last day in dharamsala

okay, it's been hard to decide what to do next, and to leave this place. it's been very comfortable (although the town is starting to feel very small, same walks by the same shops and sights every day), there's so much coffee in town, and the inertia is hitting us hard. maybe there's more inertia at higher altitudes, i don't know.
but i think we're set to leave tomorrow. another couple days of crazy travel, with paradise waiting at the end (if the fates allow...).
we're going to take a public bus up to Jammu, a 5 hour, relatively flat ride, from what i'm told, then we take a shared cab up to Srinigar in Kashmir. We've got leads on 2 houseboats. one is farooq, brother of bashir, whom we met here in dharamsala. he owns a shop here, i started talking to him, and he's got a houseboat on dal lake. he called his brother and they're ready for us, they even have flowers for our room because they know we're on our honeymoon. and as a backup, baba, our hotel manager from the Ladies' Venture, has family with a houseboat up there too, and i've got his number. (it's great having a phone here.) i think baba's place will be cheaper than farooq's, but farooq's is still relatively inexpensive and relatively more luxurious, so we'll probably start there. plus his brother bash was so nice, i know they'll make us feel like family. these houseboats stays are very homey, eating with the family, which sounds very nice.
kashmir is pretty much 100% muslim, they say it feels like iran or afghanistan as far as that goes, which i'm very much looking forward to. all the kashmiris i've met so far have been super sweet and hospitable. plus, ramadan starts tomorrow, which is a great time to go, festival time, with feasts after sunset every night. should be a very different experience, another adventure. i've always wanted to go to kashmir and finally it's safe to do so.
we're going to enjoy one last day here in dharamsala and then head up, stay there about a week, and then figure out how to get back down, and make our way to mumbai to start my work there.
by the way, the dogs here have been quite a challenge. dharamsala is where i was bit by a rabid dog 14 years ago, and while i'm skittish about dogs everywhere in india, especially so here. the first night we were out late they were running around wildly, there are so many street dogs, it really freaked me out. i think i may have hid behind heather once or twice (not exactly throwing her to the wolves but instinctually not far off). plus the streets are steep and narrow, especially if there's a car or motorcycle passing, so there's sometimes no place to hide from them. but a group of european veterinarians just arrived here to spay and neuter the dogs and take care of the sick ones, and the dogs do look a little healthier than last time. i cringe when i see tourists bending down to pet them, but it's been okay, and i guess it's helping me deal with the fear a bit.
okay that's all for now. see you in the kashmir valley! i'll take pix there, for sure...

what's that bright yellow thing in the sky?

the sun came out today, all the grey clouds cleared up. we hiked up to dharamkot, the next town up, with a visit to the Tushita meditation center, where i did a 10 day meditation retreat 14 years ago. it's so cool seeing a place after so long, i remembered it, but it hardly feels like the same me, but then it does.
it's so hard to leave here, but i think we're going in a day or so. up to the vale of kashmir, and its capital city of srinigar, to stay on a houseboat on dal lake. it's supposed to be one of the most beautiful places in the world...

chillin' in d'sala

we're still in dharamsala, relaxing here, eating good food, sleeping a lot, recharging our batteries. it's still monsoony up here, and since we're so high up, the clouds lie low like fog, and it rains a little bit each day. not raining now though.
just posted a buncha new pix at facebook. no captions yet, they are forthcoming. these should all be public links, friend or not.
kids, a chicken and a bat
Udaipur
Jaisalmer Fort
camels and more
and a slug

enjoy!!

