A FULL DAY'S DRIVE OVER THE HEAVY ROADS
OF THE HIMALAYAN PIR PUNJAL,
FROM MANALI THROUGH THE ROHTUNG PASS,
INTO THE KULLU AND LAHOUL VALLEYS,
THEN THROUGH THE KUNZUM-LA PASS,
INTO THE SPECTACULAR SPITI VALLEY,
AND ARRIVAL AT KAZA, MEETING TEAMATES
Sep. 21, 2001
Today was a Kodachrome day, with a lot of heavy duty driving along the incredible switchback roads of the Himalayas just ahead of their closing for the year with the first snows setting in to close the passes. I had come from Manali this morning after an auspicious start. I had awakened in my room at Manali in the Kunzum-La Hotel in which there was only one bed, so that Raju had rolled up the bedspread and slept at the foot of the bed. I awakened at 4:00 AM and wanted to catch up here in Manali on a number of things I would not be able to complete elsewhere, separated from such things as telephones and post offices, and even a TV that I am told works. I could not turn on the lights and begin typing since I did not want to wake up Raju. So, I quietly pulled out the birthday cards (including the "Golden Eagle" card I had saved for Michael along with the feathers and stories from Talkeetna, Kazakhstan and coincidentally toasted last night with Golden Eagle beer!) and other items t hat would take as long to get to the US as I will be out here and tried to get them to the front desk where a fellow was still pondering what to do with them when we left. "Yes," I kept adding, "There are no stamps on them, which is why I have put the money with it and then you can keep all the difference over which the stamps cost. I have a feeling that under these circumstances, the birthday cards will arrive-if at all-in time for next year's birthday, sent by the slowest and least costly stamps he can find. But, my intent was good!
The planned rendezvous with Cheryl-our new mother who is a medical school wannabe like so many I have met on such trips, although she certainly is unique among them to date-we were delayed since Raju turned on TV, and we heard a familiar voice. It was BBC reporting on the speech by George Bush to a joint session of Congress, essentially explaining the war against the Taliban's protection of Arkadi as a terrorist group and the four demands for handing over Osama bin Laden and allowing access to the camps to shut them down "or share their fate.' The best line I believe I heard in there for which both his speech writers should be congratulated, but also George W. for his delivery of this important speech-the defining moment of his presidency now early in his term-"We are not deceived by the pretense of piety." The military were called upon to do their part, which "Will make us proud." There are no budget battles now, and no discussion about political differences. The sustained applause greeted the praises for Gov. Pataki and Mayor Giuliani of New York, and a promise of assistance to rebuild New York and to assist the floundering national airlines and the industries that have been hit hardest by this terrorist attack. I am not sure that the travel plans I have booked already will have intact airlines beneath them when I get to the point of boarding-and that includes Continental airline at the extension of this trip from Houston to New Orleans and on to Denver, and includes even venerable L/H and British Air which announced layoffs.
So, having heard the BBC commentator say that this speech marked a n historic moment and among the finest speeches he had ever heard delivered, the US is getting to work, and so must I-in the Taliban's backyard, winding up the day after a pounding and dusty road trip in a finger of desolate remote India stuck between Pakistan and Afghanistan-two likely targets of US reprisals.
Here I am, on the far side of the world, witnessing events in this global village, which have to do with a worldwide impact, spread by the telecommunications technology we have all said to be revolutionizing the way we live in a nearly instantaneous present tense. That applies to all but the technology beneath me consistently failing, with the exception of a ballpoint pen, through which I have continued a complete sequence of serial letters. Now, if only the fellows I have handed the letters understand that they really do need to purchase the stamps and get them posted and that they are actually delivered and returned, we may have at least one old-fashioned medium to look back upon in the extensive records I have made of such trips as these you have been reading. The mark of utmost futility is to have all the very high investment of energy in the completion of these projects from my end, and all comes to naught by a slip in the chain of the further events that carry out the delivery-an assumption we usually make that can be relied upon. But, electricity and its uses are not reliable here, something that Cheryl had found out. The reason we had stopped by the orders Ravi had relayed by phone to Raju to have the cigarette lighter fixed so that it worked, I thought related to his wanting to put the blue light on the top of the jeeps which allows him to pass in convoy as a medical mission. He had received permission from Himachal Pradesh government to use the dome lights as a way of designating the special status of the medical mission vehicles so that they would not be detained or turned back when other traffic was. I just now learned why it was important that we have a working cigarette lighter-and the reason is different from my own orientation as a "juice junkie" as I used to try to plug in my ThinkPad to the D/C power outlet to charge the computer. She has a machine of a different sort she needs to use every four hours or so-she has to have access to a breast pump!
