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.”
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