Big Things

Non-Fiction
Location – India - Ladakh
Written - May 2008
[Reading back on this my trip to India feels like a long time ago. But the final line still stands, and the return trip is still planned.]

We set out at 2am to cross the Himalayan Range. The journey from Manali to Leh will take us around twenty hours, in one long-haul. There’s an Israeli couple sitting up front, the boyfriend is furious. “My girlfriend doesn’t have enough room!” he yells, “she has a gear-stick in her leg!” I can tell they haven’t been in India long. A gear-stick in the leg is the sort of thing only new arrivals complain about - when it comes to Indian transport, the old hands appreciate that they're not standing in urine with a goat smothering their face. The Israeli demands their money back, and the Indian driver fires up with shouted garble of his own. I turn to Rick, the Kiwi sitting next to us, and say, “it’s a bit of basic outback wisdom that you don’t start heated arguments five minutes into a long road journey.”

The driver stops the jeep . There’s more screaming. The Israeli bloke declares he’s going to roll a joint and stomps off into the night. When they return they slump into the jeep, defeated by the stone, and fall asleep. The driver collects our five other passengers – all Ladakhis. Four of them climb into the back, one of them squeezes into our middle row of three, so we now have four full-grown adults on our seat. That makes eleven of us in the jeep. And the two sleeping Israelis up front end up with enough room to stretch their legs.

We hit the road. You can’t see much. I don’t sleep, I’m far too wide awake. In the headlights I catch glimpses of steep slopes, wooded with deodars. As we rise towards Rohtang La ("La" means "mountain pass," in Tibetan) we’re caught in a high-altitude traffic jam. The dirt road is only wide enough for one vehicle, and there’s a long line of Indian cargo trucks coming our way. Our driver pulls over as close as he can to the hillside. One by one the trucks edge forward centimetres at a time, in jolting stops and starts as the driver revs the engine, belching fumes into the night, before slamming on the brakes centimetres from the abyss. It takes them some time. Drivers stand out front barking instructions at the drivers (“cello… cello… parava! parava!”) in puffs of fog. I get out to smoke a cigarette and I’m almost crushed between our vehicle and one of the trucks. I won’t make that mistake again.

By the time we move it’s almost dawn. The sun is rising behind the snowy peaks, which change colour as the sun rises to greet them. The Israelis begin snapping photos. I know that in a fast-moving jeep the light is too low to capture anything but blur. I simply look. Patches of snow decorate the sharply triangular arrowheads of black rock, like the skin of a killer-whale. As we descend from Rohtang La into Keylong the road creeps along the side of the valley. Keylong is the last town along the way, for the next 300km we will cross the Himalayan range. The driver declares it wise that we stop for breakfast.

We heed his wisdom. We eat fast, and return to the road. The morning light is dazzlingly bright in my sleepless eyes. It’s time to pull out my camera. It isn’t easy to take photographs from a jeep that’s barrelling along rocky roads and taking hairpin turns at a dizzying speed. They don’t have instructions on this in the manual to my camera. But the trick, I take it, is lightning-fast shutter speeds. Otherwise the movement makes the pictures blur. The catch is that in order to use these speeds you need light that is particularly bright, and clear. As we rise into the Himalaya the morning gives way to a beautiful day. God, if nothing else, is a provider - so long as you recognise Her gifts.

We begin the series of sharp hairpin turns that lead slowly up to Baralacha La, at 4,883 metres. The driver slows on the precipitous turns and I photograph the roof of the world. I gape at a mountain lake of the most brilliant green, resting like molten emerald. From the top, from Baralacha La, you can see all the way to Ladakh – the ‘land of high passes.’

The air is clear over Ladakh. The weather is different north of the Himalaya. At this time of year, the monsoon is being blown up from the south of India, until it covers most of the country in clouds and lashing rain. But the clouds get caught up in the mountains. The Himalayan range is so massive that it literally blocks the clouds from moving further north. And so, Ladakh comes as a revelation. The skies are a distilled blue, as we enter the mountain desert of the Tibetan Plateau. In Ladakh, it is summertime.

