ESCAPING FROM MOTHER INDIA

Ladakh is a land of fragile balance. From the coexistence of the Buddhist and Muslim communities, to the stability of the political borderlines, everything stays in the loose cord. This is scarcely apparent when one contemplates the stark hand with which men have landscaped their habitat. Leh Palace, with four centuries behind that haven’t exactly tiptoed trough, is imposing enough to make a random observer believe he is in the capital of a solid and homogeneous empire. Visually closer to the high peaks behind than to the compact town beneath, it could perfectly be the dwelling of one of those kings who are never seen by their subdues, and to whom is irreverent to look in the eye. Sometimes, clouds with poor navigation skills dock among the rocky environ, giving the wrong impression that their emanating from the dilapidated landmark, as a sign of its holy character. This is anything but the case. This area of Indian Kashmir, as any other, belongs to the Indian nation only on the grounds of a strong military presence. People here are not Hindu, nor they speak Hindi. They are Ladakhis, of a such an orthodox Tibetan culture that sending one son to the monastery is still the rule in many families, keeping at line demographic growth in an arid area where agriculture could hardly support a baby boom. The other stratus of the rainbow is the Muslim population, that here is a minority, even if around Srinagar their figure hits 90%. Most of them live near the 16th century mosque, making trade their main activity. Despite most families in Leh, due to intermarriage, have members in both communities, and both sides exchange tiny metallic discs in the market place, there is a certain tension in the air, a scar of the last decade social boycotts that both communities imposed on each other. When each day at dusk the high speakers of the mosque call to pray, the nearby monastery replies with sounding Buddhist choral music, in what may be the oddest DJ contest on Earth. In another level, India attempts to retain its sovereignty in a region landlocked between Pakistan and China, all with their own territory greediness that little cares for the local determination.

The first thing that kept me busy since arriving in Leh, was finding a legal way out. As a result of landslides and roadblocks, my journey to Leh had taken five days, instead of the expected two. Well, expecting something in the Indian Himalayas is a mistake in the first place, but with my visa expiring, I had only another five days left to make the journey back to Manali, than travel a similar distance south to Delhi and cross all the Punjab into Pakistan. When I visited the Superintendence of Police at Leh I perfectly knew two things. First, that one week visa extensions are theoretically free for most nationalities. Second, that Indian police bureaucrats, sporting moustache and dark glasses as if copied from a 1970s Latin-American dictatorship, were good at the maneuver of receiving banknotes under the table. I decided to play the role of the die hard journalist instead of that of the ordinary backpacker, and got ready, as in many other occasions. My hair correctly tight, reading glasses on, and a folder full of newspaper articles under the arm. I introduced myself as a journalist from the inexistent Buenos Aires Times, showing at the time Respublika articles in Lithuanian language (they would never spot the mismatch).Yes, a journalist from remote South America promoting Asian countries through media reports, and also –of course- sharing these with local Indian papers. Reading between the lines: if you ask for a bribe, I will publicly denounce it. The high rank police on the other side of the unnecessary long desk listened to me with little interest, cupping his chin with his hands. While I spoke I could see other functionaries of brown uniform arriving in chauffer driven Ambassadors. As this local Indian cars respect in every detail the 1950s design, they seemed as returning from Philadelphia Experiment.
The policeman I was trying to persuade of how VIP I was seemed more interested in the teenage soldier bringing him tea. When I was done with my speech, he simply said: “No problem, the extension is possible, but you have to pay the visa fee of U$S 40”. So took calmly my camera and took a nice snap, and assured him he would be in next weekend Hindustan Times. From then on, they started to pay attention, but insisted in the U$S40 fee even if I assured them I knew it was free. Eventually, after parading around several offices and acting in front of several office workers, got my legal –and free- one week extension.

During my stay in Leh, I must admit, little I did to spin in the local orbit, and succumb to the temptation of joining the backpackers own kaleidoscopic existence. Sometimes I think that the Indian chapter of my trip will definitely lack the depth of field achieved elsewhere in Asia through isolation from my western pairs. I somehow consider India as a deserved break from this immersion experience. When I have met foreigners in Iran and Afghanistan, they were themselves part of the local landscape, NGO workers, for example, or soldiers, and a few adventurous travelers. In Leh instead, as in the rest of India, it’s all about café hopping and chatting with other foreigners. Just sit down, in five minutes you will be surrounded by Germans, Israelis, French, etc. Even if most of this café talk fades away rather fast, in Leh I had the chance to meet some people who impressed me with their sensibility. The first time I talked to Eugenio, he asked permission to my landlady to inspect the light conditions of my room. He explained he was a painter, and if the room was lit enough, would I be leaving, he would take over. A white beard as the one the fat man with the sleigh. A matching forehead with wrinkles as a philosopher. Bushy eyebrows. I couldn’t help thinking of Leonardo Da Vinci. When he said he was actually from Firenze (not far from Vinci) I started looking for the hidden camera. The coincidence of physical outfit, occupation and nationality was too much. His name could be Eugenio, but for me it was Leonardo…

Leonardo had passed 12 of his 72 years in India. The first time in 1972, when he had rode two horses from France all trough Middle East, crossing Afghanistan on the way, something that instantly bebrothered us. What amazed me most about him was not his experience, but the calm and attention with which, in spite of this experience, he listened to each of the answers to his questions. As if planning to travel for some hundred years more, he justify his curiosity saying that “it’s always useful to learn fromother travelers experience” We would meet everyday in the Corner’s Café at 6 pm. He would arrive punctually with a copy of Dante’s “Paradise” kept under his arm. 1926 edition, printed in Milano. We would talk for hours over a tutti frutti of issues from photography to autistic children, for whom he felt an unparallel tenderness. Frequently, Jose, a Dutch girl, would join our table, to deliver the dosage of thriller, and relating how her guesthouse’s owner had misread the trust and started to enact an insane jealousy. The tendency rocketed out of control when the night of the party (because there are always raves and parties in these travelers hang outs) the local aspirant, in shock when Jose turned up with an Israeli friend, started a fight that ended with a motorbike chase across the Indus valley under white washed moon lit monasteries… And yes, there is always an Israeli involved, otherwise you are not in India. I have been running into many of them here and then on the way from Leh, since there is only one road to follow for everybody from Manali. I feel such nostalgia for Arabic language, that I still hope to fins one of them that has learnt, by osmosis, the language of their neighbors. But the most I could find so far, somewhat disappointingly was someone who could say the equivalent of: “If you make a step further I fire.” Very useful in checkpoints…

Virgilio didn’t leave the pages of Leonardo’s book to lead me trough the road to Manali. Classic poets still have a but at the time of hitch hiking. Instead, I earned the company of Ian, a South African of Dutch ascendance whose first language was Afrikaans, blend of old Dutch, German, and a dozen of black dialects. The Dutch that settled around the Cape of Good Hope are known as Boers. The trip to Manali was long enough to discover that, despite coming from different continents, there could be unexpected things in common. To begin, we are both grafts of European experiments in the New World. Both Boers and Italians climbed down their ships with more sense of the adventure than realism, in similar latitudes (Buenos Aires and Cape Town) and created a microclimate compact enough to psychologically exclude the place they were living in from the rest of the continents. In this way, when a South African goes to Kenya, he says he is going to Africa. Likewise, English buy ferry tickets to Europe when they cross to France and Argentinean backpackers happily announce they will set off to discover Latin America, when they intend to visit neighboring Bolivia or Peru. Comprehensibly, Peruvians accuse us of considering ourselves a branch of Switzerland…

Ian enjoys walking barefoot, for I nicked him Barefoot Boer, but his distinctive note is his passion for all things Asian. He lives and teaches English in Taiwan, what is not so terrible, if he wouldn’t loose his head for local girls. It’s this frenzy for the “narrow eye staff” what entitles him to the intensive care unit. Or maybe I should be more respectful for other people’s decision to follow the steps of John Lennon. So a Malasyan girl was waiting for Ian in Manali, and that kept him smiling, in spite of the slow pace of the local Tata trucks. In one of those we reached Tikse. A tire screeching halt and we jumped off to explore the local monastery. I still don’t see clearly the way monastic life is fully compatible with Buddhism. It was by abandoning his cloister style life and traveling that Buddha concluded that “life is pain” and that the reason of such pain is desire. But Buddhism doesn’t seem to take note of that importance, for I have never seen an image of a “Traveling Buddha”. Can you imagine a Buddha with his thumb up as a mudra?

The next stop was in Tso Kar, a brackish lake at 4500m, at which shores stands a compact tourist camp, mainly used by prearranged trekking groups who made week long walks with horses, guides and porters to take all their gear. The guides seem bored, since they have covered the route infinite times, but the trekkers seem to experience adrenaline, still don’t know how, even if they are guided and someone else is carrying their luggage. In the very shores of the lake, I also met two Austrian ornithologists who were the first people I have met that didn’t need forewords to know immediately the ring in my left hand is a cormorant’s tagging ring and not a spouse tagging one… In the third day of our trip together, Ian and I reached Pang, one of the many transitory camps I had already come across on the way north. There, the only thing heading our way was a big black stormy cloud. As if the road builders had forecasted the episode, a yellow sign by the road side said: “SMILE!”. But that was a difficult task under the rain that eventually showered us, so we sheltered in the camp. The tents there are old army parachutes forced into a conic position with a sturdy wooden pole. I said old army parachute, so that means that every time it rains (every night in this season) part of the stuff filters through, making my first Chinese lesson (language I will soon need) even more epic.