She elected NOT to use the electric outlet, but chose instead the manual pump she had been using on the plane, since she had been trying to keep herself active in the milk letdown so as to be able to continue nursing when she gets back home to her six month old son Joe, product of artificial insemination, which she is proud to have turned over to her partner, who works at Johns Manville, the insulation firm, for the next two weeks before returning as a stay at home Mom while thinking of making application to medical school.
So, you may picture this surreal sight, as we are climbing the hills overlooking the Kullu Valley on our way to the Rohtung Pass, 3,949 meters, with all the spectacular Lahoul Valley coming up as a moonscape spread between overtowering mountain ranges, and one of us is in the backseat pumping out breast milk into a plastic bottle to toss out the window.
If this applicant to medical school were not enough, I heard when I arrived at Kaza a question from one of the participants, "Is Signi coming down to dinner?" What? Signi is still here in India? No, the answer came back from Ravi, she is ill and is upstairs but is waiting for you to write her the letter that will get her into medical school. She is expecting me to get her into medical school while making no effort at this ambition herself, and was actually in Florida when shed heard this trip was going so with nothing else better to do, she decided to fly out to join in as Ravi is once again carrying her along as a helper on this trip. And she is still talking about applying to medical school, although all she has done so far that I can see that would warrant getting in is to repeatedly ask that I get her in as she points out I seem to have done such wonders for everyone else she has seen on these trips I have helped to do so. But, each of the others had something going for them, other than the fact that they wanted the title and status of MD without the effort that goes into the process of first getting into and through medial school. I do not believe she seeks this course so as to be entitled to get out of b ed at night and come in and treat someone at considerable inconvenience since she does not do well with it as the non-medical "helper" on these trips, rather frequently taking days off. I do not explain other peoples' relationships, but I do not perjure my recommendations.
THE SPECTACULAR, EXHAUSTING ROAD TRIP,
UP THROUGH THE KULLU VALLEY TO ROHTUNG PASS,
UP THROUGH THE LAHOUL VALLEY TO KUNZUM-LA PASS,
AND, THEN, THROUGH THE AWESOME SPITI VALLEY TO KAZA
I keep taking pictures, since otherwise no one would believe the environment around me is not on some other planet than the one they were born on-since it is difficult if not impossible to describe the sights I am seeing, even though I have seen them all before, and am still familiar with them-they still inspire jaw-gaping awe when I look around and see the wonders of this spectacular moonscape all around me.
U have labeled each spot along the way with GOS marking and altitude, and compared them to other landmarks through which I have come. It is surprising how close together these landmarks are within this vast remote area when mapped on the great circle route, but how long and difficult the road trip is to connect one site to another. We have traveled hours, sucking in great billowing clouds of dust to go only a dozen miles on the GPS, which was measured in 120 kms on the switchback rough roads. "Darling, I want you, but not so fast!" is the kind of inspiring road sign erected by Himank to get drivers to slow down on the very rough and rocky roads, with immeasurable precipices dropping off on the roadside without so much as a surveyors string along the exposed side of the road over the long drop.