The scenery changes quickly. There’s a sprinkling of snow on only the tallest of peaks, the rest of the mountains are awash with shades of ochre and gold. I know I will remember this journey for the rest of my life – cruising through the Lingti Chu River valley at four-and-a-half thousand metres with the wind in my hair, and my head full of delirious fatigue. We snake our way up the switchback roads towards Lachlung La at 5,060 metres. I’m sitting against the window on the side of the drop. Just past the edge of our tyres. The drop mesmerises me like a cobra. Forever close to the edge. Falling from this height, you’d have enough time to acknowledge the view on the way down.

After crossing the pass we enter the Gorges of Pang. The landscape becomes decidedly odd. Natural statues rise from mountains weathered smooth by the wind. Some look like Martian faces, massive artifacts on the mountainside. Others look like rock cities – outcrop colonies inhabited only by the dry wind. I haven’t slept in 36 hours, and the sight has the same textureless sheen of a vision. The journey is not easy. I develop bruises on my right-hand side, I begin to know each of the door’s metal bumps and ridges very intimately. At times we become claustrophobic and ask to stop. As it turns out, one of those occasions is at the ferocious Taglang La – the second highest motorable pass in the world. We take a rest-stop, at 5,328 metres.

I almost fall out of the jeep. The dizziness makes me too groggy to walk. But I'll go higher, in time, higher into the Big Things.

After twenty hours in the jeep we arrive in Leh. Leh is the capitol of a desert kingdom, high in the mountains. Its isolation holds it still. The laneways are made of weathered stone, you get the sense you could have walked the same alleyways a thousand years ago. The stone buildings are the colour of the mountains that surround us. Old Leh is an ancient labyrinth, a city built stone by stone beneath the ferocious sun. An oasis of life, sustaining itself on the sliver of green that springs from the Indus River.

The word ‘Hindu’ is derived from the name of this river. It wasn’t a term the Indians gave to their own brand of religion, and Indians to this day will point this out to you. It was the Persians who referred to India as ‘the land beyond the Sindhu,’ or ‘Indus’ (pronounced ‘in-doose’) River. And so, Indians became known to the world as ‘Hindus.’ To be north of the Indus River does, indeed, feel like a different land. The map may deem Ladakh to be part of India, but in terms of culture and landscape it is far closer to Tibet, 150km east of here. But the majority of people I meet don’t call themselves ‘Indians,’ despite what the map says, and they don’t call themselves ‘Tibetans,’ despite how we might describe their religion. They call themselves, simply, ‘Ladakhis.’

Amy and I come down with mild cases of altitude sickness. Leh is at an altitude of 3,500 metres, but apparently that’s enough. We can’t walk to the shop before needing to rest. Altitude sickness stems from the fact that the higher you go in altitude, the less oxygen there is in the air. Above 5,000 metres there’s about half as much oxygen in the atmosphere as there is at sea-level. I’ve never had asthma, but perhaps it feels similar – a slow asphyxiation. You get headaches. Dizziness. I drink plenty of water, and yet you wake up with a mouth as dry as sand. We’re both distinctly affected, though only seriously enough to remind us to take it easy. If you rest, your body will acclimatise.

I overhear someone talking of flying to Srinigar, rather than braving the roads. The woman says, “but I probably shouldn’t fly if I’m sick at this altitude.” But plane cabins are pressurised to sea-level, and oxygen is pumped in, so ironically she’d feel better in an aeroplane at 34,000 feet than she would here.

So, we rest. When we’re ready, Rick and I – the Kiwi we met on the journey to Leh – formulate a wild scheme to get higher than we’ve been in our lives. We hire a jeep. On the drive I smile to myself at the road-signs. Whoever came up with their anti-speeding slogans had a sense of humour. In Australia, the anti-speeding campaigns consist of stern slogans and terrifying imagery. In Ladakh they take a different approach, seducing you rather than scaring you, with signs like: “I am curvaceous, be slow,” and “I like you, darling, but not so fast.”

