Nubra Valley

(the main road in Diskit)

Yesterday I went with Alice to the Nubra Valley after her quick recovery from traveller's illness. The doctor injected her with something amazing and then gave her loads of cipro that seemed to do the trick. So we left yesterday morning and drove north east of Leh (near to China). It was a beautiful drive over "the world's highest motorable pass" at over 18,000 feet. My stomach is getting good at detecting the altitude and as we climb higher my stomach gets closer and closer to staging a revolt. The driver went nice and slow and luckily we came down not too long after the peak. To give an idea of the roads, it took nearly two hours to drive 40 kilometers. Wild.



A few thoughts about altitude...

Leh town = 11,500 feet
Pangong Lake = 14,000 feet
Height from which mom and I jumped out of an airplane = 14,000 feet
Highest peak in the Rocky Mountains = 14,440 feet
Everest Base Camp = 17,600
Highest motorable pass = 18,500
Highest mountain outside the Himalayas (in the Andes)= 22,841
Mount Everest = 29,029 feet

Anyway, back to the main subject... We got to a small town called Diskit where we checked into the guest house and then were driven to a small town called Hunder. We were supposed to spend a 'lovely afternoon in the quiet village' but when we got there it was essentially one hut surrounded by lots of sand dunes and some camels that you could ride. Hilarious. This was no village! It was merely a tourist stop for a camel ride. We couldn't help but laugh and had the driver take us back to the hotel. I've now avoided camel rides in two countries and will do it again if necessary.

Had a nice long nap in the very very very quiet town of Diskit and some time to read. I'm really glad I went and visited the Nubra Valley, though I must confess that Pangong Lake was prettier and I'm not entirely sure Nubra is as amazing as it's hyped up to be. The valley was largely sand dunes which were grey and not unlike what you'd see at the Jersey shore, but the mountains surrounding it were simply stunning. They looked almost like a surrealist illustration in a children's book with all their bumps and lumps. Truly a sight to see. No one mountain looked like any other and the colors and textures were so varied that I had my eyes glued out the window nearly the whole trip.

I'm so sad to go back to Bangalore tomorrow, but this trip in Leh has given me some fuel and energy to plan more weekend trips in the south. Not sure anywhere in India will be as beautiful as this, but I will search

Monasteries

Over the past few days I went to five monasteries and they were all surprisingly interesting. For the first one I actually took a public bus, which was an adventure in itself, and luckily I met some Ladakhi girls on the way who put me on the right bus. The first one was Thiksey monastery and it was HUGE. It felt like I walked up a mountain to get to the temples at the top and it was really warm and my calves were aching by the time I got down. But, it was a fascinating place and the first monastery I've ever seen so a very cool experience.

The next day the British guy and an Italian girl and I went to another three monasteries and they were suprisingly different in some ways. The first one, Rizong, was more like Thiksey than the others with the mountain of steps and similar looking temples. We saw a group of people who looked local and ended up running into them at the other two monasteries that day too. It was so funny to see a monk taking pictures for them and using their video cameras. The picture below is from Rizong.

After Rizong we went to Alchi monastery which had some amazing frescoes that were about 1000 years old. Unfortunately, the main temple was closed when we were there, but the grounds were realy lush and there were no stairs! We saw some smaller temples and one of the monks had us light oil candles for good luck. Last, we went to Likir monastery and ended up just sitting on the roof a bit near the monks relaxing. It was a bit unreal, but a very nice afternoon.

That evening the three of us ate the most wonderful dumplings and soup at a Tibetan restaurant and then followed that up with 'special tea' - i.e. beer in a teapot with a cup and saucer. Good times, though two teapots of beer between two people is a bit over my limit of late and I fear I may have swerved a bit on the walk home.

The next day (yesterday) Alice staged a miraculous recovery from her stomach ailments. She seemed so afraid of staying in one place too long that I think she willed her body to feel good enough to sit for a long car trip. Either way, it worked out well for me and she and I went to the Nubra Valley. We stopped at Sumur monastery and this one was really beautiful. It had red tiles on the ground outside and a golden-colored pagoda at the center. Again, the main temples were closed and supposedly the monk with the keys had gone to another village for the morning. Strange, but still nice grounds.

More about Nubra in the next post...

