Missing the mountains already

I arrived back in Delhi an hour or two before sunrise, back to the old familiar scams and smog! It's actually very satisfying, though, to just quickly get through the scams without being taken by any of them. They started with all the autorickshaw drivers at the bus station stubbornly refusing to even take me to the part of town I wanted to stay in.

Driver: "There is a farmer's protest there today, sir. Nobody is allowed within a km, and everything is closed. But I have a very good deal for you on a hotel in the Gold Bazaar..."
Me: "I've heard that before. Just get me as close as you can, and I'll walk the rest of the way."

Which of course turned out to be right in front of the hotel I wanted, with no sign of any protests. This specific scam is even documented verbatim in both my guidebooks, but they still try it with every foreigner. Obviously some people don't read their guidebooks until it's too late.

That first hotel claimed they'd have a room if I waited a couple hours, and offers me tea, etc. while I wait. But, as happened once before, a guy from their favorite travel agency shows up to haul me around to really crummy hotels, where I'm expected to prepay an insane price to the travel agent (and the hotel is not allowed to talk to me about the actual rate, before the "discount"). They ended up using the same driver as another time this one was pulled on me, so he didn't put up much of a fight when I fled after the first attempt. I ended up paying the same for a vastly nicer room that has the first bathtub I've seen in India!

Hopefully this will help you understand a bit how the last 10 days in Manali were so different. For one, I only really felt like I was scammed once, and that was mostly my own fault (more on that in a bit).

The obvious reason to come to Manali is the scenery. It reminded me of the northern Cascades, with a bit of the Columbia Gorge thrown in (lots of spectacular waterfalls falling down steep, rocky cliffs). Manali's the last major town in the Kullu Valley. Kullu is short for a word meaning "the end of the habitable world", which is still pretty accurate. Below are the mountains at the end of the valley:

Below is the view from Manali, right across the narrow valley, where you can see the craggy cliffs and one of the smaller waterfalls. The shadow is of the mountains behind me working its way up the cliffs.
They get an extra hour or two of sunlight on the east side of the valley - Manali is in the shade and the temp immediately drops by about 3pm, making it worth trying to get up a little early.

Manali itself is a little complicated to explain. On the one hand, it's sort of a mountain resort boom town. In the last 20 years, it's gone from a couple guesthouses to over 400 hotels, and all the other things that go with that. I know that sounds like a bad thing, and there is a small part of town that's chaotically touristy, but it's really easy to get away from that. This is partly because Manali mostly gets Indian tourists (at least this time of year), and according to the locals (and my own observations), they just come there to sleep, shop, and eat lots of food. So, if you're anywhere but the center of town, you won't see many of them, and any hotel more than a couple blocks from the bus station will be mostly empty.

Another side of Manali is as kind of a melting pot of the Himalayas. The original inhabitants are a mixture of various mountain tribal groups, most of which have lived in Manali or the many nearby villages for more generations than they can remember. Like most towns in the Indian Himalayas, there's also a huge Tibetan refugee community, with lots of brand new monasteries, and excellent "Chinese" restaurants (plastered with "Free Tibet" posters inside). Kashmir is where most of the shopkeepers come from, as there's no longer much work for them back home (in what used to be India's wealthiest resort area, before terrorist bombings became an almost weekly event there). There are also quite a few recent flatlanders from places like Delhi, looking for a better place to ply their trade (usually selling things on the side of the road). Of course, there are a handful of crazy foreigners who just forgot to go home, including one old guy from Montreal who's been there for over 10 years. Finally, at the bottom of the food chain are the Nepali workers, who seem to have it far worse than Mexicans in the US.

At least once I day, I saw something that made me realize I just hadn't figured India out yet. One of these was seeing how they make sand. Often entire extended families of Nepalis would spend the whole day doing something out of the stone age - smashing two rocks together to make smaller rocks. Oddly enough, they all seemed quite cheerful about it. It seems like this couldn't possibly make sense to do, but in the bizarre economics of India, where labor (especially Nepali labor) is essentially free, that's much cheaper than hauling such construction materials for 12-15 hours up a windy road. You'll also see big tractors going on scouting missions through the boulders in the river, looking for appropriate rocks.

There's a huge demand for those materials, too, with almost every hotel that earns a profit adding on a floor during the slow season (typical 3rd-world concrete construction is cleverly designed to easily tack on more floors, as you can see from some of the photos). Even the place I stayed is planning another floor and a new wing next year. Below's a modest house undergoing a similar transformation, while they use the current roof to store straw:

I spent many of my days exploring the nearby villages, at least 5 of which were within an easy walk (and the rest were a super cheap bus ride away), as well a few of the many good trails up into the hills. Up until 30 years or so ago, most families had to grow all their own food, which meant carefully terracing the hillsides to grow rice, corn, and hay for the livestock. In one of India's biggest accomplishments since independence, India has had plenty of food for some time, and actually exports much of it now. That leaves the mountain villagers to grow a more profitable crop that does better up there - apples (if you only list the legal ones, anyway). The hillside terraces and any spare land are full of apple trees, and all the restaurants have the most amazing fresh squeezed apple juice.