Our driver heeds their advice. On these roads, you’d want to. He eases us out of Leh, past the chortens and the Tibetan Buddhist gompas (monasteries) perched upon rocky hills as if they’ve grown out of the barren earth. We begin our ascent to Khardung La. Khardung La is the mountain pass that serves as the gateway to the Nubra Valley, and Central Asia beyond. It’s touted as ‘the highest motorable road in the world,’ crossing the Ladakhi range at a whopping 5,602 metres – over 18,000 feet. That’s higher than Everest Base Camp. The drive does little to allay my nervousness at what is to come. You can feel the change in air-pressure as you go up, it feels like someone lightly pressing their fingers against your temples. My cigarette lighter stops working every time I go above five thousand. I’m now familiar with these things, and I know we won’t be up there long.

So what do you do when you’re on top of the highest motorable road in the world, at an altitude higher than most mountain-climbers reach in their lives? Well, it might be the boys in us, who never truly grew too big for their BMX, but our way of thinking is that you pull a couple of mountain-bikes off the roof-rack of the jeep, and you ride back down.

When I was a boy, growing up in Boolarra, the steepest mountain in the world was Bastin Street. We knew, because we’d careen down every hill in town, whether on billycart or BMX. I still have clear memories of some epic accidents, and even clearer memories of racing at top speed with the wind howling in my ears. I had a mate called Adam Rockall, who lived at the bottom of Bastin Street, and we’d push our bikes to the top, under the belief that we were soon to set a new land-speed record. It was a quiet town, so we were largely unconcerned about the dangers of a car cleaning us up on the T-intersection at the bottom of the hill. You’d usually be going to fast to brake in time anyway, and we’d flash through the intersection to come to a bumpy halt in the paddock over the road. Now, looking down from the mighty Khardung La, at the forty kilometre downhill stretch into Leh, I think of Adam Rockall, and I kind of wish he was here. I think he’d get a kick out of it - I’ve found The Mother of all Bastin Streets.

For several minutes Rick and I are deeply absorbed in the task of checking our brakes. Then without saying a word, breathing open-mouthed in the thin air, we kick off.

Whilst I’ve been a passenger in vehicles crossing some of these passes, I’ve had the thought that no matter how skilled your driver, you’re never entirely comfortable with the idea that your fate is so comprehensively in the hands of someone else. The roads are only wide enough for one vehicle, and the jeep tyres always seem too close to the void below. Now, my fate is in my own hands. As I build up speed on the rocky surface I stay well clear of the lowside of the road. There’s slushy ice-puddles and sharp rocks to avoid. When I glance up I see the icy peaks of the Ladakhi range, with the golden desert-mountains below. You don’t get roads with a much better view than this. I remain tentative on the rocky road, but a few kilometers from Khardung La the road changes to a smooth bitumen. There’s fewer landslides around here, due to the lack of rain, so the road is as good as you’ll find anywhere in Ladakh. On the bitumen I release my grip on the brakes, and I’m eleven years old again.

The corners can’t wait to get to me. My helmet is blown up high on my forehead by the wind. My clothes ripple around me. I keep pace with a white 4WD just up ahead, braking only into the hairpin turns and coming close enough to see the bemused faces of the Indian family watching me through their back window. It’s handy to have the 4WD up front, it helps clear the path of donkeys that amble out onto the road. I have to be careful not to brake in the patches of fine dust and gravel, a tiny shift in weight on the bike and I weave through them. Around each corner I am enchanted afresh by the vastness laid out before me, like the world from an aeroplane. I ride the forty kilometers into Leh in a touch under an hour. As I enter the ancient city I reacquaint myself with the brakes. Rick and I only break our wide grins to down a beer or two at the bottom.