Pangong Lake

Ladakh is amazing! Some people refer to it as little Tibet because they say it has much more in common with Tibet than India and I finally learned why. Yesterday I went to visit Pangong Lake is the northeast of Ladakh and near the border with China. It was a four hour Jeep ride over “the world’s third highest motorable pass” and wow it was breathtaking. Literally. The scenery was positively gorgeous and it went from being warm and summery in Leh to cold and snowy up in the mountains.

I went with a nice British guy, Julian, I met at the hotel because Alice desperately wanted to go to a festival at a nearby monastery and I didn’t feel like navigating huge crowds. It turned out Julian’s father was Italian and owned a restaurant in London for the past 20 years so we spent a good part of the long drive discussing Italian food. Strange topic for the Himalayas, but it made the time pass quickly.

Back to the scenery though… as we drove higher and higher into the mountains and I kept squealing with delight that we were going to see snow it became more and more difficult to catch a good breath. Leh town is at 11,000 feet and this road we were on had its highest point at 17,350 feet so it was quite a bit higher. When I got out of the car at the resting place at the road’s highest point I nearly fell over my feet from dizziness after a few quick steps. I learned quickly to go much much slower as I trudged through the snow to use the loo.

We finally starting going down the mountains and out of the snow, but everywhere I looked it was beautiful. The trip took nearly an extra half hour because I kept asking the driver to stop so I could get pictures out the window. He took the curves gently and slowly, thank goodness, because I was terrified we were going to end up sliding off the road and down the mountains.

When we finally rounded the corner and saw Pangong Lake my mouth was hanging open. It was beautiful. We stopped at the bottom for lunch and walk around part of the lake and it was a really nice afternoon. I had to walk so slowly because I had trouble getting a good breath, the lake was at 14,000 feet, but it was great. In the distance, 40 km, I could see the Chinese peaks and this point on the lake is the closest to China that any foreigner was allowed to go.

It was finally time to turn around and head home and that became another adventure itself. At the rest point at the highest part of the road the car stopped and we heard the words ‘block’ and ‘shit.’ We learned that there had been some sort of rock slide on the road and the pieces were too big to get off the road with hands and shovels. Apparently the army had been called in to dynamite the rock into smaller pieces so it could be removed from the road. After the first blast they let us go down onto the roads thinking everything was clear. Unfortunately, by the time we got close to the impasse, we learned the pieces were still too big to move. A line of cars had to reverse up the mountain road a bit to allow for more blasting. Two hours and four terrifying booms later, they had finally gotten the rocks into movable pieces and we were on our way.

I was feeling a bit nauseous by this time because the air was thin and it was cold enough that I couldn’t stay outside the car for too long. Not to mention the road was narrow enough that there wasn’t all that much space for standing. We finally made it back down to Leh and a group of us had a wonderful dinner of ‘special tea’ (alcohol was not allowed in the restaurant so they served beer in teapots), my favorite Kashmiri apple juice, and Tibetan dumplings called momos. A fantastic day!
I have to confess that the picture here of Pangong is not one that I took because there’s no flash drive at this computer. But I was able to download an image of the lake to the desktop at the internet café and upload for you here. It really was this beautiful.

Ladakh

A picture from the airplane as we flew through the Himalayas into Leh





An interesting side note - I learned that in Sanskrit the word himalaya translates into 'ice abode' or 'ice house.' Fitting name, though as you can see in the summer there's not much snow on the bottom of the mountains and the rock is clearly exposed.

Delhi, Agra, and the great Taj Mahal

I made it to the north, and wow, it's been a wild ride. I'll try to go in order, but it's already jumbling together. But here goes...

On Friday morning I flew reallllly early in the morning to Delhi to meet my driver and guide who was supposed to speak really good English. At the airport in Delhi (+1 for Delhi - much nicer arrivals area than Banagalore) I found my driver Surinden and also learned he spoke almost no English. The words I remeber him knowing were 'English,' 'Taj,' times of day, 'eating,' 'car,' 'husband,' 'music,' and 'guide'. Yes, it was a long and quiet five hours Agra, though I attempted to learn a few Hindi words with the help of Lonely Planet's phrase section.

