“I grow into these mountains like a moss. I am bewitched. The blinding snow peaks and the clarion air, the sound of earth and heaven in the silence, the requiem birds, the mythic beasts, the flags, great horns, and old carved stones, the rough-hewn Tartars in their braids and homespun boots, the silver ice in the black river, the Kang, the Crystal Mountain.” – The Snow Leapard.
We climb higher. It’s dryer. There are soldiers in defense of the disputed border with
We’ve left
PHOTOS. AT breakfast, the newspaper reads “Glacier Melt Threat to Kashmir Area.” One World.
This morning we launch from
The movement through time and space is a destination in and of itself.
The first stop is the Sonamarg Meadow of Gold. Lush and majestic, it’s beautiful.
Srinagaris a Muslim city in a Hindu country. It’s Ramadan, the most sacred holiday for Muslims. Fared, the hotel owner, is fasting during the day and invites us to visit the city’s mosque. We visit the largest, which holds an incredible 33,000 worshipers and conducts five twenty-minute prayers a day.
It’s a site to behold. The repetitive movement, standing, sitting, prostrating, the uniform sex of men, the orderly lines and synchronized communal movement— there is a comfort. Considering that Islam broke away with Ishmael, and the Jews with Isaac, there is common ground. But it’s fractured by historic animosity, mistrust, bad blood, the same fight over ethnic and geographic superiority and domination.
At all the Mosques visited in
When they discover that I am an American, there is even a glimmer of realization that the bridge between us is not so divided. I cannot be an abstract enemy when I am barefoot in a white shirt, wearing a Muslim cap. President Obama was mocked by Republicans for bowing out of courtesy to President Hu Jintao of
I feel like a lone ambassador. I am.
At the same time, the Muslims I met at Mosques were more than accommodating to any desire I might have to become Muslim. I was introduced to a French convert and told about its benefits. But this is no different than walking into a church anywhere in the world. Upon leaving for the day, Fared implies the superiority of Islam practice and custom; call it arrogance or pride. “Islam doesn’t have a monopoly on prayer,” I reply smiling.
The geography of the
There are no shortage of houseboats – but they are empty. Tourists have been scared away by the political instability. Which is a shame, because it’s beautiful here.
We take a boat ride with the owner’s teenage son at dusk. The hotel boat has been in the family for three generations. ($10/each/night). He is restless and board. His future is uncertain. He talks about the regions sordid past: Kashmir was an orphan after the British granted
Today the army has orders to “shot to kill.” Suspicion is all that’s required. There is an obvious mistrust on part of the residence. The young man’s invective around
For anyone who wants to know how and why young men join the Jihad, this is your answer. I’m looking at his serious face, set against the fading
There has always been the dominator and the oppressor, master and the slave, winner and loser. If you are not on top you are on bottom. The hierarchy is part of our animal nature. It’s a quest for survival and power. Eat or be eaten. Except unlike animals, we no longer mammoth jungle predators. We fight one another.
I ponder.
Americans only know what it’s like to be on top. We are the arbiters of peace and stability in the world. But we look out for our interests in ways that appears hypocritical to the rest of the world as we stand behind our red and blue stripes. The larger question is who’s freedom are we talking about, and at who’s expense?
Depart the next morning, back to Pathankot, just south of the state of
The pastoral scenery belies the animosity between
But to be covering this ground, so close to the global conflicts that make headlines, the tension is palpable as glum-faced Indian soldiers eye me at each successive check point, barricades with small holes revealing a rifle or worse. In these places, history is being written and violent outbursts can erupt anytime.
With that said, Kashmir has been relatively calm the last few years, but it’s a tenuous peace between the Indian army and Muslim Indians who side with Pakistan, and few visitors venture this far East, causing devastating economic consequences to the region.
2 am. Arrive evening.
After the typical hand-off to a hotel owner and the insistence that the temple is closed – it’s open 24 hours a day – we secure a windowless room for 400 rubies ($8) just down the street. (Travel will test your resolve and negotiation skills.) The city’s visitors are middle-class, educated Sikh, another connection to the sacred temple near
My friend is not feeling well. I don a white shirt and black pants, head scarf, and head for the temple complex.
