the himalayas

100_1484, originally uploaded by Maxwell Holden.

a retreat, a chocolate log, and big big mountains

today i did my most mindful act yet: deleted all my photos in my camera. luckily all the new ones were only from today and zoë took similar ones, so i'm going to steal a few! i did get a few nice shots this evening though, including one of the bathroom at the restaurant. it was epic in a way, so incredibly india. when you flushed the toilet water would run out on the floor from the pipe that fed the bowl water. next to the toilet was an open fan and under it if you look closely is written: "danger! danger! do not touch!" what really made it tasteful was the sink did not run though the faucets on the wall did and there was a massive pile of wet laundry in the sink. zoë dashed out of the restaurant while we waited for our food and got some hand sanitizer.

on the way home from dinner we bought some milk which came in a plastic bag. every time i see these bags of milk i have a flashback to first and second grade when oakhurst dairy temporarily packed their milk in bags like this.

earlier today zoë had a hindi class which was great. the teacher whose name is rita is very impressed with zoë and told her she knows too much and needs to forget. We met three other students who will take the class for only 15 days all of whom seem quite nice, especially our new australian friend mel. we continually run into her especially in the main square where there are coconut cookies more addictive than most hard drugs.

today we finally went to where the dali lama lives. it is a big temple built fairly recently. it is really nice because it is built around the trees or there are holes for the trees to grow through. the top floor is the temple area while the rest of the building is meeting rooms, housing for the monks, kitchens, etc. it also has a fantastic 360 view. we did not see the dali lama this time but there were plenty of monks.

we did a lot of walking around town today and we've covered all the main roads. i would say about 80% of the roads, if not more, are foot paths here in mcleod. we have definitely seen most of the stuff here, but done very little of it since none of it has been open. when we walk to our house, (we joke and call it the palace since it is the nicest place we have stayed at yet,) we pass cows as we walk along high ledges,  then walk in between donkeys, pass a spring where everyone is washing their clothes, and go over 3 bridges.

we were excited to go to the chocolate log, mostly for it's name. we were a bit disappointed. they had a great quiche and their baked goods looked pretty great. their coffee however was not that great, it was pretty acidic. also despite having the name the chocolate log they did not seem to have a bathroom which was slightly annoying considering how much (bad) coffee makes zoë and me pee.

so then we went on retreat at tushita. it was great, the teacher had a crazy amount of enthusiasm for tibetan buddhism. her name is robina courtin. check out her teaching in the video bellow. 5 days of her yelling at us, it was so great. snow monkeys came halfway through the course to eat the young leaves off the trees. snow monkeys are awesome and have a totally different manner. some were as big as zoë.

after we got out of the course we got our papers sorted out to see the dali lama speak tomorrow and the day after. check out our new id's. i remember when we got these photos taken we duct out of the blazing hot weather of kochi into a photography studio to get passport pictures. you go in and say 5 minute photo and you get 5 passport pictures for something like 400 rupees. it's so funny, you need passport pictures for everything, including getting a cellphone.

this is where we live! if you can see the building with the green roof, we are renting a flat in the building behind that one, you can see the roof, it has solar panels on top.

here is a wider picture of the valley. it's so bright, if you squint you can see all 3 peaks that tower over us. maybe i will go hiking soon. it is tough though, lonely planet warns hikers about getting mugged in this area.... luckily the walk back to our "palace" is very safe.

nearing a daily routine

this morning we woke up and i ran out and bought 2 cups of yogurt and 10 bananas for $1.32. we mixed together yogurt, bananas, and muesli bought the day before; zoë threw in some oranges as well. we sat out on the front porch overlooking the valley.

from this height we can see several spins of mountains strung together. if you looked at it from a greater distance it would appear the earth had wrinkles. clouds gently rest in between the mountains; only their thin line of peaks is visible. these ranges are a build-up to the massive peaks that hang over mcleod and i am sure they just keep getting higher.

the altitude has not made us sick, but the air does seem a tad thinner and the sun has burned my face. also, the air is very dry considering how much it rains. at night the true reward comes: the stars are so bright even though there is so much light pollution. down in the valley below the lights of towns twinkle but it looks like the same perspective as from an airplane.

the air here is significantly cleaner than where we have been, it even smells like pine sometimes. zoë has had a cough for a while now and it worries me a little. 1 in 4 travelers who come to india get a lung infection because the pollution is so bad. i remember in bangalore a fog that rolled by us of car exhaust and industrial smog -- it is no wonder she has a cough. if you spend enough time in a place with really bad air your snot turns black. what gets me is the raw sewage and smell of death we occasionally pass.