The night had closed in long before we made it to Koksar, an insignificant village more notable for its checkpoint. The policeman there was of the kind that sticks to the word and letter of the laws and opened the door of the truck to scream ”Illegal! Illegal!” Indian laws, apparently, forbid tourists to travel in overloaded local trucks whose drivers consume brandy at 5000m to amuse themselves. That’s quite sensible. The Indian laws of course ignore a tiny part of the foreigners love all that mess, but philosophy was not the way out in this case. The roles were set from the beginning, Ian would play the goog traveler, I would play the tough one. In these occasions in I feel grateful to have dogged into theatre many years ago. It’s only a matter of turning on the switch of emotional memory and speak to the policeman as if he had just dropped my pint. And of course, take him a eye blinding snap with flash…. The man smiled confusedly. Then recovered his seriousness, and ordered the truck drivers to follow him to the police station, parentheses we used to jump down and walk past the checkpoint, enveloped in darkness. We had barely done a hundred meters when we heard a scream, and noticed a torch advancing as an acrobatic firefly in the nights of the Himalayas. After our truck sped without lifting us again, we were hopeless. Obviously, they had instructions not to help us. The policeman fastened his steps. Then, unfolded from the pen of a hidden novelist, with the synchronicity of a guardian angel, a white jeep stopped and asked: “Manali?” Wemounted it as we would mount the flying dog in Never Ending Story and let the driver understand we were in the run: “Chelo, chelo!” (Go, go ,go!). “Stop!!!” – was the last we heared from that isolated policemen interested in applying the laws of an artificialentity called India in the middle of eternal mountains. The flow had rescued us once more.

There is one technical way to describe our arrival to Manali: we were stinking, with a fragrance I would commercialize with the brand ‘AFTER475”. Four hundred and sevety five kilometers of unpaved road. Eau du routard. At Manali, Barefoot Boer and I split ways. The day after I only waited for ten minutes for a fast car of three young professionals from Delhi who were back from a short holidays in the North. “What is the aim behind traveling?”- they asked. “Well, I guess traveling is the aim”. As everybody in Asia, they found it hard to accept the concept of a project that doesn’t lead to a economic progress. They dropped me in Delhi Bus Station a couple of hours before sunrise. There is something oppressive in those places that have the same rushed pace in nighttime as in daylight. They seem cities built for machines, not for humans. But those were my last 48 hours in India, and my mind was craving for crossing the border into kind Pakistan.

Conclusions about India. I often receive letters from readers asking me about the famed spirituality of this nation. It’s true, many travelers find a denial of western materialism in the frugality of the local lifestyle. I just see the contrary. I see that India is not in the condition of rejecting anything, it simply can’t afford things as a starting condition. A potential West. The upper classes exhibit a worship of success with a typically Asian abandon, as the one Max Weber attributes to the Protestants who forged capitalism in the 16th century. For them, the magnitude of the local market is an addictive predicament: “If you make a profit of one rupee per sale, in India you are earning one billon rupees.”-would state categorically one of my drivers, as dollar symbols aligned in both his eyes. In the meanwhile, the low casts combine the lack of any self improvement discipline with the instinct of everyday fight for the basics. I assume that in the 60s and 70s India sounded out enough of the bipolar world to attract seekers of spirituality, but it’s clear that today India is galloping in the same global horse as the home countries of the travelers who come here to find the source of spirituality. It seems curious to me that the disenchanted of our side of the world find shelter in a society which is far too hopeful to produce a disenchanted bunch. Isn’t disbandment a privilege of the West? Are there Asian Carmina Buranas? To make the matter more complex, most of the travelers that arrived here in the 70s used to come overland, and comparing. Now people just arrive by plane with the prejudgment that the rest of the continent, except South East Asia, is a battleground. Arrive by plane to study yoga in Rishikesh.3 days course, fast food. Valid, as everything else under the sun. But there is also a bit of fetish, and I say this having done myself a 3 days Reiki training, but aware that it was the same to do it in Dharamsala or in Caracas. I mean, yoga, reiki, ayurvedic medicine, have been traveling with international passport long enough and don’t need to be discovered in the Himalayan foothills. But well, of course, there is the plus of cheap cafes to hang around… A Spanish fellow insists that I should revisit India and I will realize that Mother India is beautiful and feeds a lot of people. Of course, he had never tested India and never needed to be fed, plus India was the only Asian country he had been to. I held my ticket gladly and took the train to the Pakistani border. (I had to gave the thumb a rest due to the visa expiry date inching dangerously closer).

On the way to Amritsar, by night, sleeping, I could know we were traversing a city due to the smell of urine that invaded the carriage. My last vehicles were a locally made truck who engine needs to be spinned manually to achieve ignition, and some cricket players in motorbikes thanks to whom I bated my first cricket ball before leaving the country. In the border I met a French couple that were driving all the way to Paris. They pushed me to the other side, to Lahore, with the Pakistani customs unobserving the whiskey bottles hidden in the back. Once in Lahore I phoned Tabreez, my local C host, from a phone shop whose owner produced a chair and a glass of chilled water. Evidently, I had crossed the border. Once in more in lands where hospitality is not a lateral consequence of higher education.

A TRIP TO LADAKH: HIGH ROADS, THE RYTHM OF 'CHAI' AND MOTORIZED MONKS.

“Himalayan Queen” was certainly an undeserved novelty title for the ‘squat over rails’ that transported me from unbearable Delhi to Shimla, in the cool Himalayan foothills. I cannot say the trip was pleasant, and with whole families packing the corridors and quantic-proportioned mothers attempting to sleep their children over my knees, it didn’t take long until I reexamined my opinions on population control. The scene reminded me of a creepy pension in Delhi Bazaar called “Prince Palace”, where the closest thing to a shower was buckets of boiled water. I repeated myself that the important thing was that I was leaving Delhi, even if Delhi hadn’t actually been that bad in the last week, partly thanks to the social life I borrowed from my friends at the Spanish Embassy, and also to the interesting conversations with Susumoy, my local Hospitality Club host.

Shimla is a collection of large Victorian mansions, a heir of the colonial era. Horror films could be rolled in any of them, since their state of conservation make them al look haunted. While today the pedestrianized “Mall” is a stampede of Southern Indian families in Sunday dress, boy-with-ice-cream included, it’s hard to imagine that back in the colony days it was forbidden for Indians –except for those carrying the luggage of their masters- to set foot in what then was a sanctuary of style and inequality. Today Shimla is the capital of the State of Himachal Pradesh (Land of the Eternal Snows) and starting point for venturing into higher and more desolate valleys.

The plan was to explore Kinnaur and Spiti valleys, in the border between Himachal Pradesh and Tibet, and then head up the second highest motorable road in the world, linking Manali with leh, in Ladakh, another exclave of Tibetan culture within Indian borders. But my visa was slowly expiring as the classic refrigerator lemon, so the trip would only be possible resorting to the undesirable “arrive and leave” strategy.

Thus, Kinnaur Valley passed as a slide show. Even though it’s one of the most scenic valley in the whole Himalayas, the fertility allowed by the punctual monsoon deprives it from any dramatism, making it rank, at most, as idyllic postcard. The view of Mount Kinner Kailash from Kalpa village, in fact, shines with the selection of memory. Its inhabitants, the Kinnauris, to whom the first historic records refer as ‘celestial musicians’, are easily identifiable from their caps, which resemble the ones of an impossible reggae army, with red and green embroideries. They are generally Hindu, with a special devotion for Kali, who they worship in stone and wood tower shaped temples. It’s interesting to note that, besides being Shiva’s wife, Kali is also one of his attributes. Another version of the old macho argument where woman is born out of a chunk of man….

Spiti valley rest behind the Himalayas, which doesn’t mean that mountains is not all what’s around. It happens that the Himalayas are only the most famous of a plurality of concentric mountain ranges forming the arch of high peaks separating the Indian Subcontinent from the Central Asian massif. Squeezed between the Himalayas and the Zanskar ranges, the valley stays sheltered from the annual rains, which accounts for its moonlike scenery. The water of the Spiti river has over the lands it washes the same null effect that modern world has over the monks of the numerous gompas (Tibetan monasteries). Following the systematic destruction of Tibetan culture by the Chinese (process the later proudly calls “Cultural Revolution”) the monasteries in neighboring countries such as India and Nepal have become repositories for posterity. The proximity to China, occupied Tibet, is a bit more than poetic data. Both countries staged a brief war in 1962, following a failed invasion by the Red Army, and still today the area is considered volatile. While the Tibetan are used to being in the fire line, it’s still to be seen how they resolve the interaction with the new pacific invader: the tourist. Just watch the novices of Tabo gompa –the place where the Dalai Lam is meant to retire- playing fascinated with the Enfield motorcycles parked outside the monastery by foreign visitors. They seem to enjoy to much our material world to seriously expect to abandon it.