It’s Sunday night, an especially holy day, which says something. The temple complex has a humble cafeteria and dormitory for pilgrims and an internet café, where I read up on some history. Most Sikhs are Punjabis and come from the
The devotion is palpable. So many faiths in praise of the eternal, each with its own revered holy men and women, sacred objects, and places of revered worship. Symbols and signs pointing, I would like to think, to something similar. But history tells a different story. It’s only ten miles to the tense
We live on one world; but the people on it occupy infinite ideological realms. Multicultural tolerance, aka pluralism, is a quant liberal invention a million miles from here. Extreme sects, inspired almost always by religious fervor, will fight and die for the domination of their world view. It is no wonder that
It’s 2 a.m. but it could be the afternoon but for the darkness. I nestle myself on the water’s edge and strike up a conversation with two middle-class students in computer science, who attend a nearby university. We talk about career (“Microsoft”) business (“what do you do?”) and
The young men invite me to join them for a round through the temple complex, which sits in the center of the water, with a land bridge connecting it to the outer square. We join the crowd (3 a.m., mind you). At the temple’s bottom are musicians and priests. Upstairs is a room where a man reads from a Alice-in-Wonderland-size book, a composite of all the prophets teaching, a composite text developed by a secession of teachers beginning in the 1600s, to form the Sikh Sect, called Sri Guru Granth Sahib. After a ride on their motorcycle through the dark and flat plain
After a few days in Dharamsala, what the Dali Lama has put together is impressive. It’s literally an active library of culture, full of all the seeds to build a nation if it ever finds a permanent home in
Academies of music, art, dance, philosophy, history. Advocacy and media and educational NGOs to serve its people. The reality is that all this depends on the financial support of outsiders and foreign governments.
The Tibetans have a great deal of pride and integrity and it shows in everything: discipline to religion and practice, tradition, living with self-reliance, schooling, the leadership of the Dali Lama to appeal to the world for his people and befriend influential leaders in government, media and entertainment.
The museum at the Dali Lama’s temple and residence is sobering. The devote Tibetans are pawns at the hands of a humiliating Chinese, who themselves were shamed by the Japanese and nineteenth century colonists. Oppressive and oppressed. It all depends on what side of the fence you’re on.
The situation appears intractable.
There is something about trains I love. The silk-and-rock movement under your feet, the click-and-clack rhythm, the land passing by at ground level, the forward motion, the ability to walk about.
It’s a window into a place, with gentle geographic transitions that provide the traveler with continuity and context. It’s the preferred way to travel when available.
As transit goes, it’s green, too. Nothing about being buckled to a steel tube at 30,000 feet compares.
Riding a train in
McLeod Ganj, Dharamsala, Himachal Pradesh
At the bottom of the mountain is McLeod Ganj, the main city. Up the hill is Dharamsala, a refuge for some 100,000 Tibetans, ground zero for Tibetan Buddhist culture, tradition and scholarship, and home to the Dali Lama.
It’s a lovely and visitor friendly hill town nestled on a ridge, full of monks and intellectuals, an oasis of all things
We are parked next to one of several NGOs in town devoted to those who fled Tibet-China, leaving family and their homeland behind, without the hope of returning. The Center shows documentary films at night, in the hope of encouraging Westerns to exert political pressure on their government. Unfortunately, with
The politics and social strive are real and current, and present a prelude to my upcoming
I volunteer for one its conversationalist English classes. One female monk has been in McLeod for years, the other lived in
Overnight bus from Rishikesh enroute to Dharamsala. Hold on to seat, no bench. Pitch black. I stop counting roller coaster curves at one hundred. Impossible to sleep.
The narrow, winding roads at this altitude tightly hug the cliff. Curves reveal deep valleys that have no visible bottom; there are sometimes no guardrails. One can understand why there are numerous fatalities every year. It’s treacherous and brilliant.
We pass Indians everywhere rebuilding the road because this is no place to build a road. These workers use no equipment. No, they chip away at massive rock boulders by hand, piece by piece. It might take a yuga to dissolve. But what’s the rush. Time has a different meaning up here.