as we sat eating our breakfast zoë noticed a child with a stick chasing something we could not see. behind him, a faithful dog followed, and behind the dog a cow, and behind the cow a crowd of children. we certainly missed out on some sort of exciting event. 

the tibetan new year has proven to be a little scary. the children are armed to the teeth with firecrackers and all sorts of other explosive fun. they chase and throw the firecrackers at each other in their chaotic celebration, and i cower trying not to get in their crossfire or lose my hearing. when the firecrackers go off its a very sharp, short sound, but there are also these massive firecrackers that shake windows and echo through the valley. i always laugh when these go off because they are so ridiculous -- we feel like we are in a war zone!

the monkeys continue to be a great source of free entertainment. it amazes me how well they climb and leap from building to building. even the small ones seem to latch onto smooth concrete walls with little effort. when we eat in a restaurant on the second floor of any building they often run by our window.

there are also tons and tons of mongooses. they are just like squirrels without the bush tail. instead they have a thick rat like tail that is definitely used for balance. they are grey, slightly bigger than squirrels, and much faster on the ground. there are tons of them in the grassy terraces right before our hotel.

after a while we head to a cafe to get caffeinated right before zoë's hindi class (she seems to be really enjoying them!) i dropped her off and now i'm at an internet cafe typing this up. writing is proving to be useful for both memory and understanding india. 

tibetan new years resolution

write better. i must write better. last night was the tibetan new years. my resolution is to write better. well, new years resolutions are actually one of the worst ways to initiate growth. to change one's life it must be a slow and steady process if it is to be effective. i must stop using commas or semi-colons to join two sentences together to begin with.

today we climbed (further) up a mountain to a buddhist retreat center where we listened to a talk by the main teacher on the basics of buddhism. she is australian and has taught at the center for about a year, but will leave in april.

she told us that arguably in the west the greatest scientific discovery of the 21st century is brain plasticity. once it was thought that by the age of 7 most of the "self" is formed and unchangeable, this i believe until about a year ago. brain plasticity can be observed all through life even at an elderly age. however, about 25 hundred years ago this was discovered in the east with far less technology (as a philosophical idea rather than a scientific one.) habits can change, skill can grow, we all can improve. 

the main emphasis of the talk was on impermanence. it was fun to think about how we so easily intellectually accept impermanence and that we would even be embarrassed to say we were immortal. the really hard part is to accept it emotionally.

i nicknamed her "the knife." she is so good at not wasting any time or dragging on for too long. there was a short q&a after and as soon as the question being asked became clear she would respectfully cut them off. she was extremely assertive but not from an aggressive or ego source. her dialogue was simple and somehow very organizing of the many aspects of buddhism. i think she is a great (enthusiastic) teacher.

well, i could go on and on about the talk, but i won't. we have invested in a 5-day course starting on the 8th that's taught by this woman. when it ends we will go to a two day course by the dali lama. it seems like a pretty good start on buddhism in india.


it is also a good use of our time since most of the volunteering organizations seem to operate through this centralized office that is closed until the 15th we are pretty much out of luck until then. i am very keen on teaching english to monks or editing the local magazine (i don't know how good at either i will be!)

electricity, stoners, fireworks, and a new place to stay.

electricity is a mysterious modern convenience here in india, but especially mcleod. once or twice a day, during strong downpours, the power goes out, usually for an hour, but sometimes more. the wires are exposed everywhere in a giant tangled mess draped from one building to the next or even hanging in the trees.

today, in the street, i saw a man reach into a box full of wires hanging off a telephone poll. he pulled two wires from the tangled bunch and wrapped the wires with the wires of a telephone receiver, then immediately started talking into it. i was shocked he was not electrocuted, then was lost in the great mystery of if there was someone he was really talking to. we will never know.

we switched hotels to a room almost half the price. our new room has everything our old room did, minus a television (who cares about that anyways?) the only difference really is that it is smaller. gas must be expensive -- so far every appliance has been electric, including our antique-looking water heater. 

at our old hotel we had a similar hot water heater that could give you a 2-3 minute shower. the current heater does not seem to work at all. i tried a combination of the switches in the room, which has worked in the past, but the power light refuses to illuminate. taking a shower is a pain anyways, it's 45 degrees outside and the room is not heated. it's amazing how fast you're dressed when your shower ends.


this was literally across the street from our old hotel:

stoners. there are lots of stoners here. don't worry, there are lots of other kinds of people here. i can broadly classify the four groups of tourists i have seen so far, but it is a very loose system. first there are people who are here just for the day or two, and seem to come here because it's close by. then there are backpackers who look a bit mountain worn, vaguely hippy-like, seem somewhat spiritual. there is a good number of late-middle aged people here who vary a lot in how "into" india they really are. and then there are stoners.