I joined the main road in Manali, and soon moved to an outlying pacific village called Vashisht. Pacific, in spite of the hundred or so Israeli backpackers, that you may also find in any other touristic village in Northern India. As far as I understood, after two years of Army service, the average young Israeli compensate with a couple of years plane hopping around the world. Those I chatted with were twice as happy to be in India: if they had been at home they would have certainly been called to duty. The night arrived, but I resisted the temptation of cheap guesthouses and instead wandered the streets, a bit lost, knowing that little could I wait from the locals in terms of hospitality. I was, in fact, rescued by a fellow foreigner, a German called Rogelio, who is resident in the village. I had just watched “The Lord of the Rings” in a café, and the in-stage of Rogelio, with his broad never ending ginger beard and his Saxon warrior outfit, made me wonder if Frodo legions hadn’t escaped the 24 inches. In any case, reality and Rogelio were not best friends, and even if he offered a space in his room as promised, he went all night speaking incongruously with himself. I pretend to sleep, but I listened in awe: “I have an Enfield motorcycle. I can ride it to Germany, and drive around the Reichstag, and inside stadiums, no problem, but slow…” At midnight he would stand up in bed and proclaim: “The German Parliament of Schroeder is a debate club where people get paid to talk nicely…”
Standing out of town I stretched my thumb towards Leh, 475 km further north. I didn’t expect an easy trip, knowing that it takes two days by bus. I reached Keylong without difficulties, with two rides in a jeep, one carrying tomatoes the other pipelines. Keylong is situated at 3350 m, and it is the last town of any size in 280 km, before reaching Rumtse, already in Ladakh. In the middle , the road runs almost always over 4000m, with two passes over 5000m, and there are no settlements except for army barracks and transitory yurt camps offering accommodation and basic food to travelers. And the travelers are not few: since the road was opened to foreigners in 1989, thousands of our specie complete the arduous journey every season, whether in bus or in rustic Enfield bikes. Personally, I couldn’t avoid evoking similar South to North trips in the Argentinean Calchaqui Valleys, but without the perspective granted by recurrence. Behind lied the Beas river, that responsible for discouraging Alexander the Great, that traveler disguised as conqueror, who thought the “End of the World” was around here. I stayed overnight in Keylong, where Ailine and Stephanie, two Swiss travelers, smuggled me into their room.

It took me the following morning a jeep and a tractor to reach Parsu village, 52 km north from Keylong. There I saw in the horizon a caravan of Tata trucks, one of which, a tanker, stopped for me. After so many short rides in jeeps, tractors and motorbikes, I had a reason to smile when they said they were going all the way to Leh. Of course, things were not going to be that easy… The first day everything went smooth. Kuldip, the driver, and Guddu, his assistant, were kind in each detail and never spoke about money. So, slow but steady, the Tata opened his way across the winding cliff roads that characterizes the north of Himachal Pradesh, where the high peaks hold the eternal snows so precariously that one expects an avalanche at any moment. More the geography I feared the human factor: Kuldip chose the Baralacha Pass (4830m), the first of a series of high passes, to train Guddu in such tasks. Eye opened Guddu gave stern turns to the wheel, hardly correcting the direction in time for the next curve. I started to choose what memories to retain in the second of my life.

But Gudu did the job. The job of a trucker assistant in India exceeds those of a mere navigator, for in top of those tasks in relation with the road, such as clearing the way from heavy rocks and monitoring the progress of the truck in dangerous curves, there is a devote Guddu who lights incenses very morning to purify each corner of the cabin, from the dead speedometer to the mandatory Shiva image, before joining hands in prayer position and clapping twice. Darkness surprised us soon after the pass, and we stopped at Zingzingbar camp, in a yurt where also three Israeli bikers took rest. These people always surprise me: one of the, with long hair and a pacific aspect, is, in the reserve service, a tank driver! That night it rained harder than ever. My Israeli friends will have, I thought, some genetic skills in Arc construction. Given the circumstances, I couldn’t make clear if the terrible headache was the product of the altitude or the first symptoms of the rabies shared by the dog that bite me in Delhi bazaar… Way or another, we were up 5:30, ready for a long day of traveling after which we should reach Leh.

We hadn’t covered 20 km when we found a column of parked trucks by the roadside. The rains of the previous night had caused a landslide and the road was blocked. A group of 15 workers from Bihar (the poorest province of India) struggles with shovels to make the surface even again. A digger was on its way from Zingzngbar, but it would take hours for it to arrive. With such scenario, Kuldip stared at Guddu and invited (imposed) with a scream: “Chai?” (Tea?). Chai, that Asian way of punctuating the void. Each second, in all Asia, from the Bedouins in Syria to the mullahs of Iran or the lamas in their gompas, millons of throats coordinate the exact inflection and invite (impose): “Chai?” As the tea was not going to be enough to quench my hunger, I decided to walk over the landslide to Sarchu, the next camp, 4 km away. After filling the stomach I looked for a quiet yurt, rented a mattress for the day (1 dollar) and, lethargic as the altitude had rendered me, I fell in a deep sleep. Between the gaps of unconsciousness I believed to hear the engine of the Tatas roaring through. Could it be possible? Could the way be already repaired? I decided, with more instinct than rationality, that resting was now the priority and that next morning I would eventually find another truck bound to Leh. I woke up at 8 pm. It was still raining outside, and there were no other foreigners in my yurt to talk to. Feeling a bit miserable a bone-wet, I emigrated to a yurt across the road, where some Israeli and four Indians from Bangalore, all riding their bikes to Leh, were having some greasy soups as dinner. While crossing the road I could noticed there were several trucks pulled by the muddy roadside as defunct dragons, but being the camp several kilometers long, I rejected the idea of searching for “my” Tata. I had been talking for a couple of hours with my new friends. Raghu, one of the Indians from Bangalore, worked for Dell and had offered to sponsor my up coming website for the first year. In that moment I saw Guddu emerging out of the semi light provided by the kerosene lamp, leaning his head to a side and another, as if it was about to fall, in that polyvalent Indian gesture that can mean everything from affirmation to acknowledgment. They had arrived while I slept, and they were looking for me. “Tomorrow, 6 am, up, evening, Leh” –said Guddu in his broken English, which in that moment sounded as a Shakespeare sonnet. “See you in the next landslide!” – I greeted my fellow travelers and went back to my yurt.

I shouldn’t have used such a dangerous formula. The following morning we had covered less than 10 km when we met again a queue of trucks and jeeps. “Chai!” – shouted out Kuldip, as if two landslides in 10 km would be part of the routine. The second landslide was, nevertheless, more peculiar, for this time the foreigners who traveled in buses and jeeps delayed at both sides of the landslide, joined the Bihari workers and shovels in hand helped to repair the obstructed road. The bright skinned black Bihari workers are always found where the most difficult tasks are required, and remind me of the sub races imagined by A.Huxley. The job demanded more than 5 hours, and only after midday we speeded again. By now, landslides had imposed their rhythm, and we traveled in an involuntary convoy of three trucks. One of the other trucks carried goats, which loomed with through the gaps of the wooden bars of the cargo compartment; the other five hundred hens drugged by altitude. In each landslide, the three truck drivers (and their assistants) would gather and ask each other: “Chai?”.

After we overcame the second landslide, our Tata galloped like a wild horse. The road unexpectedly got paved and led to a plateau of pastures, inhabited by a few khampa nomads, from whose faces can be told that they are still complaining to the Gods for the draw of destinies. The plateau lasted some 20 km, and we started to climb the side of a gorge. The outcome of such steep zigzagging was Taglang Pass (5360m), the second highest motorable pass in the world. With the attitude of a surgeon, Kuldip extended his left arm, where Guddu appropriately fitted a bottle of cheap whiskey. It was their way of celebrating the safe crossing.

On the other side, and after three days in the truck, we reached the first town, Rumtse, which is culturally, a point of inflection. We had left Himachal Pradesh and entered Ladakh soon after Sarchu, but the absence of any settlement had concealed the evidence: that Ladakh is a “Little Tibet” in India. And in Rumtse that fells like a verdict, it is enough with looking at the architecture and the faces of people in the street. Tibetan architecture somehow transmits the stoicism and solidity of the Tibetans. Even the humble most of dwellings looks like a fort built to last a millennium. The slightly inclined angle with which the Hellenic white walls part from the ground enhances this illusion. Near Miru, another Tibetan village with eroded stupas –symbolic Buddhist altars- on the sides, our third landslide surprised us, and tamed us until the next morning.

The last stage on to Leh was clear of landslides but not uneventful. In Karu, a large military base, a young local palmed down the Tata. I thought he was a conscript heading back home to Leh. Once inside, with the premeditated eloquence of a TV presenter, he took a dozen film black plastic tubes refilled with opium and started a real auction. The drivers of the other trucks were already in our cabin. The always ready dealer had even a manual weight like the ones jewelers have. All the transactions went on just in front of the military base…

In Karu I said goodbye to Gudd and Kuldip and boarded an Army jeep of a General who had lived a year in Angola and spoke Portuguese. We soon reached the broad Indus Valley, with its enormous gompas that, far from having been conceived and built in the same instance, are real rag puppets, the babelic result of infinite additions and earthquakes and… Finally, the road seemed to crash against a arch of high unforgiving mountains. A couple of curves and these slided like a theater’s canvas. What was behind was Leh. 101 hours and ten vehicles had been necessary. But I was there.