After a few weeks in Ladakh, Amy and I make our final journey towards Kashmir. We’d been hearing of the current problems there. The Indian government granted a patch of land to the Hindus, along the route of the Armanath ‘yatra,’ or pilgrimage, which invoked the fury of the Shiite Muslim majority in Kashmir. There were shootings, bomb-blasts, and strikes, which prompted the government to retract the land-offer, thus invoking the violent fury of the Hindus. We have a flight from Srinagar booked for the 18th of July. Amy spoke to a Kashmiri who assured her that “it’s been blown out of proportion.” It becomes her favourite line, whenever the topic of the recent problems comes up, she tells people dismissively, “it’s been blown out of proportion.” My response is “yeah, well, maybe we can go to Kashmir and get ourselves blown out of proportion.”

The road past Kargil follows alongside a branch of the Indus River, with frothing rapids that surge in a continuous flow of foam. The area is what a newspaper would call ‘militarised.’ We pass long convoys of identical army trucks, khaki with tinted windows. The road is narrow so we dutifully pull over to let the convoys past. Their cargo is a mystery, covered by camouflage netting. We pass our first artillery camp, ‘Tiger Battery,’ with dozens of artillery pieces, some fortified in dugout bunkers, some out on plain view with their long, black barrels glinting in the sun, but all pointed in one direction – Pakistan. In this northernmost pocket of India there’s no official borders, there is the ‘Line of Control.’ In Ladakh, the ‘Line of Control’ is with China. In Kashmir the 'Line of Control' is with Pakistan, marking the point where previous wars cooled. Neither India nor Pakistan recognises this Line of Control as a border, it is a line in the sand across which the nuclear-armed states eyeball each other. At regular intervals there are road-signs which read: ‘Caution! You Are Under Enemy Observation.’

We come to checkpoints where we show our passports to the soldiers. As our vehicle approaches the checkpoints I can see heavy machine-guns trained upon us through gaps in the sand-bagged bunkers, tracking our movements. I've never had a gun pointed at me before.

On a later stretch of the journey we take the bus. When the bus pulls into the station we're slow off the mark, wasting precious seconds for our luggage to be hauled up onto the roof. The locals rush straight onto the bus to secure their seats. By the time we board the bus has become ensnared by politics. Every seat is staked out by a coded system of bags placed on seats and stern sentries guarding the valuable real-estate from all challengers. It is only when we attempt to take a seat that the intricacy of this political network becomes apparent to us. As the bus prepares to leave we park ourselves in one (apparently) empty seat with a lone bag by the window. We presume the one bag indicates one ‘reservation,’ in the local style, which would leave room for Amy and I on the seat. Several Ladakhis rush to tell us that the lone bag in fact represents a reservation for two.

I’ve found the Ladakhi people to be scrupulously friendly and compassionate, and what follows is incongruous with this perception. We remain in the seat for the time being. At the next stop a new horde tramples each other to board the bus. I know we’re in for a six-hour bus journey. By now I’ve developed a stubborn resolve to protect our turf. That is, until a frail elderly woman carrying a newborn infant approaches us, to claim the seat which a friend of hers had strategically reserved with the bag.

The grandmother and the mother of the infant – the two reservees – ask us to move, I stand and the grandmother shuffles across to the window seat with the infant. As I stand, another man, a middle-aged Ladakhi, tries squeezing past me to claim the seat I’d been sitting in. I’ve been in India long enough to know that politeness is ruthlessly punished on local buses, and I stand my ground, pushing sideways to block him. I figure I’m willing to stand for the mother to claim my seat, but I’m not letting this upstart steal it away. He keeps pushing. I turn to him and let fly. When I lose my cool here, I don’t vent an hour or a day’s tension, I ejaculate a month’s worth of it. I shout. I make a scene. I believe I use the words, “here, take the seat you fuckin’ idiot.”