i am slightly entertained by them, i don't really want to poke fun at them, but they are so classic. i so far can put them into two sub-groups. the first type is like 1960s u.s. military's depiction of hippies, with a bit of shaggy from the television show scooby-doo mixed in. the second is your dreaded grubby backpacking friend.

i don't mean to make fun of people and this is not seriously classifying people, it's just we have had such a continual run in with this crowd and it is obvious mcleod is designed to receive this type of tourist. the the majority of shops look like mexicali blues. there are only a few true tibetan shops that break this pattern. mcleod has so much to offer, it seems most people do not take true advantage of this place. the vibes below this subculture are of much greater depth, you can find it in the land, the locals, and the schools/temples.  

fireworks go off at random times. it's not like your pretty forth of july fireworks, the ones here just make a ton of noise. zoë and i actually laugh when they go off because they are so ridiculously loud. the windows panes shake and i usually jump when they go off. it's 10:30 p.m. right now and some of the loudest ones yet have gone off. 

what will the tibetan new year be like?

we have a new place to stay. for the same price as our cramped hotel we now have a room with a bathroom and kitchen attached. earlier we were torn between another place that was a 20-25 minute walk out of town but this one is only about 5 minute walk from the heart of town. it will be about $5 per day.

it's funny, the place we saw on our morning walk yesterday with the green green grass and the dog i nick named zipper is actually exactly where we now live. i suppose things really do work out. we are on the second floor of the building behind zoë.

we miss zipper but today i saw a pug! we also set up hindi classes for zoë.

i think zoë is going to post pictures of the inside of our new place! I am still sorting out buddhist philosophy classes, and we seem to have it pretty much sorted out of what we need to do to see the dali lama speak on the 14th/15th, which is registering 2 days in advance. I am really looking forward to the tibetan new year, the town is really beginning to shut down, it must be huge! I hope we can still find cappuccinos....

dharamsala fun

dharamsala is a big mexicali blues. it's fun though, and the local life has a different beat. we start out our mornings with cappacinos now!

here is almost all of mcleod, the dali lamas house is on the other side of that shoulder.

we went for a walk and made a friend, we had two dogs walk with us for a half hour. i named this one zipper, then realized i wanted to name my future pug yeti.

the camera did not capture how green that grass was, we had an absolutely gorgeous walk this morning.

later when it was raining pretty good we ventured up the mountain and passed a bunch of monkeys, maybe 30 or 40.

we saw this on the way back down.

mcleod is still plagued by trash, unfortunately i believe the locals produce most of the littering.

the pointy mountain is hiding behind these two.

delhi to dharamsala

the train ride turned out to be 35 hours with some minor delays. it was not as long as we feared. we ate lots of food, read, and slept a ton. i got sick towards the end of the ride with stomach pain, a low fever, and lots of burping. flashbacks of being sick thailand hit me, and i tried not to panic. i patiently waited for it to get worse -- getting sick in thailand started out the same way. luckily it did not get worse, and i'm better now, but my energy is still lacking.

delhi was an amazing city. i believe it has at least the same population as nyc (a little over 12 million?) we bought an all-day pass to the spanking clean new metro that buzzes all over the city. it's funny, even though it is quite large it is still groaning under the demand of the people.

we went to a massive shopping area; to our disappointment the only thing that was open was cafe coffee day, our favorite overpriced chain coffee store with so-so drinks. since going back on the metro did not seem like much fun, we went in. during our cappuccinos we were informed by a man of the corruption of the dali lama once he heard our next destination. wonderful, i hope this is not what the typical indian believes. he also said it was too early for KFC, so that was why he was at this coffee shop.

we went to a planetarium show, bizarre as usual but scored a bit low in the ironic section. i liked it a lot though, especially that ewan macgregor narrated a really low-budget, really strange cartoon on what it takes to be an astronaut. it included a mad scientist torturing his clones to show you all the horrible things that space does to a being unprotected.

i was still feeling quite ill and was craving to just take a rest. zoë was exceptionally understanding and agreed to take me too a hotel to sleep and take a hot shower. we decided to go to a tibetan area of town that consisted of a mere 3 or 4 blocks in the sprawling city.

i immediately felt better once entering the neighborhood. slightly inconvenient in location to the bus station it proved its worth with its in your face but polite culture. men sat out front the gate playing cards while children ran up and down the narrow alleys, mostly playing and asking for money. this area was significantly poorer than the surrounding areas and it was obvious from a distance.