NEW DELHI: SPIRITUALITY, DECEPTION AND COW'S TOTALITARISM...

By definition, the capital of a country of almost a billon inhabitant cannot (and will not) be a pleasant site, I knew that, but besides my wishes, New Delhi was the place to obtain Pakistani and Chinese visas. Being the Indian Himalayas, where I had already spent two weeks, a culturally diverse region I comforted myself by saying that now, traveling southwards, with the unforgiving heat of the plains growing closer, I was in an exploratory mission. Thinking ahead, I imagined an overpopulated metropolis, poorer than Cairo maybe, and surely with more rickshaws and street cows. But I was being distracted by frivolous differences. New Delhi, the heart of the beast, was going to let me with recurrent fantasies of a trip to a South Pacific Island as Cook or Tokelau.

I had always read travel guide authors empting the dictionary when time comes to describe how hospitable Turks, Kurds and Iranians are. En route through such grounds I had found comments of the kind fair, and I had started to such amount of generous adjectives wouldn’t have sense without any of the neighboring countries being hostile or at least sensibly less inclined to help strangers. With its widely acclaimed pacifism and spirituality, India ranked as the applicant less likely to incarnate such eventuality. And yet, I am convinced, acknowledging all what the country has to offer in terms of culture and history, India is, as regards hospitality, the element that allows for the contrast.

After such a categorical statement I know some of you will be wanting proves. It may be enough to remember the rickshaw driver who, on learning that I wouldn’t pay him seven times the fare of my trip, preferred having a nap to driving me for the real price. Or shall I evoke that friendly local who, seeing the coming bus that we should both board overloaded with passengers hanging from the doors as bunches of banana, sent me to the wrong one and literally ran towards the correct one. In any case, it’s their poker face and deep apathy what now, with hundreds of Iranians and Afghans still mimicking invitations for tea in my retina, makes me miss Muslim countries.

Having said this, I must make clear that no specific resentment towards foreigners operates in Indian people, but they are rather democratic: they treat you as bad as they treat each other. The whole picture is both sad and comic, that of a nation regenerating daily their own suffering. Saying that Delhi inhabitants have an unchallenged capacity to turn unnecessary stressing the simplest events of everyday life would be to oversee far more alarming aspects. We are not expecting the vendors of the Paharganj Bazaar to throw their rubbish in the bin, because the haven’t been taught the trick, but then it’s funny to see them throwing rotten fruit in front of their stands and chasing tha happy flies with giant fans soon after. In fact, the average Indian seems to take an immense pleasure in being in close contact with filthiness. When the first monsoon rains hit Delhi, the narrow main street of the bazaar became an Olympic pool size swamp, and mother tenderly waved their children who set off to play and swim, dodging if lucky the open drainage mouths, where hundreds like them drawn every year. By night, control of the area shifts to gangs of rabid looking dogs (one of which sharpened his teeth with my right ankle) and homeless sadus (holy men, most of the times disguised beggars) whse only friends are those dogs.

It turned an immediate question to me, where does the famed spirituality of India comes from? After only two months in the country I am less than qualified to write an essay about the issue, but I suspect it has more to do with the spiritual vacuum of western new agers than with prevailing local state of facts. Many of the travelers I come across arrive to India with an a priori fascination and rapidly derive spirituality from the polychromatic simplicity of life. As for me, I still can’t find any depth in the abundance of incense and the mechanical worship of Shivas and Kalis. I am the first one to admire India for its theoric developments in the course of history, but it is quite obvious that little of that wisdom has filtered to present days. No need to say it is the of yoga and meditation, of the clever assets who wrote the Uppanishads, but this bulge of knowledge seems reserved for a tiny learned minority.

My arrival to Delhi overlapped with the Bombay blasts. Thousands of Indian in the streets stopped harassing each other to watch the news and vengefully exclaimed: “Pakistani people!” In the aftermath of the tragedy, even the noses of the street cows were pointing across the border, and the temptation to strike back was stirred by the contiguity with which TV channels broadcasted Israeli retaliation in Southern Lebanon. That’s within comprehension, but I am still trying to understand how can Indians ride in panic when the death toll is caused by the enemy and be so indifferent to the much higher number of casualties caused by their sole negligence. The supporters of spiritual unearthly India should have a closer look at statistics, and learn about the thousands of cases of parents murdering their newborn daughters to avoid paying hefty marriage “taxes” in the future. As women are considered worthless, the family of the bride has to pay thousands of dollars in compensation to that of the groom for taking their daughter. That also explains why pre-born analysis is forbidden in India. The slightest hint that it is going to be a girl is enough to result in abortion.

In perspective, levels of internal aggression, silenced and accepted, seem to more than enough to stop speaking at once about a land of mystic tolerance. The pacific strategy of Gandhi to drive the British away was emotive. Yet, I wonder, wouldn’t they value more the consequences of their actions had they had to fight for independence? In any case, any attempt of to understand Indian indifference requires looking further back at the emergence of the cast system. The cast system must be the most efficient social control device in history. In this way, the exploited low casts comfort in their misery, and those who receive the legal minimum wage of 7 dollars a month don’t blame anyone, but just believe that they are going through the punishment for bad actions committed in past lives. In India, logically, it’s more realistic to expect advancement from reincarnation rather than from the less than flexible social frame. While the higher casts –the businessmen, or waisha- continue to base their wealth in the management of an underpaid working class, the future remains hazy. Cows are, by far, the ones who result always unscathed from the struggle of Indian existence. The Hindus consider them the second mother of all India, since their milk replaces the mother’s breast. This turns them into untouchable beings who dwell victoriously around the city, smelling at the sign of Indira Gandhi International Airport, as if claiming the few areas not yet under their realm. Being native from Buenos Aires province, where probably the best steak in the world comes from, I can only regret so many cows are not on the right side of the fence (and in the menu).

After two weeks of waiting for Pakistani and Chinese visas to be issued, for anti rabies vaccines to be shot in my arm, and for Delhi citizens to show a more kind side, I left the city for the far North. The Buddhist valleys of Kinnaur, Spiti and Nubra – and the highest roads in the world- were waiting for me.

SLOWLY, SLOWLY...FULL POWER!!! (TWO WEEKS IN MCLOED GANJ)

Many years before cheap airlines and the Interrail would metabolize nomadism making it socially acceptable and accessible almost to the point of irrelevance, both the North American police and the Interpol led their own investigations aiming to understand (and prevent) the growing inclination to roadside life displayed in the 60s and 70s by a disaffected youth. Those were times of the overland hippie trail to India, of the French May, and to the eyes of authorities that understood self segregation to be another kind of transgression, , the movement of an intrepid generation seemed to akin to ideology and militancy. In his book “A sociology of Hitch Hiking” (1974) Mario Rinvolucri pastes fragments of such reports, where the official-redactor bitterly complains: “traveling, specially by hitch hiking, seems to be the joy of this people. Wherever they are found, they are bound for somewhere else; back to Amsterdam or onwards to Istanbul (…) Drinking wine and kissing in public they are a displeasing spectacle” –concludes the inspector who, with the Vietnam war in the headlines manages to make room in his indignation for wines and kisses. Confronted to the lack of consensus at home, there was hardly a better choice for the travelers than the shelter provided by their own strongholds, like Crete, Istanbul or Northern India. But intolerance had a replica abroad and soon the leaders of several alternative settlements near Pokhara and Katmandu were given a stern warning by Nepali Police. An alarming similarity with the late Roman Empire era when, anticipating the Medieval Law of Residence the peasant was obliged to stay where he was recorded at the census. Two weeks ago I arrived to one of these reservoirs; McLoed Ganj, in Himachal Pradesh, Northern India.

My first impression of McLoed was that of a compact universe where Tibetan monks, cows, and long haired travelers in their Royal Enfield – the little modified Indian version of an English 1955 motorcycle- share the streets bis-a-bis. The second mementos I associate with McLoed are its are its poster covered walls, announcing courses on yoga, meditation or Tibetan cuisine. The town has in fact performed a maneuver of adjustment (and bastardization) to accommodate –and please- the visitors’ community. Having traveled trough Iran and Afghanistan in relative cultural isolation, it wasn’t difficult to take the decision to drop anchor for a fortnight, stability I hadn’t known in 14 months of marching pace. Consequently, McLoed became a sort of TV studio , with the curtains unveiling each morning the same settings, more often than not the terrace of the View Café. I was talking there to a slightly built man whose beard was white enough to remember Afghanistan in peaceful times and even to emotionally recall the winters in Qandahar, when a another man, who had been all the while leaning over the corner sofa and repeatedly preparing whiskey and coke, addressed to me. His name was Daniel, and he was an artisan (or jeweler –as he dubbed himself) from Argentina. He resided in Canary Islands, Spain and had come to India to buy stones at Jaipur’s gem market, allegedly the largest in the world. Having accomplished his commercial affairs, he had quickly realized that he was spending less money in India, sleeping in hotels and eating at restaurants, in perpetual holidays, than back home with a basic life in Spain. As many others, he had decided to stay until the last day of his visa. And that’s not a short time, for all Indian visas are granted for six months. For his contemplative pose, every afternoon in the corner coach, whiskey ‘n coke in hand, rather than for the badge in his left eye we started to nick him “the Captain”. I am speaking in plural, since by dusk the View Café, which also doubled as a guesthouse had revealed the presence of other latinos: Sergio and Andres from Chile, Elena from Spain, and others.

