On the Road Again!

The past week and half was really good. I started traveling with a Flemish girl my age from Belgium named Eva. It’s so strange how well we get along like we’ve been friends for a long time. There’s something about traveling around with someone too that cuts right through the formality of getting to know someone, and instead you start right from the heart of being good friends.

We just arrived in Vashist, a small village-town outside of Manali. We caught 8:30p bus from Dharamsala and survived a 10-hour hell-prison-like bus ride. It wouldn’t have been so bad if the road was paved or even straight, but it was rocky and windy the whole time, or if the driver didn’t wake us up 3 times throughout the night for a ‘dinner break’ and ‘tea breaks’.

But we made it! and arrived in Manali at around 6am where we caught a rickshaw from the bus stand to Vashist. Autorickshaw are tiny and it barely fit me and Eva and our stuff. Eva had to sit up front with the driver. Had I known he was a filthy creep, I wouldn’t have been so polite. It was only after he dropped us off that Eva told me he was feeling up her leg the whole time. Ugh!!! That kind of thing happens a lot in India. It’s disgusting.

It was definitely time to leave Dharamsala. I was already feeling antsy about leaving Dharamsala, but after I met Eva I had the opportunity to travel with her. She’s on her way up to Leh, the highest livable place in India. From here, it’s a two-day bus ride with an overnight stay in tents along the way. Just before I left Dharamsala I got a bad sinus cold. The weather was terribly cold and damp. My feet were always wet. Even my blankets felt damp at night because it’s so humid there. I found out that Dharamsala is the second wettest place in India. In the morning it was foggy and rainy and since it’s up in the mountains the clouds that come down trap and carry bacteria and pollution.
There were some other omens that it was time to leave too, like
1) the giant monkey that broke into my room while I was inside and stole my bananas and then hissed at me and ate them one by one in front of my door leaving the peels there, and
2) my next-door neighbor, the delusional, tactless (she had good intentions though) Vietnamese nun that started to make me feel crazy with all of her talk of demons and ghosts possessing my massage therapist and the little Indian boy who cleans the toilet trying to poison her because she has magical powers, and
3) the creepy Tibetan guys that kept following and harassing me and Eva.

These kinds of things just screamed that it was time to move on. The energy there was stagnant and foul. So our arrival in Manali, despite the creepy richshaw driver was much welcomed.

The weather up here is extreme. It’s really cold in the night and morning, and hot and sunny by the afternoon. Leh is supposed to be even more extreme. Vashist is charming little village-town situated in a mountain valley along a rocky river. The mountains are gorgeous here and remind me a lot of the Rockies except with more rich-green trees. It’s nice and quiet because most of the backpackers and tourists stay on the other side of the valley in Old Manali. There is a natural hot springs just up the road from out guest house that the locals use as a public bath and near to it a small temple for Shiva. The local Indians come and do puja (offering) ceremonies in the mornings which scent the air with perfumed incense. There are several juice bars along the main road here. It's wonderful and whole room of every fruit you can imagine and they can blend whatever you want. Me and Eva went for a walk and there are apple trees everywhere full of beautiful ripe red and green apples. Another thing that this place is lush with, is marijuana --everywhere. It's a weed and grows like one amongst all the other flora. It's just a trip to see it so casually growing in field-like proportions.

We're headed to Leh in the next couple of days. It's going to take us 2 days to reach Leh, and the road to gets to 5400m high so altitude sickness is probable. But from what I hear, the landscape in Leh is like heaven on earth. It's so high, it's above the monsoon, so the weather should be nice and sunny. There's supposed to be terrible internet and phone service there. So I might be a bit out of touch, but I'll try my best to keep in touch.

All my love,
Lien