There's still some corn being grown, especially on the warmer side of the valley, and most of the roofs in villages like Naggar were partly covered with drying corn:

Another critical activity, especially this time of year (before the snow gets too deep), is collecting firewood. For a variety of reasons, small wood stoves and even shared wood/garbage fires in the street are really the only options for keeping warm. Houses, hotels, and better restaurants will usually have just one of these, with everyone trying to get as close at they can this time of year. However, there doesn't seem to be any official source of wood for these - it's all a matter of scavenging what you can from the forests for miles around. While exploring a trail, I heard a noise up in a tree, and saw an old geezer way up there, snapping off branches as high as he could climb (much like another old man I know). This is apparently how the village gets most of its wood, and why any park areas near town have high fences topped with barbed wire and charge admission.

Weddings were a very common sight in Manali and the nearby villages. I saw, or at least heard the drums for one a few times a day. They provided a good chance to take photos of locals all dressed up. Better yet, as part of a wedding party, they expected to have their picture taken, and there was no need for the awkward negotiation about price, or if it's OK at all beforehand. Here's a shot of the horn player that was leading a huge procession in Naggar, and stopped it all to pose for me:

These guys were very busy, as they're needed for all weddings, funerals, protests, etc. I captured a couple of their songs, but I apparently don't have the right software to yank the mp3s out of the mpegs yet. They remind me a little of my early attempts at the French Horn, but with way more enthusiasm.

Like most of India, this is a deeply religious area, with hundreds of temples around the valley. They come in all shapes and sizes, from the traditional stone ones like I've seen before, to ones that look more like Scandinavian wood churches, while others look more like Japanese pagodas, or a hybrid of all 3. Those are just the Hindu ones. As I've found typical of mountain areas, it seems like you get some of the more unusual beliefs there, with blood sacrifices still being quite common at some of them (starting with vegetables, and working their way up to buffalo, then decorating the temples with the remains). There are also a few so old that they're dedicated to pre-Hindu gods that were eventually encorporated into modern Hinduism. Though less stunning than it was before being rebuilt recently, the one below in Old Manali is probably the most unique, and the the source of the town's name:
It's the only temple anywhere dedicated to Manu, the Hindu equivalent of 3 Old Testament figures: Adam (first human), Moses (law giver), and Noah (survivor of the flood of (re)creation, whose boat landed on a nearby mountain). It was also the source of another small wedding that danced for quite some time in this old village across the river from modern Manali. Below is pretty much the whole village turned out to watch the dance (or watch the crazy tourists snapping photos of the wedding party):

One of my last days in Manali, I finally got to see a spot I'd been trying to get to since I arrived - Rohtang Pass. This was also the source of the one scam I fell victim to in Manali. Though it was too late in the season for the big tour buses to go up there, almost every travel agent sold spots on "share taxis" to go to Rohtang Pass. This worked out to about $4 for a seat in a Toyota Landcruiser clone (a Tata Sumo, if you're curious), for the 32 mile ride. Unfortunately, it turned out that nearly all of these drivers only went half way, to where they first hit snow. Looking at my ticket more closely, I couldn't tell what it said, though it certainly wasn't "Rohtang". Well over 100 identical vehicles were full of Indians who had been sold the same thing, and they all seemed thrilled just to see snow for the first time.

I wasn't. After much grumbling, I found out that 2 or 3 vehicles were going to press through for the pass. I was able to squeeze onto one of these and got my spot for 25% of the asking price (though still a lot more than what I'd paid to start with). This driver was definitely worth it, as he seemed to have actually driven on snow before! He also knew to check with each driver we met going the other way for the latest conditions (packed vehicles that had survived a 40-hour grueling journey from Ladakh, on a road that's supposed to be impassible by September!). In the end, the road got too bad for even his formidable driving skills, but he got us within a mile of the top, so we hiked (gasping) for the last bit and were rewarded with a glimpse of the next valley, past a bunker of some sort:

More than usual, the picture doesn't remotely do it justice, particularly since the clouds had just started to roll in, but trust me, the 13,000' view was breathtaking! As always, be sure to check the gallery for more interesting photos taken near there.

The best part about Manali, though, were the other travellers. Though I'd missed catching up with the Aussie who first talked me into visiting Manali, there was a steady stream of fascinating travellers at the Tourist Hotel, let alone the various restaurants in town. The first bunch, as I mentioned before, were a fun bunch from southern France. One of them celebrated a birthday there, which of course required a long night of good food (I was brave enough to order the Chicken Honey Lollipops, which turned out to be quite accurately translated) and improvised celebration:

In the last few days, I met a cool sorta Californian who had worked for the State Department for a couple years, and was heading back to grad school in DC. I expect him to be an ambassador in no time! Most surprising, I met a major rock/fusion band from Mumbai (Bombay), who had their concert in Delhi cancelled by a bomb scare, and decided to make the most of a couple days off by heading to the hills. Though they're apparently quite big (able to fill stadiums as far away as New Jersey), they were very friendly folks who insisted on treating us to dinner.

They're throwing me out now, so I better send this before I fly to Malaysia tomorrow!