- I have whiskey, warm clothes, and playing cards, all I need” –had stated the Captain, letting us mentally reconsidering each item of our gear in the first place, but also hinting at the downhill fate McLoed had experienced, formerly a screen for the flirt and the bias of English aristocrats who, among cocktails and servants would show off their position, now a hangout for a impoverished artists who make frugality the center of their pride.

- When I first set foot in Canarias –the Captain went on- I had no shoes, not a dime, my trousers –a present- could have fit two men at the waist, I didn’t even had a belt. Such is the life of the artisan, today you are rich, and tomorrow you starve. I love it!” It was clearly a Captain that appreciated wrecks. And yet, something hadn’t changed. Hill Station or Hippie Station, it was always about the locals serving a richer lot.

In the following days I rejoiced in the bourgeois and novel pleasure of having a neighborhood. When the day would draw to an end, it was a tacit date that grouped us in the View or Trimurti Cafes to play cards with Sergio and Elena. McLoed itself doesn’t loose, for being the seat of the Tibetan Government in the exile, its general aspect of farming town. Tibetan prayers –strips of colored cloth printed with Buddhist sutras strung at the top of houses and temples to purify the air- make the hillside village look like something in between a birthday and the bridge of a massive ship. There were in McLoed enough temples and monasteries to keep us busy for al week, but it was hard to see the town as something different than an esthetic background for our own personal searches. It was enough to activate the lateral hearing in the View Café to realize that it was possible there to go around the world in 80 loonies. Everybody there seemed more or less involved in a series of disciplines ranging from Reiki –which I later found myself learning- to Ayurvedic medicine and yoga, but we were particularly impressed of the constancy with which ‘the people over the cushions’ gathered each evening to work on the Mayan calendar. Led by a Swiss with a scholarly preoccupation for the nature of February 29th, the group worked industriously, deriving the astrologic predictions for the following day, and publishing the graphically in a A4 size poster. In fact, when you ask, “what day is it?” in McLoed, chances are the other person is going to come up with “self existing red moon” or “blue monkey”. With such titles, who can honestly miss old Monday or Tuesday? Other times you can hear them speaking about bakthuns, 52 years long cycles. When 52 bakthuns are passed hold yourself, game over. Redirecting our ear to our South American table, the Captain argued with Andres about the mileage of different Royal Enfield models, while Sergio categorically suggested a classification of nipples, and asked seriously if hardness and diameter should be enough criteria. Mind the gap…

Seen like this it seems like just a logia of mystic orientated coffee drinkers. And to some extent most of the routine in McLoed slips away hanging around different cafes in rota basis, but of course, with a police reluctant to interfere with Holy Tourism, the freedom of consciousness is the only moderator and coffee or chai are mere footnotes to marihuana or hashis. It’s an old issue which, let me say, our society, too afraid to openly embrace it but too interested in the grass to reject it, has promptly resolved with clandestinity. It is no doubt a matter of perspectives. I was surprised to meet an English couple who not only resorted frequently to smoke in front of their children but were rather afraid that these would pick up odd prejudices from school…

As days passed, however, other layers of the onion came to surface, and it became evident that McLoed was a lot more than a destination for a colorful bunch happy to have a great time in a cheap country. It was quite an experience to run into Jari, an Ecuadorian who has studied alternative therapies in India for over 4 years, and who is equally qualified to heal a migraine with Bach Flowers or to give a lecture on the Bhagavad Gita, the Epic drama of Hindu gods. But Jari rejects the word “mythology”, for he rather considers our civilization to be the corrupted inertia of a forgotten golden era, which echoes reached the scribes of the Bhagavad Gita. As he instructs us in an elegant style that includes rhetoric questions, nothing seems to grasp at the attention of the Swedish girl who next to us keeps knitting a brigh orange sweater with the slogan: “Slowly, slowly, full power”, which quite summarizes the prevalent attitude around, the faith of the visitors in their alternative paths, the stoicism with which the Tibetan maintain their exile. With the same criteria, the inhabitants of Christiania, the alternative community nestled in the heart of Copenhagen, had their coins minted bearing a snail. Not as intimidating as the double headed eagle of the Russian coins, but far more meaningful. Also as in Christiania or as in a Rainbow Gatherings, McLoed offers shelter from the mainstream to the traveler and the innovator. On learning that many of the present were thinking of flying to England to attend the on going European Rainbow in the South Coast, the link was clear. But no matter how cozy harbors are, ships were conceived for the sea. Sometimes ships don’t return from the sea, and this is something sailors know perfectly well. My last days in McLoed were all sadness. By email I learnt that Kinga, resourceful and unstoppable Polish hitchhiker and writer from Gdansk had died as a result of malaria in Accra, Ghana. It is proper to ribbon an article about patience, commitment and confidence with the most famous of Kinga’s statements: “Every dream is given to us with the power to make it come true”. Slowly slowly, full power.

BETWEN THE CONCEPT INDIA AND REAL INDIA.... HAS ANYBODY SEEN MY SAINT ID???

An innocent white line painted across the pavement divides, in the famed Wagha border, Pakistan from India. It is possible to speak about these countries as different entities only from 1948 onwards, when the former British India split up in three independent states, when the former British India split up in three independent states including the mentioned ones and Bangladesh. In the case of Pakistan and India, the “Partition” had a religious background, and the newborn countries found themselves edging battle almost from the beginning over the bordering northern region of Kashmir, whose valleys are populated by Muslims in a ratio of 92%. Even if the Wagha border is way far from the red zone, one would expect to find the parsimony of two nations that guard each other as wounded snakes. Instead, the two wedding clad officials stuck at each side of the white stripe chit chat fluently and are even happy of having their pictures taken. More significantly, both border corps merge each afternoon in a border closing ceremony where the choreography comes to symbolize them. Ironically, the Pakistani secret services continue to fund a petty terrorist attack scheme in Srinagar and Jammu.

Some meters on the other side, with a new stamp on the passport, a boar welcomes me into the “largest democracy on Earth”, undoubtedly referring to the figures rather than to the magnitude of such representation. Personally, when crossing the magic line I realized that I wasn’t arriving to Real India, the physic substrate of statistics, but to the concept India, to the remote lands where the first books –the Vedic scriptures- were written, to the mist that threaded Sanskrit – mother of almost European languages. Through millennia India has worked as hidden sender of wisdom, as a supernova whose energy reaches us well after its conception. Knowledge was for some time an endemic creature of India: while Europeans were sharpening their axes someone near the Ganges was designing the intricacies of chess. Moreover, the idea that the universe is a mere illusion to our minds unfolded from local sages centuries before Descartes and Schopenhauer started to crawl. The umbilical cord may seem invisible today, but quite a few people suspect that Jesus himself studied Yoga and meditation in India during his uncharted days. On the demon’s side, and racist as they were, the Nazis ended up excavating their origins in the Himalayans, as attested by several SS led political archeological expeditions poorly portrayed in the film “Seven years in Tibet”.

Having listed these attractive connections, I must say my first steps in Amritsar drove me back from the Concept India to Real India, where slow, obese, elder cows block for minutes the fishy stream of rickshaws that no traffic lights could punctuate, and where unworried men and women find comfortable sleep in walk paths and roadsides. Temporarily, attributing the excessive spontaneity with which life occurs in India to an unconsciously professed nihilism seems pushing things too hard. Overpopulation may explain the issue, if less charmingly, more accurately.

Busy with these thoughts I made it to the Golden Temple in Amritsar, Punjab’s premier cty. All travelers on East to West traffic had informed me of the possibility of lodging for free in the fabulous temple of the Sikhs. Introducing the Sikhs: opposed to the ever calm Hindu, Sikhs considered violence necessary to defend themselves from invading Muslims. Sikhism spiritual life centers on the Golden Temple, an extensive complex of temples and ashrams aligned at the shores of an artificial marbled edged square lake in the center of which, and linked by a catwalk, lies the bright, golden laminated, main shrine. With the rhythm of religious music (gunbali) as a pass maker, thousands of pilgrims, some arrived from as far a field as the US or England (where rich Sikh communities reside) walk around the lake day and night. Telling an Hindu from a Sikh is really easy. The later are reluctant to cut any of the capillary emanations of the body, which results in Afghan like beards, and cover their hair with a unique turban called padgi. Theoretically, they all should carry a curved knife by the side, thank God just for decoration these days. One of the temple guards, for example, parades himself proudly dressed in neon orange turban and deep blue one piece garment, as he discretely dispenses stick beats to those falling asleep during prayers. Coming from the chromatic sobriety of the Muslim world I have the impression of having swallowed a hallucinogen

Seated cross legged by the lake I was approached by a young guy dressed in a brown shaggy gown. “Excuse me… are you a saint?” “Negative. Why do you think so?” – I replied. “Because of your dreadlocks!” Rajan was a graduated from a Philosophy College in the South of India wandering in search of enlightenment. He had been crossing India by train in all conceivable directions for over three months. Before getting the point that I was hitch hiking for pleasure, Rajan suggested that, looking like a saint, I could use the trains for free. For I moment I overlooked the possibility, and smiled at the idea of adding a saint ID to the passport and the fake student card. We spent many hours discussing about Hinduism (he, speaking; me, learning) and the veil of Maya… “Today people believe too much in the propaganda of reality” – commented Rajan as we looked for our place in the temple where 40,000 portions of food are served daily, attesting to the Sikhs vocation for hospitality. There were around 300 people in the room, aligned at both sides of a carpeted way where colorful servants passed by, refilling each plate aerially and almost without breaking the march. As food is served all day round, also teams of men and women can be seen ringing tones of onions at any time while, in a similar premise, a similar bunch wash and pile hundreds of metallic dishes. After each banquet, another party, armed with buckets and brushes, storms in. With an un Asian degree of precision the room is ready to welcome new hundreds of anxious dinners a few minutes later.