An Oasis in the Sky

We’re now in Dharamsala, in the Dhauladhar range of the Himalaya, at an elevation of 1770 meters (5800 feet). Dharamsala, being in the mountains, has different neighborhoods at different elevations, and we’re actually a little bit above the Indian town of Dharamsala, in McCloud Ganj, named after the Englishman who settled it as a British garrison in the 1850s. (When westerners say Dharamsala, they really mean the Mccloud Ganj neighborhood.) It was a tiny village until 1960 when the Dalai Lama took refuge here after the devastating Chinese crackdown on Tibet. There are more Tibetans (and Westerners) here than Indians, and the town has a quiet, friendly, comfortable feel. There are cafés and movie houses (where they show Western movies on DVD on televisions, some big-screen, for a tiny entrance fee; I might go see The Reader today) and Tibetan handicraft shops and fantastic little restaurants. There are also great bookstores and libraries and centers for Tibetan refugees with museums and information about their plight. And while Indians are certainly religious, there’s a certain quiet spirituality to the Tibetans here (most are monks or nuns, refugees from the Chinese persecution of their religion). Their smiles are beautiful and quick to appear, and they are perfectly honest and fair, which is a nice change from some of the other places where the locals try to squeeze every last rupee out of you and charge ridiculous tourist prices to Westerners. Travelers tend to stay here in Dharamsala for a long time, sometimes months, and study yoga or languages (Tibetan or Hindi) or take meditation workshops or Ayurvedic (traditional Indian medicine) retreats. We’re going to chill out here for a week or 10 days, do some hiking, read, drink coffee, and relax.
Nearby are the villages of Bhagsu and Dharamkot, short 2km hikes away. They used to be tiny villages with nothing there, but now many Westerners, especially Israelis, like to go there, so they’ve been developed a bit with guest houses and restaurants. We’re going to hike there to check them out, but we’ll probably stay here in McCloud Ganj.
I was also here during my first trip to India, in the fall of 1995, 14 shortlong years ago. When we were in Pushkar a couple weeks ago, another place I visited back then, it was mostly unrecognizable, much bigger. I recognized the main market street but otherwise I couldn’t find my old guest house or anything.
Here in Dharamsala, there have been incredible changes in the last 14 years as well. So many new buildings, however here I was able to orient myself quickly and find my way around. Some places from back then are still here, like the Chocolate Log, which serves real coffee and cakes in a sunny courtyard. And we found the guest house I stayed in last time, the Ladies Venture. I told them I had returned after 14 years and they were tickled by that. (This is also where I was bit by the stray dog last time I was here, and had to hike down to the Tibetan hospital for rabies shots, but that didn’t spoil my opinion of the place.) It’s now run by a young man from Kashmir, who not only checks you in but makes your chai and cooks any meals you have in the place, because the Tibetan sisters who own it are getting on in years, but it still has the same peaceful feel (in fact one of the hotel rules is to keep a peaceful (shanti) demeanor, and they reserve the right to refuse service to anyone giving off bad vibes). So we’ll stay here for a while. I might take a Hindi lesson or two.
It’s raining now outside, beautiful cleansing rain, while I write this in our room at the Ladies Venture. It’s also much cooler here in the mountains. I have a conference call with American Jewish World Service and Dreamcatchers, the organization in Mumbai for whom I plan to volunteer. It looks like I’ll be helping them set up social networking systems so that the street children of Mumbai can communicate with one another, express themselves, and envision a better future. Oh yes, I have an Indian phone now, from the US you can dial 011-91-987-166-6539 (international code, country code, and 10-digit number).

From the desert to the mountains- what a long, strange trip.

It’s been a little while since I last posted here, because we've been on the move, and deep in the desert where internet connections were hard to come by. We got as far as Jaisalmer, a mere 100 km from the Pakistan border, deep in the Thar desert. And now, we are finished with our trip through the desert, finished with our planned tour through Rajasthan, land of kings, and are now back on our own. The tour was nice, it was a good way to see the desert, but it was a little rushed, with more or less fixed departure times, and only a day or 2 in each place. Now we’re on our own itinerary and schedule, and I’m much happier that way.
By the way, thanks to all my readers, I don’t know how many of you there are but I appreciate your interest, and I hope you’re enjoying these little stories. You can respond to any post at the bottom of each one, so feel free to comment, even if it’s just to let me know you’re out there.

Our journey to Dharamsala was incredible; one of those India horror stories (like the dog bite/rabies shots) that becomes an amazing story later. We booked a bus from Delhi, which was supposed to be a nice, air-conditioned overnight bus, leaving at 5pm and arriving in Dharamsala at 7 the next morning. The bus turned out to be awful, with windows that wouldn’t close, A/C that barely worked, and stains on all the seats from previous difficult journeys. And the worst part was that we were in the back, over the tires (I think our seats were attached directly to the tires), so we were bounced around ridiculously. We literally were bounced into the air every few seconds with the bumps. Sleeping was impossible. And just when we thought it could not get any worse, sure enough, the bus broke down at 3 in the morning. The driver left, or climbed on the roof to sleep, or something, but was nowhere to be found. He left the engine running until it ran out of gas about about 8 in the morning. Most of us slept through it, some people didn’t even notice we were stopped. I got off the bus at one point (stepping over a couple people sleeping on the aisle, I guess they could lie down flat, but yuck, that floor), but we were in the middle of nowhere with no one around. Slowly, as the sun rose, we realized our predicament. Apparently the driver took off to find a mechanic, and one arrived at 8:30 or 9 am, took out a very important-looking part of the engine (the starter motor? the distributor? the solonoid?), got on a passing local bus, and left us again. We had no idea what was going on and no way to reach anyone with the bus.
Pretty early on, a group of Israelis (the demographics on the bus were about 1/3rd Israeli travelers (Dharamsala is a favorite destination of theirs), 1/3rd Tibetans, and 1/3rd other Western travelers) decided to bail. They took an auto-rickshaw to a supposed taxi-stand in town, to grab a taxi the rest of the way. The rest of us stayed behind. But when the mechanic showed up, took that part and left again, more of us had reached our limit. I had gotten the phone number of a taxi driver earlier, when the first group left, so I called him back, we negotiated a price, and 6 of us started the drive to Dharamsala. The other 4 were Israeli, and were happy to learn that I’m Jewish and could speak a little bit of Hebrew. I told them if my Hindi doesn’t improve in Dharamsala, at least my Hebrew would. A few hours later, after some crazy winding mountain roads with steep drops and no guard rails, we arrived. That made it about a 24 journey, with very little sleep and much physical discomfort. Heather and I hauled on our backpacks and looked around the main square. It had changed considerably, but I found the road we needed, used the Chocolate Log as a landmark, and sure enough, the Ladies Venture guest house was right where it was supposed to be. Amazingly, they had one room left, so we took it, showered, and crashed. What a journey! But we made it to our destination with a happy ending, so all ended well.
here are some camel pix:

Shave & a Haircut, a Few Rupee

got another shave today (in Udaipur, a beautiful city of lakes in Rajasthan), it’s one of the true indulgent pleasures of traveling in India, something for the most part lost to the modern western world, which brings you back to an earlier time. It’s something you can do for yourself, of course, but it’s such a treat to have it done, something i suppose like women going to get a manicure or pedicure. Here’s what happens.
you find a barbershop, identifiable by chairs facing a mirrored wall, with shaving products on display on shelves all around. you tell them what you want, mostly by just saying “shaving”. you tell them you want a new blade, and you point out any facial hair that you want to keep. then you lean back.
he starts by gently massaging your face, to wake up the skin, and to get the lay of the land. then he takes a dab or two of shaving cream from a tube and puts in on your face. he uses an old fashioned bristle brush (probably camel hair) to spread it around vigorously, which also wakes up the skin.
the shaving-wallah (wallah just means anyone who does something; shaving wallah, laundry wallah, etc.) then pulls out his straight edge razor, takes out the old blade, washes the razor with a bit of alcohol, pulls out a new razor blade from a small box of them, and puts it into the razor. he begins the shave, pulling your skin when necessary to make a tight, flat surface. they are so good at what they do, it’s the best shaves i’ve ever had, and it can’t compare to a safety razor like we have back home. he carefully shaves everything, around the chin, the neck, the wispy hairs at the back of the neck, the sideburns, and around any mustache or beard. sometimes he will lather you up and do it all again.
after the shave comes a variety of soothing applications. first he uses a spray bottle of water to remove the rest of the shaving cream, and wipes your face expertly with a towel. he wipes the water from your eyes perfectly, just as you would yourself, with enough pressure but not too much. then he applies some kind of alcohol based after-shave liquid, slapping it on your face, giving a bit of a tingle that you can feel is so good for you, followed by an anti-septic astringent, to close any small cuts (there usually are none) and prevent infection. after that comes liquid aloe vera, which he massages into your skin, even into places not shaved, like your forehead.
after that, if you don’t stop him (and why would you?), you get a face massage. he slathers on an absurd amount of oil, but it doesn’t drip, and he rubs rubs rubs. the oil sounds gross but it’s really wonderful, and he rubs your cheeks, forehead, neck, chin, sides of your nose, ears, and temples. sometimes he will use one of those electric massagers that go on the back of your hand with a strap, and makes your fingers vibrate. sometimes he will apply the electric massager directly and before to long it turns into a full on head massage, including these kind of punctuated slaps or thrusts with the palm onto the head, which are harder to do than they seem (i tried).
finally, there comes another spritz of water from the spray bottle, and a solid but not too hard wiping of the face with a towel. all the oil is gone and your face feels healthy, glowing and alive. it’s both fantastically relaxing and invigorating, an experienced not to be missed.

why did the mongoose cross the road?

to get to the snake on the other side!
saw a mongoose running across the road today, we had no idea what it was at first, until our driver said "enemy of snake". it was long and tubular, kind of like a ferret.
We spent a couple lovely days in Pushkar, a holy city around a lake, very small, very chill. the travelling has been a little rough. on the way to Pushkar we had about 7 flat tires. On one delay we stopped in a small village and had a great time hanging out with the village children for a couple hours while waiting for our driver to return with a tire, or bolts, or something. took a bunch of great photos, will upload when we can.
i have a bit of a head cold, and heather has an upset stomach, so that's been a little rough too, but it's no big deal, don't worry everyone!! i'd make a joke about it not being malaria, but you at home might not think it very funny. really, it's fine. and we just checked into the Hotel Natural in Udaipur in deep Rajasthan. It overlooks a lake in the mountains; it's quite lovely, so this is a perfect place for a couple days of recovery!