We left the Kunzum Hotel after I had posted my letters (I hope) through the agency of others and while looking on the TV to see the end of George W's speech to the joint Congressional session. We drove up the Beas River, along which we had driven when we went off on our Vayas Kundh trek in 1998, then began the long series of switchbacks into the Pir Punjal mountains climbing up through treeline and looking over at large waterfalls dropping off the sheer face of the massif. We made a long slow climb to the Rohtung Pass, which I have often got to from the other direction, sometimes in the rain and even more often by night. That may explain why this time by daylight I kept shooting photos of the incredible sights just outside my open window.
We arrived at Rohtung Pass, 3,948 meters high, which separated us from the Kullu Valley between Kullu and Manali we had driven yesterday, and the arid and rocky moonscape of the Lahoul Valley. How on earth there is water coursing don the middle of this dry barren rocky gorge is impossible for me to figure out, but that water does not stay here to give life to anything on this Martian terrain. Several large rock avalanches had wiped out the road, and we had to crawl our way up and over boulders around switchback side detours to keep on going up the direction that the lorries were hurrying with loads of firewood, making fuel while the sun shines since the first dusting of snow came to the peaks yesterday for a long year of winter that will close these passes in only a few weeks. We stopped for a pee stop along the river and could see the snow capped peaks of the Pir Punjal rising on either side of the Valley which would be a good introduction for the moon walk that astronauts might train to do by jumping around big erratic rocks and crawling forward around patches of ground up mountain rocks to the glacial flour that comes down the river suspended as glacial milk.
The Himank road signs remained edifying: "On my curve, test your nerve," and hanging beneath the colorful designs painted on a big lorry-beneath the painted on sign that I can never figure as a mark of courtesy "Horn Please! Use Dipper at Night" was the painted maxim above the stylized shoe and the evil eye to ward of accident "Love is Sweet Poison" As we rode further I looked up at the huge vista we would be crawling down on switchbacks through frequent fords of streams that fell out of the incongruously dry mountainside, "Of your dosing in bed." I would think that the scenery is more distracting than a driver's cell phone conversation for the driver who is still downshifting in the faithful little 4 cylinder diesel 2 wheel drive toy-like Tata-a lunar lander moon rover in the setting of this vast geologic gash.
We came across only a scattered few small rocky hovels, which were set up as roadside tea stops-although any scenic overlook would be prime real estate for such traffic patterns to pause for some entrepreneurs. They sometimes had signs on them that would say such as "Kunzum Dhaba" painted over a portrait of the European supermodel of the moment's pensive beautiful gaze-a residual from some other planet luring us to consider Pepsi. We did not stop for tea, however, despite frequent offers to do so, and neither did the big lories loaded with logs for firewood here far above treeline, as the approaching winter would close all this transit. In the passes of Rohtung and Kunzum-La (I remember it's enchanting name means the "Gathering Place of Ibex") the snow pack accumulates to over fifty meters on the road way which is continuously being manually repaired on even as fine a day as today represents. Men and women-an egalitarian Equal Opportunity Employer, is Himank-are crouched at the roadside precipices, pounding big rocks into small ones, and occasionally standing with their pick axes to pour the smoky oily black tar into the "potholes" with the potential to wash the narrow roadway into the nearby space filled with nothing but gravity. I still think of this as a vision of Dante's Inferno, to have these small darkened people swathed in discolored rags emerging from the hellish black smoke of their tar melting barrel fires to ladle the molten slag onto what is the narrow path skirting certain destruction. If I were from OSHA and carried a spiral note pad for infractions against workers' safety in this forsaken remote environment as shadowy figures emerged from the smoky carcinogen-rich thin air along unguarded precipices tended by unskilled myriads of unprotected laborers, I would have to send out for more notepads
We emerged from dense clouds of our own dust as we would switchback and forth in a slow climbing up the scarp toward the Kunzum-La Pass. It was there we made our first stop, at 4,551 meters in the Pass at the stupa and prayer flag-bedecked saddle between the Lahoul Valley and the even more spectacular Spiti Valley beyond. No one, not even the lorie drivers on a pushed schedule to deliver their goods and return as quickly as they can in this last month of transit traffic drives through the pass without stopping at the small temple in Kunzum-La and bowing in prayer before the sacred objects-both Hindu and Buddhist in their symbols. Each traveler can see that their arrival here is only a contingent event and not at all guaranteed by the National Highway Transportation Safety Board.