After feeding ourselves we continued our conversation lying n the garden’s grass. Reality was unsubstantial; we had reached agreement on that point. I tried to remember what I had done on a random date, say July 16th, 2005. Impossible. Even if it didn’t evidently transcended, chances are that day I woke up with a feeling of urgency, hopes and programs. No track however of July 16th, 2005. Vanished from the wheel of cosmos. My wise friend prescribes local Hindu medicine (seldom used by Hindus tough): “Mindfulness of each second, grain of rice or smile. Avoid chains of actions with long term sense. But enough philosophy, let’s go for a good plate of water” And his exclamation was correct and literal, amid such frugality it was possible to talk about a good plate of water, as reposed over a desk by a pious Sikh. Rajan had successfully rescued me from Real India. I was floating in th Concept India again.

I knew that hitch hiking out of a large Indian city meant exposure to unwanted offers from rickshaws drivers. The first ten who opted to park their hellish machines by my side (thus blocking the sight corridor between me and the coming cars) benefited by an early and unfruitful attempt of cultivating patience. Number eleven, instead, saw his rickshaw stolen by the hitch hiker. With a puzzled passenger in the backseat, I pedaled 500 meters to a much quieter location, much to the driver’s surprise, now half a mile distant and shouting. Excluding this initial stressful scenario in Amritsar, the rest of the trip to Dharamsala, en the Himalayan foothills, was a swift concatenation of private air conditioned cars and local “Tata” trucks, which come with Shiva altar as factory feature in the center of the windscreen. Fleeing the tyrannical heat of the plains I bypassed Dharamsala and made it to McLoed Ganj, formerly a hill station for the India residing British aristocracy, who quickly discovered that no fan was enough to cool down Delhi n the summer months. Being McLoed Ganj synonym with Tibetan exiled government (which includes the Dalai Lama) the character of the town is no less defined by the presence of hundreds of hippies from 5 to 80 years of age, embarked altogether in a different sort of exile. When I arrived, the sundown was already limiting my curiosity. Only the following morning would I start to navigate the labyrinthic network of searches which is McLoed Ganj and the Kangra Valley.

PASHTUNISTAN, MOSES, AND THE LIZARD...

Five years ago, excited by the success of my first hitch hiking trip around Europe, I had written an email to my best friend in Argentina describing the adventure briefly. He had replied: “…and I am really happy that our beloved “thumb method” works also in the old continent, where in 1941 you could get a lift in a Panzer, and in 900 with a caravan of enraged camels. The epic episode of hitchhiking to a passing convoy of German tanks had remained ever since in the vault of dreams, until Afghanistan proposed a valid substitution. I was hitching out the outskirts of Kabul towards Jalalabad, in the Pakistani border. Initially, the front sun and the ever present dust allowed seeing only the hexagonal contours emerging ghostly. A second later, the German flag became visible, along with the white riveted black cross that stands for the Bundeswehr: it was a column of German armored vehicles on patrol. I pulled out my thumb, more as an acknowledgment than as a serious attempt to stop them. A bit confused –in shock- the driver waved at me. If the strong foreign military presence in the area did not intimidate me, I started to pay more attention as the local kids welcomed me replicating with the index finger the triggering of a gun. And this meant: “Welcome to Pashtunistan!” the tribal Pashtun are that extends on both sides of the relatively new Afghani-Pakistani border raw by the British a century ago, today a porous border permeable to smugglers and terrorists of varying lineage.

At the sight of this scenario I felt nothing but relax when I came across a camp of the road police, and the officer in charge of the road block, who spoke English and Russian, address to me with a “My dear! Come in the office please” It was the first of a series of charity actions by the police that week. As snooker balls that shoot each other, I was going to be passed on until Peshawar, my final destination in Pakistan. Of course, the office meant the tent, where another officer, of higher rank, seated behind a desk, cashed in a mysterious road tax from truck drivers who left the place mumbling references to Allah. Corrupt policemen are a classic grief for all travelers, but in this case I exited the tent with my stomach full, Pakistani pocket money, and a free ride to Jalalabad, where I arrived in the Hi Ace van the boarded me in. Jalalabad marked the entrance in a new climatic zone, technically known as “damned hot”, without stepping out of the Taliban risk zone, it also encompasses the risk of malaria. A great junction.

In Jalalabad I slept in the police station. The commander and his secretary, anxious to practice their English, honored me with a dinner at their fan ventilated room. Next morning they boarded me to the border in a typically Pakistani truck, excessively decorated with its wooden panels featuring landscapes, houses, women’s faces and prosperity amulets of various kinds among which, significantly, a Pepsi logo had found its way. At the end of the ride I was in the mythical Khyber Pass, a land of bandits even in the local’s regard. The pass itself is disappointingly low (only 1080 m), deservedly unnoticed behind an amorphous bazaar that sprawls under mediocre peaks. To spice up the peak was enough to remember that the road to Peshawar is considered by some to be the most dangerous in the world. When the Pakistani official heard I had come by foot, he twisted his mouth. When he heard I was ready to continue on foot, he almost literally fell from his chair. With a veritable shout he called in a young soldier with a machine gun. It was my personal escort! I explained that the soldier looked very elegant but I had no budget for Rambo, since I was expected to pay for my protection. In any case, I said, the soldier was welcome to hitchhike with me to Peshawar. As no officer wants to be responsible for the death of a foreigner in his jurisdiction (and no soldier wants to hitch hike) I also exited the customs room with a free van ride to Peshawar. And seated next to me, Rambo!

From the pass, the road zigzags down for 53 km before reaching Peshawar. After each bend, it became warmer. Parallel to the road, occasionally, the rail line could be seen. To install railways in this eternally lawless region, the British had to seduce local Pashtun chieftains by promising them that the train would roll slow enough to be assaulted. The sign that says: “Khyber Rifles welcomes you” suggests that the mood in the neighborhood has changed little. I had to meet Dustin, a North American aid worker, in Peshawar’s Kentucky Fried Chicken. Despite Pakistanis, as any ex British colony, speak reasonable English, the instructions of the first person led me to a dark alley full of live, caged chicken…

I stayed two days in Peshawar, before hitting the road again aiming to cross the country towards India. I will zoom in Pakistan later in the summer, as I expect to enter China through Pakistan’s Karakorum Highway. So for the first time in a while I was moving through grounds where there was no reward for my head, and that was something to appreciate. As was the heavenly sent three lanes motorway, a real bless after the always off road Afghanistan. Moreover, a steady flow of cars (yes, private cars!) not only UN vehicles, trucks and taxis, dashed by. With 40ºC, I didn’t complain when this air conditioned cars started to pull by gently, their drivers stopping now and then to invite a cold drink by the road side. In spite of independence, high class Pakistanis display, in their politeness, standards, and self image, the stigma of the British Empire. When I asked one of my drivers, a textile businessman who was taking me to Faisalabad, if that city was big, he replied: “It’s is the Manchester of Pakistan, the heart of textile industry” So he still looks in an old mirror. The driver of a spotless Corolla, instead, when asked about his profession, he surprised for his originality and sincerity, and replied: “I don’t work. My father dedicates to money laundry in Saudi Arabia”. From the air conditiones Corolla the back of a truck with two oxen, and on in another truck –in the cabin this time- to Lahore, where I arrived at dusk, having completed 450 km since the morning. Being at shouting distance from the Indian border I called it a day, and phoned Riaz, a local member of Hospitality Club there.

“No problem –said Riaz unworried- I am dinning with a friend at the Holidays Inn’s restaurant. You are invited” In this way, straight out from the road, considerably filthy, I flagged down a rickshaw, announced my destination proudly, and 20 minutes later I was arriving, heralded by the explosions of rickshaw’s exhaust, to the all marble and golden foyer of the luxury hotel. With no ferry to turn my proletarian tricycle in a chariot or Lexus 4x4, the confused steward barely let me in. Fully equipped as a moonwalker I made it to the table where Riaz was serenely chatting with his friend, a politician who had just landed from the UK, where he had interviewed Pakistan’s former prime minister. In such a celestial setting I couldn’t do less than apologizing for my spontaneity, and sited own. Averaging half dinner, Riaz asked me where I was planning to stay overnight. “Well, in your house”. Misunderstanding, misunderstanding! The good man had omitted that his sister and nephews were visiting so he had no free beds at home. “But no problem – he anticipated- There is a YMCA hostel near by. We boarded his friend’s Land Cruiser (“Pakistan’s most expensive car! –he said proudly) towards the hostel, which was closed. Then, my “host” hided his sight stretched my hand, said sorry, and protected himself behind the dark windows of Pakistan’s most expensive car’s.