Boys run along the mountain road eager to accept pocket change from the car window. A straggler runs with the taxi and catches one rupee. He smiles wide as the sun, mirroring a thumbs up. Girls are coy and avert contact.
We stop at Chopti, a tiny village on the long way back to Rishikesh.. From here it’s a four mile hike to the highest shrine in
“We take for granted that instinct for survival, fear of death, must separate us from the happiness of pure and uninterrupted experience, in which body, mind, and nature are the same. And this debasement of our vision, the retreat from wonder, the backing away like lobsters from free-swimming life into safe crannies, the desperate instinct that our life passes unlived, is reflected in proliferation without joy, corrosive money rot, the gross befouling of the earth and air and water from which we came.” – The Snow Leapard
Muscles and joints ache. Short of breath. The vistas and devotion, the discovery and beauty, the timelessness of this place, invoke exhilaration. Strangely I feel both like a child and an old man.
Badarinth has inspired.
Arrive Badarinth Hill Station, the last stop at one of three sacred hill stations. A man greets our taxi by marking its front in sacred orange before blessing each of us on the forehead. This place makes spiritual Rishikesh child’s play.
Sadhus are everywhere. Lights flicker and all the town can go dark. The electricity is sporadic. Kirtan, devotion singing with tables and flutes, can be heard in all distant directions, where men dance in revelry and women sink into pillows and blankets line the floor. pay witness to a conservatively dressed Indian woman wearing a head scarf moving ever so slowly in place.
At the main temple, along the river, is a spring which feeds a hot pool said to provide blessing and purification.
Pilgrims come here from across
At this attitude, in these waters, surrounded by the most sincerest form of devotion, beside a mountain river, hot steam rising, a dense fog streaming through the valley, the mind becomes quiet. There is harmony. The next morning I behold this Shangri La.
“The wildwood brings on mild nostalgia, not for home or place, but for lost innocence—the paradise lost that, as Proust said, is the only paradise. Childhood is full of mystery and promise, and perhaps the life fear comes when all the mysteries are laid open, when what we thought we wanted is attained. It is just at the moment of seeming fulfillment that we sense, irrevocable betrayal, like a great wave rising silently behind us.” – The Snow Leapard
Back in the small village of Ghagria, Rose and I discover a nature photographer. He sadly describes how quickly animal and flower diversity is shrinking, even in these remote regions, that his last encounter with an Indian tiger was 2007. But the most dramatic impact was the Western press article we encounter at the nature center: “Himalayan Glaciers Gone by 2020.”
Ten years, I think incredulously. The Himalayas are not just the province of India but Nepal, Pakistan, China, Burma, Thailand and Vietnam. Its mountains and glaciers feed every the major Asia rivers, including the Ganges, Indus, Mekong, Yellow Yangzi. The research comes from legit sources. It calls the situation devastating across every continent and will impact the world’s most vulnerable one billion people who depend on river basins fed by glacier and snow melt.
Later I encounter these stories in the American press. The world is getting small, and quick.
http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1944167,00.html
http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1929071_1929070_1945667,00.html
What’s most disconcerting is the impact on hydroelectricity, the largest green energy source in the world next to coal. Ironically, the melting glaciers mean that the production of electricity will increase, but the obvious implication is what happens after most of the ice has melted? Laos, Bolivia, Peru, Columbia and Ecuador – the poorest, most dependent are especially vulnerable. In Europe, 20 percent of green energy is hydro; China is the biggest producer in the world. It’s the same dilemma. The situation gets worse exponentially and by the time the situation becomes impossible to reverse in short order.
Behavior and economics must change is the refrain. But consider the challenge as illustrated by a minor observation. Past that small village of Ghagria the trail forks. One path leads to the entrance of the Valley of Flowers, the other continues to the pilgrim site. One can’t help but notice what the swami said about Indians living on another plain, for the trail to the nature reserve is sparsely populated with secular, educated Indians and a few Westerns, whereas the religious trail is pack full of devotes. Religion and faith vs. nature and science. To my mind it’s One World; to that of many Earth inhabitants, devote Christians among them, there are numerous “worlds,” and the one we inhabit may not be the most important.
