hidden only slightly by a disarming Marley shirt.

Watching him work a crowd was like watching DaVinci paint.

He played chess too quickly – far too aggressively. And never won a game, finally accusing me of cheating and storming off. How one can cheat at Chess escapes me.

I finally made my excuses to Baba-ji and Ro, and booked a ticket on the next bus out of the mountains. It was a sad farewell to a town that had nursed body and soul of a man near broken by the rest of it.

I wouldn’t be without at least one more trial, one of my own making nonetheless, but with a few weeks of recuperation I was ready to step back into the fray.

Exfiltration. Manali back to Delhi via the death road (FML), Delhi to Varanasi by train, Varanasi to Calcutta by train again, then the big bird out to Bangkok. Easy. Just need to get out of these mountains…