Sarahan, the “Gateway to Kinnaur”, is an exquisite place. It had been described to us by somebody as ’something like being in fairyland’. Well, I’m not quite sure about fairyland, but it is as beautiful a place as anywhere I’ve ever been, and we enjoyed our brief stay there immensely.
With one or two exceptions: Read the rest of this entry »
Leaving Chitkul was a very hard thing to do. We’d fallen in love with this village and didn’t want to leave it. Where else had we wondered what the crowd of people around the pole was on the side of the gorge and discovered it was the village telephone being used? Where else have I played on a one-man cable car over a broiling river or stacked river rocks beside grazing donkeys? In no other village have I drunk ice-distilled Angori with a toffee in it to kill the tequila taste (personal dislike of mine, tequila - and no, I’m not telling you that story.), or eaten salty, hacked-off bits of mutton specially brought to the village and cooked for us by an important local. Nor have I sat sipping on ‘Nature-Simulated Apple Juice’ looking at the sun going down over the higher peaks of the Himalayas. It’s a pretty hard act to follow. Read the rest of this entry »
Raj, owner of our guesthouse in Chitkul, is a very interesting guy to talk to. He is very high caste, is the local postmaster and also secretary of the temple committee. In fact, you might as well come right out and say he’s pretty much chief of the village. So he knows a fair amount of history about the place. Read the rest of this entry »
The animal life in Chitkul is quite different from that lower altitudes. There are lots of donkeys, no snakes and I didn’t meet one single cow wandering around the village. I was trying to think what was so different about the buildings, aside from the fact they’re a different shape, when it finally dawned on me - there are no bars on the windows. Hah - no monkeys! You almost need bars to keep the insect life out at night time though. We watched that many moths, etc, do a kamakazi act into the candles that we lost count. But several times at bat (who we decided shall be hereonout christened ‘Sadie’) flew into our veranda room and did several sweeps up around the ceiling before exiting again. Paul tried to tell me tales about bats loving to get tangled up in blonde hair, but I wasn’t falling for that one. Besides, after my imaginary snow leopard scenario the other night, a little bat certainly wasn’t going to scare me! Funny how men remain boys in some ways. Read the rest of this entry »
Another day went by, consisting of lolling, drinking chai and chatting. We had an afternoon rest from this exhausting business in our concrete cell, reading and doing crosswords. A local guy went past our open window (which wasn’t actually very public at all), happened to notice us (hmmm) and insisted he was coming around to the front for a chat. Paul cut him off before he got to the door (I was feeling too lazy for talking) and he turned out to be one of the local schoolteachers. So somehow Paul ended up at his place, tasting the local brew (Angori), which has the kick of a bee-stung donkey and smells like tequila. It transpired that this guy found out I was a teacher (all right, literacy tutor, but YOU try explaining that to them), and he wanted us to visit the school the next day. So we found ourselves entered into his appointment book. Read the rest of this entry »
Something we came across here in Chitkul was the occasional “Debta” (sp) stones. There was often a patch nearby where a fire had obviously been going. These stones are 2 or 3 feet high, stand alone and are not to be touched. A local guy we chatted with (who’d been university educated) told us that when he was a kid and hadn’t learned about this taboo yet, he touched one of them and his skin erupted with horrible sores. So we made very sure to keep an eye out for them and not bang into any accidentally. Okay, it may not be part of our belief system, but we had no problem respecting the locals’ beliefs and customs. Read the rest of this entry »
For me, the first night’s sleep in Chitkul was terrible. I think it was from overtiredness, but I went to bed super early, had a crappy sleep then woke up at about 4.30am (again!) and ended up sitting outside on the veranda with my trusty torch wondering what to do with myself. I really needed to go to the toilet, but, having heard Raj’s (guesthouse owner) tale about a snow leopard taking his large, male donkey away for a meal a few months ago, I was just too darned chicken to go along the veranda and around the corner to the concrete box that contained the necessary hole in the ground. It was very, very dark, we were way up in the mountains, nobody else was around, and although I like to think I don’t resemble a donkey in any way, what if there was a snow leopard that needed glasses crouching in the shadows, just waiting for me to be at my most vulnerable with my pants down? Okay, I could close the bathroom door and be safely inside with whatever creatures lurk inside such less-than-salubrious surroundings, but what if the short-sighted snow-leopard sat outside the door and trapped me there until I could yell for help in the morning? These, and other wonderful-to-read-in-a-book-about-it-happening-to-somebody-else visions swam round and round in my head until I finally gave up and went back to bed with my legs crossed. Paul, as per usual, was comfortably asleep, blissfully unaware of the incredible dangers I had just survived, and I lay there in our concrete cell waiting for dawn to throw it’s disgustingly cheerful sunrays over the mountain tops again and bring with it the sanity of daylight. Read the rest of this entry »
Finally, we got onto the final bus of our burst up the mountains. This was fun as well. We were tearing along quite nicely, when suddenly the bus driver screams to a halt after a landrover passes us. The guys got out of the landrover, boarded the bus and demanded to see everyone’s tickets. This turned out to be an audit! How about that - you’re most the way up the Himalayas and bureaucracy still manages to find you and wants to check the paperwork. Well, that’s India for ya. Read the rest of this entry »
We were very lucky to be on a bus with quite good seats. This meaning our knees did not touch the seats in front of us. The ride was very mountainous, which I was to find out as we went along meant full of curves and alarming drops over the sides of quite narrow roads. The bus driver was full of confidence, so he had no problem driving on these roads at the pace of a speeding bullet. This is not to say there weren’t warning signs, such as driving past trucks with “Oh God Save Me” painted on the sides and and local people needing to lean over us and throw up out the window. Too late - we’d already paid the ticket, boarded, and had very little chance of getting of aside from doing a 007 number out the door. Due to the lack of a helicopter fortuitously hovering beside us, we decided to stay aboard and take our chances. Read the rest of this entry »
Well, we ended up staying another night in Shimla. Sheer exhaustion dictated that this should be so, not to mention acclimatisation to altitude. The room we had (on the 4th floor, naturally, according to Murphy’s law, which is continuously having a good laugh at our expense) was like something out of an Austin Powers movie. The backrest of the bed was shaped like a velvet peacock and it had little lights all around it. However, when we turned the lights on, one of them did go, one went on then changed it’s mind and went off again after a few minutes and one didn’t go at all. This wasn’t the only power problem we had. As it turned out, we could watch t.v. and recharge our camera batteries, or we could watch t.v. and have hot water for the shower. We couldn’t have it all - just who did we think we were?! Read the rest of this entry »