In the high mountains of the Himalayans I meet older men who walk from temple village to temple village. They themselves say they are on a pilgrimage. “I complete my worldly duties,” said an erudite father-turned-yogi. “Now I seek.” The Aborigine call it a “walkabout,” where there isn’t a destination per say. You are said to keep walking until you are whole again. Muslims and Indians call it a pilgrimage, and they are everyone, sometimes in colorful packs along train platforms, heading to a sacred location that symbolizes spiritual wholeness.
Pilgrimage usually calls for a journey to a holy site associated with gods, saints, or heroes, or to a natural setting imbued with spiritual power, or to a revered temple to seek counsel. To people the world over, pilgrimage is a spiritual exercise, an act of devotion to find a source of healing, a journey of risk and renewal, crossing boundaries literal and metaphoric, touching the land and feeling the earth beneath your feet. It’s process of regeneration and purification. The journey is almost always difficult, or it wouldn’t be.
Westerns have to create these metaphors for themselves. “Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t know where they’re going,” I’ve heard. Contradictions. You have to lose yourself in order to find it; solitude refines love; the road is the destination; yield to receive; be open to what comes your way.
The next day we arrive at Govindghat, the base of a steep hike to the small village of Ghagria, where we’ll spend the night, and then hike to the even more remote Valley of Flowers, one of India’s few national parks, the following day.
We meet Rose, a UK student, and begin the grueling ascent. Along the trail are mostly Seak pilgrims on their way not to the park but a sacred temple past Ghagria. It’s extraordinary to witness Indians of all ages making the climb, some one small step at a time, young kids and old men and grandmothers, something you’d never see in the American outback. I meet lots of friendly young people along the way, eager to have their picture taken and ask questions. I talk on the trail with three young Indians about arranged marriage and sex (their obvious preoccupation). Premarital sex just doesn’t exist for an Indian man, but for prostitution. One complained bitterly that even after dating a girl for a while “she won’t even offer a kiss.” Sex workers in Delhi, where he’s from, are “lowest of low,” no money to eat, they begin their horrid life as young as fourteen.
Meanwhile, a procession of pilgrims make their way past, chanting and carrying something sacred. Just another day in India. OM MANI PADME HUM, Jewel in the Heart of the Lotus, the Buddhist dedication to compassion and the divine within.
The park boasts 520 flowers, the Himalayan black bear, musk deer, brown bears and various butterflies. And the Khulia Garvya Glacier, which is melting at a pace never before witnessed by the elders. It’s the most pristine India I will probably ever see.
Reading Peter Mathusens’ The Snow Leopard, about his trekking the Himalayas in the 1960s, a travel classic:
“This stillness to which all returns, this is reality, and soul and sanity have no more meaning here than a gust of snow; such transience and insignificance are exalting, terrifying, all at once, like the sudden discovery, in meditation, of one’s own transparence. Snow mountains, more than sea or sky, service as a mirror to one’s own true being, utterly still, utterly clear, a void, an Emptiness without life or sound that carries in Itself all life, all sound.”
AT dusk, along the beginning of the sacred Ganges, fed by the Himalayan mountain waters of the rainy season, the same river I would later encounter hundred of miles downstream in Varanasi, was just another sacred ceremony involving music, prayer, chanting and purification, alongside the towering figure of Lord Shiva, the all powerful Supreme destroyer God. Mesmerized by the chanting and raging river, I am reminded of Arjuna, the hero from the Bhagavad Gita, who triumphs over his unwieldy senses in his quest to see the world as it really is, without psychological filers and the ego needed to cope in this world.
Flowers and small candles set sail on banana leafs. As in most places, you’d think it’s for the tourists. Not here. This is India. Countless manifestations of Gods and Goddesses are venerated everywhere, everyday, by hundreds of millions of devote Hindus. Religion is a verb. It’s not an empty European cathedral or a Native American museum. To be a guest in India is to take part in a living tradition. It’s this authenticity, so unlike well trodden Asian destinations, that make India unlike anything else. It’s the real deal. Indians are as devote as Muslims, which help explain the conflict in Punjab and Kashmir, which skirt Pakistan, that I will visit later.