i had a hard time with the kids. two girls hung off my pinky and thumb for a good block testing whether they could lift themselves off the ground. they kept asking me for money, which i had none, and only when some adults yelled at them did they leave me alone. i believe it is because i have a hard time giving a convincing face with a firm no -- i cannot hide how feel about kids in such obviously terrible situations. it was tough seeing a 10 year old smoking a cigarette who then passed it down to his younger brother who could not have been more than 7. he was very aggressive when he asked for money, but there was no way i could fund his smoking habit.

we crashed in peace house, which was a perfect place for that purpose. well-rested and cleaned, we went to the bus station. the station is unbelievable. it is tucked under a massive 5 or 6 story unfinished concrete structure with only half the first floor in place. the station occupies the ground (literally dirt) level where the buses squeeze in and crowds of people churn like the sea. i cannot even describe all the smells. there is a new one every 10 feet. I am not sure any westerner would be truly convinced that this was a bus station and that it was as efficient as it was.

as for the bus ride itself, it was a moderately uneventful 10-hour ride, quite short once again. it was an overnighter, which i woke up about every hour on, but still managed to feel somewhat rested. at one point in the night we were on a dirt road for several miles. it was difficult to discern the side of the road; it was all smooth dirt with the occasional marker of a good size rock or a tree.

then the bus went up, and up, until at last we reached our destination just after dawn. we met a spaniard on the bus and spilt a taxi to go from dharamsala to mcleod ganja. when we got into town it was about 7 in the morning and nothing was open. i saw a woman in the street who seemed to be a fellow tourist, and more importantly, well-settled in this mountainside town.

she was actually a resident, she is belgian, and extremely kind. she brought us to a cafe where she explained to the waiter our situation and to please admit us even though it was 45 minutes until they opened. the waiter was completely fine with it, zoë and i enjoyed some real cappuccinos, and hot porridge.

now let me give you a picture of dharamsala, it has been constantly raining or drizzling all day and its about 45 degrees. both zoë and i love the change in weather and we really enjoyed the cold even though we had nothing to cope with it. halfway through breakfast we heard an explosion and the power went out. the waiter explained that it was due to the rain and that it usually came on with in an hour.

when we left we noticed that our irish friend had a shop on the ground floor of the cafe. we chatted with her a bit more and we introduced ourselves. her name is marleen. i had put on most of what i owned and was warm, but zoë had very little, so marleen kindly lent her umbrella and a thick jacket to zoë until she got some more clothes.

i bought an ugly sweatshirt that now doesn't seem so bad, and zoë got a nice wool sweater for a bit less! we are both warm now. by now the power turned back on but went out only a few hours later for some time. since the water heater is electric zoë and i are both waiting for it to get hot. our hotel room is unheated, but even the locals don't heat their homes.

we ventured to another part of town for some more coffee (we are overjoyed by how great it is,) and did a little bit of internet stuff. on our walk we ran into a group of 5 or 6 women, one with a baby who begged me for food. it caught me completely off-guard -- it was the first time someone begged me for something other than money. there are certainly new experiences and new things that tug on your heart every day in india. i am forced to learn quickly how to deal with these situations, both in the moment of choosing whether it would be good to find a store and buy these women some food, or realizing that receive a lot of support from the local community, especially the one with a child. also, i have to learn how to let these experiences pass. they can build up quickly and get me in a really depressed state.

animal treatment seems so much better here as well. the dogs seem healthy despite the harsh weather conditions and they do not cower when you get with in 5 feet or so. the old dogs even have thick fur coats and none of them are starving. there are monkeys too, with big white manes like lions, and tons of baby monkeys, which indicates it is good environment here for them. 

overall, the start to dharamsala has been a great one. we have made a few friends already, the cost of living is low, and we are already  investigating classes. i just hope we stay warm!

later on zoë and i had tea and talked with marline in her shop. what an amazing woman! the hoops she has had to jump through in order to be here are incredible. we chatted with her for about an hour over some chai. she was drawn to india for the buddhism and now resides here. she told us so many great stories about her first experience in india and then later on getting her family to come out and vista her.

marline also had some extremely good advise. she recommended specific classes and told us the best thing to do this time of year. she also warned us of some of the problems here in dharamsala, mostly theft. it turns out the women who were begging me for food are not locals and come here to scam visitors into buying them food then selling it back to the shop at a much higher rate. she told me what to say in hindi (because i didn't know, zoë did) to the women to make them leave me alone quickly. i am so glad i did not fall for that scam. it really is great to have a really good friend here!