Our first stop was Agra Fort which was a very beautiful and peaceful fort that had been built by some rulers of Persian origin. The windows of the fort had an amazing view of the Taj and it was one of the first clean, quiet places I'd seen in India. Very nice!

Surinden got lost going to my hotel that evening, but the place turned out to be a gorgeous old relic from the colonial days. It was empty because it was off season and very very hot, but everyone was very nice and the room had ac. There was a small incident with what I only hope was a cricket... I ended up putting a room service mug over it because I couldn't find anything to use to swat it and it was a little larger than anything I'm comfortable swatting. All in all, not too bad.

The next morning we went to the Taj and it was quite the experience. It was beautiful, a gorgeous building surrounded by lush grounds that somehow never make it into the famous pictures. The shade was so nice that it made the whole experience even better. Interestingly, I report with a strange feeling of guilt, I think the Taj is somewhat overhyped. It was very pretty, but it wasn't the kind of thing that changes you when you see it. I think a lot of that has to do with the expectations I had set and all that I had heard before about the Taj, but the experience is just nothing compared to the temperature change you experience when you stand in front of the statue of David in Florence or walk along the train tracks into Auschwitz or taste your first glass of really good Chateneuf de Pape.

Not to dog on the Taj, it really is pretty, but I hesitate to use the word spectacular. Perhaps the funniest thing that happened to me there, and apparently to most other fair-haired foreign women, is the onslaught of people wanting to take their pictures with you. I ended up using it to my advantage and asking them to snap some with my camera, but it was a very strange experience. It started off with a few shy young girls, then become whole families, then a huge group of guys who each wanted a picture with me by himself, and then just a mess of all kinds of people. Some of the men were a little audacious and I slapped many hands off my shoulders, but they still seemed to want to have a picture with me even after I pushed them six inches off to my side. I've heard that this happens to most foreign women so can't be too flattered, but wow, what a strange obsession they have taking pictures of foreign women!

Driving back from Agra to Delhi was a bit more exciting than I hoped for... an autorickshaw crashed into the driver's side of our car (it really was the auto driver's fault completely) and that took a good 40 minutes to sort out. Surinden turned off the car and rolled down the windows, but good lord it was hot. I've developed a good glare, at least I think I must have, but after I kept glaring at people for a few minutes they finally stopped putting their faces into my open window. My mean face has matured so much in India!

Finally made it back to Delhi and nearly cried tears of joy at the sight of my hotel room. It was amazing. So clean and modern that I felt like I'd been taken home to DC for the day. I never wanted to leave! I did have to leave though and I met a colleague from work in Baltimore for dinner. I've realized there are two Indias and she happens to inhabit the one belonging to the ultra wealthy. She took me to the Hyatt for the most wonderful meal with wine and sushi and japanese style food cooked on the skillet at the table. I was so overwhelmed with this India of the wealthy and I didn't know how to thank her for letting me into her club for a few hours last night.

All good things must come to an end though, and at 5am I left Delhi to come here to Leh. Leh is a pretty spare town compared to Delhi, but I just love it. It's at such an altitude that the hotel managers make everyone drink a lot on arrival and then shuttle them off to their rooms for rest. You're supposed to spend minimum 24 hours concentrating only on rest and rehydration. The stories people have told about dumb people who get off the plane and go trekking immediately were enough to scare me into submission. Invariably the people who don't rest end up in a clinic or hospital. So, here I am typing and trying to be very restful. I'm content just to sit outside and look around... the plane ride here offered such a beautiful view I had to blink a few times to keep my eyes dry. I've just never seen anything quite like the Himalayas and then to fly down into them to land in a valley, wow is about the only word I could think of.

northward!

Hello from my last day in Bangalore for more than a week. I'm so excited that tomorrow earrrrrrrly in the morning I fly up north to Delhi where I'll be visiting Agra and the Taj Mahal over the weekend. I have my camera ready to go s0 will try to get lots of pictures.

On Sunday I leave Delhi and fly up to a small town called Leh. Leh is in a region called Ladakh, which is the last valley before the Tibetan Plateau. The weather will be nice and cool and I will be surrounded by Himalayas! The town of Leh is at 10,000 feet so they advise taking a full day to acclimatize so you don't get sick from the altitude. It's in a Buddhist region in India and has lots of monasteries both in town and hanging precariously on cliffs in the outskirts of town. There are also apricot farms and supposedly other delicious fruits too.