At a spiritual level, the Ganges is the very definition of Northern India – life, purity, flow. At the more practical level, by the time the Ganges hits the plains, it becomes one of the most – maybe the most – polluted rivers in the world. It is a repository for all things – garbage and sorrow, crematory and vegetable wash, urinal and bathtub.
He goes by the name Swami. He is Myonk and his brother Yash’s teacher. He arrives downstairs. We was here to see if we could help him connect with some American patrons. “It’s not the best time to be looking for investors.” We talk at length. He is erudite and professorial. He is a real person. I am amused by the chance encounter. It’s not everyday you hand a swami a business card. He alludes to “one world” and “from the source,” which I innocently take as a good sign as that was to be the name of this blog.
He talks about India districts in terms of chakras: Kerala at the base, Tamil Nadu the belly, Varanasi throat, Rishikesh the third eye. He believes that “global karma” is playing out but that the planet is on the verge of change, that the days of Western gross materialism will end. India society is resistant to authority and regulation, and Indians live on a plain that is not only material. In other words, trashing your neighborhood and country doesn’t pull with Indians. I push pack. He resists our questions about balancing individual liberty and the global need to protect the environment. He obviously is critical of the West but his prescription don’t provide me with much comfort.
A week later we meet at his place, not far from where we are staying.
He is a talented artist seeking to set up a creative arts and tantric yoga center. As a Kundalini Yogi, I discover, he believes that the mindful use of the senses provide a path to liberation. He advocates for passion, something “society beats out of you and discourages as eccentric and self-involved.” To illustrate the difference between East and West, he tells a story of how a cow was run over on a German highway and made headlines and how, in India, a bus crashed over a Himalayas cliff to avoid hitting a bovine, killing thirty-five people. Indeed, this is planet India.
We are living in a crude period in the evolution of the universe, a perpetual cycle from ameba ignorance to human liberation and enlightenment, he says. We’re at the tail end of the Dwapara Yuga, on the cusp of entering a more enlightened period. The world is getting small, he says. However you arrive at it, his diagnosis is sensible. How many of the world’s six billion will make it through the eye of the needle is much less certain.
PHOTOS. A day in Rishikesh, the once cultural epicenter of Indian higher consciousness and 1960s folklore. Today it’s as much a historic destination as a place to learn yoga and dropout in orange ropes. But there’s plenty of authentic India to behold. A Sadhu on the back of a motorcycle. The chagrined smile of a young Brahman heading to her temple. Children walking in mobs. A cow blocking pedestrians and devilish monkeys in the image of Hanuman, the Indian monkey God. A clown swami greeting restaurant patrons.
Walking across the pedestrian bridge, beholding the Ganges, its people and custom are inseparable, its history older than even China. These are the highest mountains in the world, where the Upanishads and Yoga Sutras were written, the world’s oldest sacred texts about how to live an integrated life, long before Christ, Moses, Mohammad, Socrates or Confucius set foot on the earth.
The Ganges is fresh, as the high mountains are just upstream but the water is brown and murky. I decide to join my fellow Indian bathers. Three teenage girls bath with all their clothes, giggling. The boys arrest their clothes, but for their shorts, and swing mud at one another. The tribe of kids admire Nathen’s muscles and tattoos. The complications between men and women are strained by ions of patriarchy.
Take boat across the river (10 rupees, 25 cents) to the other side. The joy is palpable. The mountains and river and incenses and tradition is woven together as if an outdoor temple. Everything resonates as sacred.
The mid-day monsoon rain pounds the city, breaking the humidity and heat. It’s brief and dramatic as we lunch along the river at the “Organik Café,” an upscale yoga studio and spa catering to Westerns who seek the dubious first class path to Enlightenment. Who can blame them, me too, if only it was that easy. The place is empty. Business is down. As I would discover everywhere, the recession has followed me to the other side of the world and is global. Places so dependent on visitors feel it hard. Read in the Hindu Times that the bestselling book, Eat, Pray, Love, about a divorced woman who rediscovers herself on the road – the pray part India – is being made into a movie staring Julia Roberts. I smile. East meets West in the most bizarre ways.