The park seemed to be waiting for me, with a show of Sufi music. A bearded man in white tunic makes place for me in his bench. “Why are you here?” –he goes. I explained him. In the curious English of the subcontinent, he replied: “Oh, so you are here for sleeping purpose! Don’t mention it, come to my house!” Sajid lived in a student’s residence, because even if he looked older than me he was actually four years younger, and studied Laws in Lahore. The common room of the residence lacked all furniture. At its center there was a PC, and some hundred books scattered around as if intending to eat it. There was everything among these, from Chomsky to an anachronic book about the “rational spirit of socialism” in which pages you could see a picture of two blond guys repairing some radio equipment, and the legend “Kaunas Technical University”. Sajid and Kaswar, his friend, were two men at the edge of their society. “Which is the meaning of life?” –he repeated once and again. I declared that I didn’t know, but I knew many things that were not. “Shall we be materially productive?” – Kaswar essayed. Somehow, submerged in a society where one has to buy a Corolla and a wife (yes, buy) before becoming thirty, these guys had managed to realize that happiness and material progress are two different wheels. Curiously, Pakistan’s high class, who would always claim to be moralist, suggests their children a path in which family seems a mere added value, an effervescence of time, a fermentation of money. OK, also in Europe I have met guys who, running after the Porsche, have lost their wives, children and got an ulcer. While we talked, two lizards on the wall were acrobatically trapping the insects which happened to be in the wrong place on the wrong time. Sajid improvised a joke: “One day Moses, disturbed, came to God and demanded: God! What is the meaning of the lizard? Why did you create it? God replied: “Curious! The lizard was here yesterday, and asked for the meaning of Moses!” Meaning. Sense. Perspective. I diluted in sleep happy to have met two alert minds in a country of automats.

VISITOR UNESCORTED: HOW TO SHOPLIFT IN A NATO BASE IN AFGHANISTAN…

Notice: to read the full story, have a look at my book "Vagabonding in the Axis of Evil – By thumb in Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan". Clic here to learn more. Order a book and keep me on the road!

As if life wasn’t hard enough in Chaghcharan, the precarious capital of Ghor province in Central Afghanistan, a sandstorm sweeps across town every day at dusk with the commitment of a comet. At those hours its unpaved streets are all exodus: Land Cruisers, turbaned men, and bony dogs all head for their garages, houses or shelters, among the metallic drums of doors slammed by the wind.


Also at those hours, Morgan, Jeffrey and John, the North American volunteers in whose place I stayed for four days, do the thanksgiving prayer for their dinner. In Northern Ireland I had already learnt that protestant people talk to God as if they were talking to Axel Rose¨¨…and thanks men for this great food, I mean, your are really a great dude…¨ And so on. The same God that had created molasses (a terribly tasting spread from the Southern States, derived from sugar cane and masochism) had booked place for them in contemporary Afghanistan.

´Do you know that the Taliban are carrying on attacks near Ghazni? ¨ - I asked Morgan trying to find out what their strength was made of. He didn’t know anything. ¨Since we got here we haven’t been in touch with the news, we don’t want to live in panic¨

To the eyes of the North American troops deployed in Afghanistan, Morgan and his fellows are kind of weird. While the soldiers get paid 3,000dollars a month to come here, these guys are here out of their plain own will, they get just a volunteer’s allowance, and parade their Caucasic features round the local bazaar everyday without bullet proof jacket. All the political conflict is clearly for them a background issue, second to the more important question of: ¨Are we producing a difference here? ¨‘asks himself in loud voice Morgan while we walk up and down the bazaar looking for someone selling unrotten tomatoes. And the situation can work as metaphor.

It is extremely difficult to help the Afghan people. After 30 years of fighting invaders and each other, these people has developed a ¨for my own sake ethic. Afghans, against al of my expectations, are ostensibly ungrateful to the crusade of international assistance organized solely in their favor. This has nothing to do with any resentment for the military foreign intervention in 2001 (the Taliban were indeed as foreigners in much of Afghanistan as the made in USA). Neither we are talking about some reflex proud triggered by the presence of hordes of civilizing white men. It’s more basic.

Generally speaking, Afghans seem dedicated to manipulate the international community, to squeeze it and extract from it as much economic profit as possible before they live or some new fundamentalism starts to sharpen their swords. The difference between what UN technicians and what Afghan workers get in salaries also led some locals to think, in the best case, that these individuals should be financially responsible for local problems. In other cases they even think that Afghan problems derive from this difference of wealth, as if the Afghan government would be paying their expenses.

In a neighboring village, a foreign technician designed a scheme according to which each family should pay a dollar a month to buy a generator that would ever since be collectively owned by the village. To which the chief of the village laughed and said: ¨You have more money than us, you should buy the generator¨. In different cases, village chieftains and warlords have required bribes to NGOs to have the right to improve the life of the people under their influences. Of course, this warlords are noble Muslim that pray loudly in public and are worthy of every vow. This is the main battle that the non-soldiers have to fight daily in nowadays Afghanistan. Who point out that there is no national identity in this country is right. I would go as far as saying that Afghanistan is an illusion plotted by cartographers. People here feel Heratis or Kandaharis, Tajik or Pashto, from this valley or from the next one, loyal to mujahedeen Massoud or to Dostam, but never Afghans.

Friday was big day in Chaghcharan, the anniversary of the victory of the local mujahedeen over the Russians in 1989. From each valley a steady flow of anxious men had flowed to attend the centerpiece of the celebration, the bushkashi, deservedly national sport of Afghanistan, 40 riders fighting to grab and hurl decapitated goat and don’t stay on their way! From Marco Polo onwards, it has been said that the game is a portrait of the Afghan soul. The plain next to the river had become something of a circus. The people, crowded as a polymer, was demanding the end of the less than coordinated side shows, which were by the way overlapping each other. The female crowd, up in the hill, was distinguishable from a far afield: their burkas turned them into a blue spot in the landscape. The riders were, in the interlude, trotting up and down the streets of the town.

In the center of it all, in a postcard that would have kept context 300 years ago, Gintaras Azubalis, the commander of the Lithuanian led PRT base (Provincial Reconstruction Team) was sitting Indian style next to Shah Abdul Afzali, the Governor of the province. There seemed to be little or none conversation among the two men, and the Lithuanian looked particularly bored. I wonder how he was feeling surrounded by 5,000 Afghans and, more worryingly, 40 bushkashi riders.




A hundred meters away two armed-to-teeth Lithuanian soldiers emerge from the roof of their vehicles. They provide logistic support as they chew gum and complain about the abrasive heat. Until 1989 Lithuania and Afghanistan shared their status of Soviet occupied territory. Now Lithuanian troops, in a funny twist of history, patrol Central Afghanistan. With some perspective it can be said that, by peacekeeping in Afghanistan, Lithuania is paying its historical debt with such country. What debt? Events are too fresh, but an increasing number of people attribute the fall of the Soviet Block partly to the catastrophic 9 years long Russian intervention in Afghanistan. In other words, more than a ¨Singing Revolution¨ it would have taken hadn’t it been for so much Afghan spilt blood.




When the commander withdrew from the game we crossed words, and I got my authorization to visit the base. I got there by foot, just in the same moment a cargo C-140 was taking off. Judging by the comfort you can also take Chagcharan for the transitory camp around the PRT base, and not, as it is, vice versa. Once inside, the first thing to call my attention is a board signposting distances to some Lithuanian cities: “Vilnius 3800 km”, catering more for the lads’ nostalgia than to the occasional lost driver.

I am accompanied into a large tent where there are six people typing in their laptops. One of them is the representative of the US government, a man with an apostolic beard that looks more like a retired writer. Next to him, the chief-in-exile of the Lithuanian Police, in his coiffed-and-manicured presence, seems straight out of the gym, with his muscles pumped as if he had just lifted the whole base. There are also representatives of the Danish and Icelandic troops. Two men stand up and show me the way to a second tent, where the commander is waiting us with his smoking coffee.

The commander is a man from Alitus, a city I had noticed on my map as I was thumbing my way down the E-67 from Lithuania to Poland, but where I hadn’t happen to visit. The other two men, Danius and Aleks, were going to speak more than the commander, who would basically limit himself to observe how inappropriate the term “Provincial Reconstruction Team” was. “We are here to rebuild the institutions of the country, not its bridges”. Nevertheless, Aleks, who is in charge of the humanitarian aid department, almost sheds a tear while he relates with a musical and soft voice the donation of toys collected in Lithuania to a local orphanage. Confusingly as an orchestra with two directors, Danius, chief of political affairs, interrupts him and says, in a simultaneously serious and playful tone: “that’s a side show to gain some hearts, we are here to provide security”.