A girl I met a few weeks ago decided to meet me in Leh so on Monday we'll get together and hire a guide and driver to take us on a jeep expedition through the mountains and valleys. There aren't too many routes to choose from, so we'll poke around and see which has the nicest scenery before deciding, but I'm angling for the one that takes us to a salt lake that's a remnant of the ocean that existed before India slammed into the rest of Asia. There's another lake nearby that belongs 3/4 to China, but we need special permits to travel there so not sure how it will play out. Either way, it all looked beautiful from a slideshow I saw and I can't wait.

A quick note about pictures... trying to use my laptop in the office has been a bit of a disaster (too many viruses on their network to make it worthwhile) but I've heard of a coffeeshop that has free wireless. When I get back from the north I'll bring my computer there and see if I can upload pictures to finally show what's been going on in this corner of the world.
love, julie

it's been so long!

I can't believe it's been a whole week since I last posted! Not too much has happened to report, though plans for the next week are becoming very exciting.

This past weekend Mrs Simha and I went to a biological park on the southern side of Bangalore where we rode around in a caged bus and got to see lions and tigers and bears, oh my! Seriously though, we drove the bus through these nature preserves and saw the most beautiful animals. Interestingly, the bears seemed smaller than I expected (and had such long hair!) and the lions and tigers seemed much bigger than expected. The tigers were as tall as the windows on the bus and actually came up and walked right alongside the bus. We had to stop many times to wait for the animals to move out of the path, but they were so beautiful I was just content to stare at them. The paws on the tigers were enormous and I felt like if the took a swipe at me I'd be knocked out flat. Thank goodness for all the cages around the windows on the bus!

That afternoon an amazing thing happened in Bangalore... I found chocolate and milk hazelnut cream!!! If anyone remembers the mass of jars I brought home from Croatia, this is the same stuff! Half the jar is chocolate hazelnut spread and the other half is just a sweet milky hazelnut spread. Divine. I've been spreading it on toast in the mornings and eating straight out of the jar with a spoon in the evenings. It's addictive stuff and I find myself thinking of it during the day at work and wishing I had my trusty jar and spoon with me.

Though not quite as exciting as the hazelnut cream, I also found cheese in this same shop!! Cheese, at the grocery near my house, is limited to small packs of four slics of processed american cheese. Pretty foul stuff. At this gourmet market I had trouble containing my excitement at seeing not just cheddar, but goudah and feta too!! I must have had a funny look on my face or been making strange noises because a nice Australian man in front of me at the counter asked if I was having trouble converting everything to the metric scale for ordering. I explained that it'd been more than a month since I'd seen glorious cheese was just going nuts with excitement. He'd been working in B'lore for a year now and had some good advice on other shops to visit for goodies from home.

Now, to whet your appetite for the next blog post coming soon, on Friday I fly up north to visit the Taj Mahal for the weekend. After that, I continue further up north to the Himalayas for cool weather and clean air. I can't wait!
love, julie

The return of durian!

Just a quick note to update you on durian - otherwise known as jack fruit in India. They have it in India too! Today for lunch someone brought little fried balls that looked, and tasted, like hushpuppies. They smelled a little funny, but hey, lots of things here smell a little funny so I didn't make much of it. But after we started talking about who had brought which foods, I learned that I had finally tried durian! Of course everything tastes good when it's fried up with dough, but it really wasn't too bad aside from the stench. It was shredded durian/jack fruit all mushed up with sweet dough and then fried. Delicious!

Ode to Cipro

Hello everyone! I have now survived my second round of traveller's illness with a newfound love and appreciation for ciprofloxacin. Three pills over 36 hours and magic, I'm cured! It's the best thing that's happened to me in India so far. Well, not really, but close! So to back up, I'll start on last Sunday...