The few Westerns I pass resist eye contact in a way that reminds me of the alienation I feel among Americans. Getting and spending we lay waist our powers, little we see in nature that is ours, opined Wordsworth.
Indian celebrates 60 years of independence from the British
in 2007, not long before Mao founded the People’s Republic of China. No country
it might be argued has more valiantly pursued the promise of democracy, messy
as it is.
India is struggling to be one nation – like China, its diverse ethnic regions could make up many nations.
Against the odds of staggering poverty, religious passion, linguistic pluralism, regional separatism, caste injustice and resource scarcity, Indians have lifted themselves largely by their own sandals to become an emerging global power. Its Gandhi-inspired nonviolent struggle for independence was followed by mayhem and bloodletting, dynastic power plays, assassinations, military defeats and victory, political leaders as saints and sinners. Its an epic story commensurate with its epic Bhagavad Gita.
My friend and I land in the darkness, heat and humidity of
New Delhi at some dizzying jet lagged nether hour, neither night or day. With
the aid of a 3-wheel-toy-boy “tuk-tuk,” we opt for the aptly named Hotel Om near
the airport for an early morning flight to Rishikesh. The back streets are
clear, closed and quiet. The living standard is lower by degrees. dark
carbon-dirt soot blankets the streets. We pass the Radison Hotel, secured by an
armed guard because we fit the profile. It’s air-coned and luxurious inside, as
would be a Western Hotel. The contrast is stark. Herein lies the first contrast
between the first world and the developing one. Based on energy use and
consumption. Glad I’m here – but why and what I know not.
In the light of day appears the frenetic and chaotic India I was last familiar with. With gusto and adrenaline, head to the new domestic airport for a one hour flight on Kingfisher to near Rishikesh, where we meet a friend named Myonk, a young educated guy resisting an arranged marriage who runs his family’s $3.50/night accommodation.
Begin contemplating
explorations into the high Himalayas, the possibilities of Leh and Kashmir, areas
Myonk has explored by motorbike, ubiquitous in Asia.
It’s 11 p.m., on the rooftop of the hotel, the same full moon over mountains, over Rishikesh. Need to disconnecting to world back home. Take it easy. Adjust to time zone. Now, here, breaking boundaries and limitations.
Burlington, Vermont, Tibet Inn
Tonight is a full moon. The tent and camping gear and car are stored away. Now it’s just me and my pack. In a nod to India, my first destination, my head is shaved – the raw openness feels about right – and I am lodging at the Tibet Inn, not something I expected to find in the north woods of New England. The owned is a Tibetan exile who immigrated to America because America opened her gracious doors to the politically vulnerable. He has pictures of him with Senator Leahy of Vermont and the Dali Lama all over the lobby. I smile.a useful definition of travel:
Vagabonding – n. (1)
The act of leaving behind the orderly world to travel independently for an
extended period of time. (2) A privately meaningful manner of travel that
emphasizes creativity, adventure, awareness, simplicity, discovery,
independence, realism, self-reliance, and the growth of the spirit. (3) A
deliberate way of living that makes freedom to travel possible.
More than anything, it’s a perspective and attitude. About rediscovering the magic in everyday life, about bringing adventure to the mundane, about discovering foreign people and places, about learning to live a little like a child again, about being an explorer and life-long learner, breaking old habits, pondering life, and feeling the joy and excitement to live on this one world.
If you have traveled like this, you know the feeling. If you haven’t, this amusing video can give you a taste of the intoxicating, mind-expanding excitement and bond with humanity that once experienced will change your life forever and make you a citizen of the world (thank you Geoff):
The future horizon has narrowed to the next 72 hours –departure
to Chicago for New Delhi. When do I
arrive, how will I get to a hotel, when does the flight leave the next morning
for Rishikesh? I know not what lies before me. I am nervous, like how an astronaut
might feel before lift off or an European explorer felt before departing port
for brave new worlds. Months later, in the heart of sweltering Bangkok, a
British expat implored me to Seize the world before it seizes you. So it shall be.