The commander finished his coffee and, smiling, showed off the badge on his shoulder: “Welcome to the moon” it read. I understand him, Lithuania’s everlasting imprint were not the arid deserts separating Kaunas from Vilnius but... the moon? That’s a bit too much. I am sure he wouldn’t show the badge to the governor of the province, I mean, to the governor of the moon. Especially because some Afghans believe that the moon is a woman and as such no man has ever, or will ever, touch her, let alone land there.

On the way out, I was guided to the canteen, where a table displayed a whole choice of cereal bars, snickers, Gatorade, ice creams. There were enough snacks there to spoil Buda himself. ‘Everything is paid for, take the chance!” –said my guide. So I found myself kind of shoplifting in the NATO base, not a bad way of breaking the monotone and proteinless road biscuit diet.

SHARING THE ROAD WITH KUCHI NOMADS...

Another moment I will not forget easily was walking by a Kuchi nomads and their camels. I was leaving the town of Dowlat Yar on foot, waiting for some truck to roar by when I saw a confusing shape growing in the horizon. I could barely see, for the sun was still low. The amorphous stain rapidly changed into a more meaningful configuration: two nomads and their camels. When they get close I could see their camels were decorated with red pompoms and mirrors hanging from their heads. The rustic leather chairs they use for mounting the beasts make me think things shouldn’t have been that different 200 years before. I had left my backpack on the floor, but I soon lift and fit it, and walk by them. I feel the spiritual need to share a piece of road with some of the lasts nomads on Earth.

We exchange more smiles than words, since I don’t speak Pashto and they don’t speak Farsi or English. For the nomad, the fabulous creature was me, astonishment crew his smiles. His forehead wrinkled under his whitewashed turban. My feet, his, and the camel’s ones, beat on the dusty Afghan road the drum of a very peculiar caravan: that of a nomad towing his camel, and a modern globetrotter with a backpack and a blog… With such different lives, certain settings make me feel closer to him than to any of my non traveller friends: we both spend a huge amount of time in our lives watching the horizon, that slim line always pregnant of surprises… I regard that moment one of the most meaningful and peaceful ones.

A POSTMAN IN THE HAZARAJAT...OR MAYBE IN THE MOON

Notice!: to read the full story, have a look at my book “Vagabonding in the Axis of Evil – By thumb in Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan”. Clic here to learn more. Order a book and keep me on the road!

So I hit the road towards Bamian, town that became sadly famous in 2001 when the Taliban destroyed the biggest Buda statues in the world. Morgan had given me Justin’s telephone number. Justin was another North American who worked as volunteer in agriculture related projects. I was carrying two letters for him, which had arrived five months before from Taiwan and U.S to Herat but in the absence of a credible post service to Bamian had got stacked there.

While my parents and uncles expected me to become a successful lawyer, I had dreamt of becoming a postman. Now, in Afghanistan, I was not going to let the chance go. I designed my own stamps though. They showed a white thumbing hand framed by a yellow square and said: “By Thumb mail”.

Having a mission also attenuated the fact that I was 4 days away from Bamian. The start was slow. I walked to Pozelek village and sat by the road side to smoke my pipe. I started singing alone to a Fito Paez song: ” I like to be by the roadside, smoking as everything passes by...” And three black cows and their shepherd boy marched into scene. Then a man in a motorcycle carrying a rifle. Then I remembered that the commander had warned me of some warring tribes between Chagcharan and Lal. So I skipped lines and sang “...the breeze of Death dwells around as an assassin angel.” But something that day made me tremble with happiness. Or I was sitting in a bad position.

The Kamaz truck that finally put me in motion crossed the rivers by just driving in and sticking the wheels to a diagonal direction so as to correct the pulling force of the stream. The lights of the truck, barely over the water level as the eyes of a hippopotamus. I made it to Dowlat Yar by dusk. Somebody interrupted the village’s teacher in mid-prayer to tell him there was an American in town. Azis was an educated man from Kabul who not only hosted me but also gave me a history class in good English.

I had asked why half of the houses were destroyed. It followed that, during the Russian occupation, people in the Southern riverside were educated and received support from the Russian authorities. People on the “other side” received, instead, support and bribes from US and Pakistan. The deal: they should destroy their southern neighbors. The schools were special targets –regrets Azis- since somehow the people from the other side –and millions across Afghanistan- had been brainwashed to believe that studying implied abandoning Islam. This shows in a microcosmic level, how irresponsible Western intervention in Afghan affairs let a fertile ground for the upcoming Taliban.

Another interesting point about Dowlat Yar is its bazaar. ¨Why are there so many closed shops? ¨ I asked. ¨Well, opium harvest time hasn’t arrived yet. In a couple of months all those closed shops will be open, full of opium, and smugglers from Helmand and Kandahar will come here to buy, beginning the slow smuggling chain towards Europe, where the street price for a kilo of heroin can reach U$S 50,000..¨ With such figures there is simply no way Police officials couldn’t be involved. I instantly thought of Bolivia, but as a South American I know that coca growing has been a part Andean culture for centuries, while opium was introduced by the English from British India in the 19th century.

History lesson almost made me forget that I had started my trip exactly a year ago, when I hitched a sailboat from Ireland to Scotland. There was no point to celebrate: the closest to lust that could be found in the bazaar would have been a pack of strawberry biscuits. Better to keep accepting Azis ever flowing tea. ¨When do you think you will go back? - He asks me. Sometimes I think of home. But then I open my world map, the same that has always hanged from my room’s wall, the same where I had started to plan all this trip, and I realize that Greenland, Kirgizstan or he Falkland Islands are there waiting to be explored, and I feel that kind of tickle in the stomach that only recedes when I knock off kilometers.

Another truck, slow and big as a Galapagos turtle, forwards me to Kirmun village. There I was told by locals that the Shatu Pass was blocked by snow, and that the only way to cross the mountains on to Yakawlang was a secondary pass trough Sadbarg village, a road that didn’t even came up in my map.


I soon found myself crossing bridgeless rivers in a valley that got increasingly landlocked by snowcapped granite towers. In the first village a swarm of kids splashed out their houses to receive me so violently that a man started to keep them at distance using his extended lunghi (turban) as a lash. There is something strange in the kid’s faces: their eyes are too fine. Maybe I hit shortcut and ended up in Mongolia? No. Welcome to Hazarajat, the territory of the Hazara people, descendents of the destructive legions of Genghis Khan, and therefore regarded the last element in the Afghan ethnic ranking. When the Taliban rose to power, in a delayed and senseless revenge, they took a thousand Hazaras to Kabul, slaughtered them and piled their corpse in the parks.

I crossed that valley of the Hazarajat almost on foot, carrying both of Justin’s letters, and sharing some of the way with two teachers whose motorcycle had run short of gasoline. No vehicle used the road in the whole day. When in 1954 British explorer Wilfred Thesiger did his trip to the Hazarajat, he found them rather inhospitable. Even if in no way I can complain about their hospitality, I don’t want to thoughtlessly follow the stream of travelers that in any developing country, no matter what they find, they say the people there is just gorgeous. In one or two guesthouses I entered, people just started to pronounce the word “dollar” every five seconds. I understand the first time they meet somebody from the “other world” that is slowly trying to set their standard. For a while I had the impression that the loudspeakers in the minarets could start screaming ¨Dollar Akbar¨ (The dollar is great) instead of ¨Allah Akbar¨ (God is great) and nobody would have noticed.

That said, in Nodros and Denikoch I was hosted and fed by locals, but they lacked the joyful tone of their Tajik or Pashto neighbors’ hospitality. Their features were strong and proud, and any im promptu group of villagers in a tea house appealed to me as a chieftains meeting. My memory clings to the image of those orphans of history.

After a short visit to Bande Amir, Afghanistan’s only lake, I finally arrived to Bamian. It was after 9 pm, time when every Afghan city becomes deserted. At the question of ¨where can I find a telephone? ¨ (I needed to phone Justin) the local police whisper to each other in the dark. ¨Maybe the Neo Zealanders have one¨. They board me in their jeep and speed towards the New Zealand led PRT base. The light rays of the jeep made the sign visible: ¨Kiwi Base¨ It looks like the sign of a beach, not a military base. Let me say in the first place that I found the idea of knocking the door of the PRT to ask for a telephone absolutely ridiculous. But how charming can the consequences of ridiculous acts be! So I let them do. The bearded policeman bumped vainly the plastic disc in the center of the wheel: the horn didn’t work. So he started screaming in Dari. The young kiwi soldier that was in the nightshift clearly didn’t have a clue of Dari, and was growing dangerously nervous. He advanced toward the Afghan police finger-in-trigger. So I stepped in scene and talked in English to the guy. The kiwi soldier was that happy that he congratulated me on speaking English! But, of course, no public phone available in the base.

On the way back the Afghan policemen started to sing enthusiastically inside the jeep. In the climax of the chorus, the jeep ended up against some trees. The wheels, traction less in a water channel. I thanked them for their professional help and walked away. Not that they noticed my departure: they were too busy kicking each other. I would call Justin the following morning. Though neither rain nor sleet nor dark of night would keep this postman from the swift completion of his appointed rounds, he could use some rest .