We had stopped at a small stream that issued straight out of the barren rocky ground at the crest of the pass in a high wind. Now just where does that water issue from? There is no snow pack scene above us, and no glacier is hanging nearby-we are, after all, at the highest point. And the rocks themselves cannot have much of a reservoir capacitance, sine they seem anything but porous, and, still, cold clear water trickles and then gushes out of the dusty barren landscape-a true gift of the gods who seem to want to encourage life even in such a hostile place where it does not otherwise seem very welcome.
A check on my GPS systems again shows a long distance we have traveled by road seems only a trivial distance on the great circle route, and I am relatively close to landmarks I had programmed in on each of my prior trips to Dharamsala in the Dhauldihar Range and in Lei, Ladakh and its extensions out to Punang, Tso Morari, Panamik and the highest pass at Kardungla. It is as though the vast area we have covered has been crumpled up like a map wrinkled and tossed away by some giant force, so that here on the peaks of the folds in this disorderly map we are much closer to the other peaks in the map there were once as far as hundreds of miles away. In fact, this is precisely what must have happened, since the crumpled map may show that the collision of these massive plates that produced this jumble of inclinometry around me has exposed fossils and AMMONITES from the floor of the Indian Ocean somewhere far away between here and Australia which was left behind, and some inconceivably long time ago.
LANDMARKS
OF THE SPITI VALLEY
From Kunzum-La the Spiti Valley road distances and the various altitudes of the landmarks are:
Kunzum-La 0 kms 4,551 meters
Lossar 19 4,077
Kaza 76 3,600
Kibber 90.8 4,205
Sajmun 118 3,650
Tabo 123 3,056
In this listing, you will see the points along the road that I have marked the
GPS to recognize the shorter distance between them and the orientation seen
from their global perspective on the bearings between them. You will also see
the highest village on earth with year-round habitation, the high dry and cold
town of Kibber, I had visited last time and will again this time, remembering
that it was just beyond the Ki Monastery which clings to its isolated mountaintop
over looking the stark simplicity of the Spiti River-a braided channel of water
through a vast barren valley.
As we entered the Spiti Valley the sun was crossing behind us at the Kunzum-La Pass, and shadows lengthened from the vertical landscape before us. The banded buttes were reflected out of the golden braided threads of the Spiti River and the Grecian columns of the "hoodahs" (as the formations that are weathered away under capstone rocks would be called along the Green and Colorado Rivers in the Western US) look like they have been engineered there to shore up the collapse of the entire Himalayan range eroding above them. From the far side of the Spiti River Canyon I could look across and see both the Ki monastery and the still higher and more distant village of Kibber reflecting back the sunset as Alpenglow tinged the summits behind them It is a magic moment to be carrying a couple of cameras-and I had no unexposed film by the time we drove past the "highest filling station on earth" in the town of Kaza-our "destination travel."
KAZA, SPITI,
"DESTINATION TRAVEL"
FOR THE SAKE OF ACHIEVING
A "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED"
Welcome-at last-to your Kaza destination. No one gets here on his or her way to anywhere else, so you really have to want to be here to find yourself here at all! It has taken over ten days to get here with a lot of forces at enmity with my planned arrival here last week. I never take for granted my arrival at any place which I have programmed, nor with all the planned accouterments I had packed. I had begun this trip with four big packs of medicines, with assurances of four more in places such as Atlanta and Simla, and despite extraordinary efforts to keep these moving along with me, I arrive (thank God) but none of the medicines are accompanying me (courtesy of the evil forces unleashed by terrorists with another agenda.) But, here I am, and we will do what we can do as soon as I meet the unique residual group of those who have somehow come through stories similar, if not as complex, as mine, and we will get to work in the Kaza clinics planned for tomorrow, God willing!