The American girls Saras set me up with were really nice, though unfortunately they're just here a short time and have already now left for Delhi. On Sunday we all met up again for some shopping and coffee (and I bought my huge book of maps - the second best thing that's happened to me aside from cipro!) and decided to go visit a Krishna Temple. Now I had no idea what a Krishna Temple is, who Krishna was, or what we were in for. In my mind I kept signing that Hare Krishna song and picturing the old ladies who come up and ask you for money at Tyson's Corner. Anyway, so we take an auto-rickshaw to the Krishna Temple at the north side of town and it's HUGE! Like a great white step pyramid with huge ornate detailig. Along the way I learned that Krishna is a Hindu God (unfortunately, I don't remember the stories associated with him...) and this was a temple devoted solely to the worship of Krishna. We decided to pay the extra 50 rupees (A little more than a dollar) to get in the patron line so we could get closer to the icons and skip the long lines. Good deal! Everyone has to take off shoes and check them (I was certain we'd have tetanus or staff infections before we left becaue there were so many people) and then we started working our way up through the chapel type of things. There were various icons and statues with bright colors and lots of gold and people were really into it... everyone was praying and down on their knees and performing rituals. It was so interesting, very different from the more familiar judeo-christian traditions. Anyway, at the top there's a huge room with very very big icons, I'm guessing of Krishna??, and lots of music (again with the Hare Krishna song whirling through my head). At the head, we in the 'patron' line got shuttled into a special room where the monk/priest type people solicited us for donations. Because the Krishna temples actually run a really good program feeding kids lunch in India, we donated the equivalent of 30 U.S. dollars between the three of us an apparently bought lunch for a kid for a year. So, all in all, fascinating place.

On Monday a new volunteer came to the office, James from the UK, and on Tuesday I had to take him out to the field and show him around. It was a little like the blind leading the blind because I'd only been there once before, but I think I gave a good intro and he seemed really interested at seeing the women's income generation projects at work. He somehow even got convinced to organize a sale of their products the following week at Bangalore's AOL offices. Yes, it's true!!! I'm finally going to see the famous Bangalore call center! Totally incidental that the product sale is also a bit of tourism for me, but if you call AOL in the middle of the night on Tuesday, I'll be there! Funny stuff.

Anyway, so quickly after I got home from the rural villages on Tuesday I felt like a truck rolled over my head and could barely stand up without my vision clouded and I ended up really sick by the morning. Had to miss two days of work and was gulping down water with oral rehydration salts. And of course my wonderful cipro saved the day and by Friday I was back at it. So here I am, found an internet cafe near 'home' and am off to a film festival for documentaries about water issues this afternoon. Should be interesting!

Missing home a bit and hope all is well.
love, julie

More about my boss

I felt like I needed to share a little more about my boss, Saras, because she's such an interesting lady. She was born and raised in India and went to NYU for medical school and specialized in pediatrics and neonatology. She spent 10 or 15 years working as head of neonatology at a hospital in NYC and developed a fond affection for some of my favorite things New York - pastrami on rye, lox and bagels, chopped liver, and gefilte fish. She has a mezuzah on her door because she just thinks they're pretty and when I asked about it she immediately realized that I might know some good jewish recipes. She started grilling me, begging me to handmake gefilte fish and humantashen or chopped liver. Luckily, mom trained me well and if she sends me the recipe and I can find filling, I will bring humantashen to Bangalore!

Sometimes I think I should be calling Saras a Bubbi - she's very protective and motherly and also assertive (read: domineering) and has found me two american girls with whom I'm to be friends. The three of us are going to a play tonight and Saras has already started to make suggestions for our weekend travels - no matter that I haven't met these girls yet. And she says if I make good humantashen she'll take me on a trip to a coffee growing region in the west. Bonus point if I can teach her housekeeper/cook how to make a good pie crust, courtesy of Aunt Andi's apple pie recipe.

We sat at the dinner table two nights ago eating traditional Indian good with our hands and she told me about the time she screamed at a man behind the deli counter in New York for a full five minutes for putting her pastrami on white bread. She's a riot. When I told her how I made Matt walk 30 blocks early one Saturday morning for his first lox and bagel at Barney Greengrass she nearly salivated.

Saras's husband is a playwright and we've had some funny talks about my slow progress reading Rushdie's "Midnight's Children." Girish is not Rushdie's biggest fan, to put it mildly, and has tried to convince me to read Moby Dick instead. We settled on one of Girish's plays, though I must confess I haven't yet started it.

Well, I've successfully made it through nearly another workday and it's almost time for my date with the american girls.
Hope all is well at home.
love, julie