I stand with my head bumping against the railed roof of the bus. I stare with hatred at the back of the man’s head. I can’t stand for long, so I kneel on the floor of the bus. As the kilometres roll by I am calmed by the scenery. I begin to feel ashamed. The man turns to me. He offers me the seat back. I say, “no, you just have it.” I hadn’t noticed until now that he’s an older man himself, with kind, wrinkled eyes. Perhaps he’s as embarrassed at the scene as I am. He asks where I’m from, in a voice that acknowledges my anger with humility. I realize that he speaks English well enough to have understood what I called him. At the next village a few people get off the bus, so that both myself, and the mother who’d missed out on her rightful seat, are both able to sit down. When the bus stops for a lunch-break the old Ladakhi man and I end up side by side. “Chai?” I ask him, and we sit in the plastic seats outside the busted-up old restaurant. I order three chais, but Amy has gone off somewhere and fate decrees that I sit alone with the old man. I ask him about Ladakh, and he tells me of his life in Lamayuru.

Two grown men, perhaps both not without our stubbornness, making their peace through the realisations that only come in the absence of pride. The bus driver blares his horn and we board the bus once again, all seated, rolling towards Kashmir, where perhaps the conflicts of the world will blaze on until both parties become ashamed at their own foolishness.

I guess I’ve been doing a few ‘big things.’ I’ve craved altitude, and high places. But perhaps what we need is smallness, a return of what Arundhati Roy calls ‘The God Of Small Things.’

We sometimes learn via opposites. Perhaps I wouldn’t appreciate the low, humble ground if I hadn’t so passionately sought out the highest places in the world. If I hadn’t played, ‘wow, look at me,’ even in these emails, in some egoistic quest for adventure. But now I’m ready for home. I’m ready to embrace the small things. I only want to sit on a beach somewhere, at sea-level, and drink a beer with my friends. To eat a simple ham-and-cheese sandwich with my family.

The day before leaving India we fulfil a promise we'd made to ourselves - to go and see a Bollywood movie at an Indian cinema. We arrive at the cinema late, the usher tells us “no problem, no problem! Just ten minutes started ago! This film has the actions, the romances, the singing and dancings!” We pay our Rs30 admission (about 75 cents) and enter the darkened cinema. The man in front of us is falling asleep amidst the insanity, his body slowly tilts sideways until his head strikes the shoulder of the person next to him and wakes him up. It is, of course, in Hindi, so we can't understand much of it. The movie is on celluloid, and in the middle of one scene is suddenly cuts out and jumps to an entirely new scene. The crowd begins howling and waving their fists in the air with indignation, before a psychedelic song-and-dance routine comes on and they burst into applause. Some members of the audience seem to know the words and sing along.

At intermission I smoke a cigarette in the lobby. I happen upon a sign that’s been posted up for the staff: ‘Management is knowing that ushers are sleeping during the films. Management is hearing that the staff are drinking the whiskey. There is to be no sleeping and drinkings of the whiskey during the hours of working…’ We debate whether or not to go back in for the second half and then think what the hell. The movie is overwhelming. It makes no sense. The soundtrack is loud enough to make it at times excruciating. And yet, like India itself, it is utterly, stupifyingly wonderful.

The movie is too colourful for this world. The romance is too dramatic – too powerful and heart-felt to exist in real beings. The people are too animated to be find in the outside world, bursting with passions that spill upon everyone in their orbit, and compelling them to dance, calling them to sing. There’s elephants and cows and monkeys popping up in improbable places. The plot is too wild and jaggedly nonlinear to be borne of real life. And then, after the film, you step outside and it’s pretty much like that in real-life, out on the streets of India.

These emails have been self-indulgent, but if they have in any way inspired an interest in the culture, the landscape, or the peoples of India, then I’d feel I’ve done my job. It is not an easy country to travel in – it may well, as people say, be the hardest of countries to travel in – but for my time in India I have experienced life at a sustained intensity unmatched by any other place I have ever known. I feel smaller for having been here, somehow humbled by the extremities of the place. I’m flying home tonight. I’m eager to return home. But before we sit for a beer together I must warn you – don’t ask me about India if you don’t want me to rant on for some time. There’s a lot to say.

So thanks to anyone who’s stuck it out with me and read these things, and I’ll be seeing you all shortly. I might even try recruiting some of you for a return trip.