AUG-A-4
RETURN TO
LEH FOLLOWING THREE INTENSIVE WEEKS OF THE REMOTE LINGSHED-03 TREK
AND MEDICAL CAMPS FROM FANGILA
THROUGH
SEVEN PASSES ON FOOT FROM FIFTEEN TO EIGHTEEN THOUSAND FEET ELEVATION,
ALONG THE
THE
TO RETURN BY
THE
DUSTY, WEARY, WELL-EXERCISED,
WITH A COUPLE OF NEW PAIR BONDS AND ONE
JUST-NOW
CONFIRMED PREGNANCY
AS FURTHER MARKERS OF THE EVENTS
IN THE MANY
Well, we did it. It was not always pretty or graceful, but we got the task done, and completed well!
There were a fair number of first-worlder complaints of denied privilege (looking a lot more like the indigenous people than just observers of them) and incessant complaints from at least one source about how everything in India was filthy—there seems to be much more dirt in India than elsewhere in at least one world. In that world and in a very limited life, everything is unsafe, unsanitary, unsavory and unsuitable—wh9ich is why it is not much of a life.
That one exception should never have signed up for the trip, and was almost left at the hotel Kangri but promised to make the effort. Then she should have been evacuated from the first day of the trek when we had the ability to carry her back from Hanaupata by horse, which she rode in almost from the first steps on the trek. But, after that it was too late to turn back, and she was carried along. Several of the younger students did spectacularly well—and I am proud to say that the GW students ranked highly. We had good tutorials and improving case presentations as we went along on the professional side, and even those who were not quite up to the rigors of the trek found that the Himalayas had a way of making them fitter as they went along, if they did not have a failure of will to perform in the spectacular setting in which they found themselves.
The full details area available to those who ask, and the itinerary was followed as it was outlined to them in their pre-trek orientation and briefings along the way—notwithstanding the usual “democratic votes” to change plans to convenience and an earlier return to civilization and shopping, notwithstanding the fixed group permits with the police permits allotting us to be at a given location at a given time not subject to re-working on whim. Of course, any who wished to break away would find it difficult if not impossible, given the isolation and lack of transport, hotel accommodation, and the all important permits to be in this restricted area. But, most realized it was a chance of a lifetime, and settled in to performing and enduring, if not always enjoying the rigors and the isolation. A few remarkable events also marked the passages, with the last being a positive pregnancy test confirmed at the last stop in Lamayuru Gompa as we concluded our trip before the return to Leh, where we are now in the scramble to regroup and re-pack whatever can be cleaned up and got ready for the next trip for me into Sikkim, or carried back for the next trip into Alaska.
And, therein lies
a rub. The warning about the lack of a
return ticket to
THE NEWS GOES FROM BAD TO WORSE:
I AM STRANDED AFTER A PROLONGED STAY IN
NOW DOOMED TO FAR LONGER,
AND WITH THE ONLY WAY OUT BY WAY OF STILL
FURTHER
LONG BOUNCING DUSTY BUS RIDES AFTER A FULL
WEEK OF SAME, TO GO BY ROAD TO A CONNECTION TO A LATER
INTERNATIONAL FLIGHT
When I went down to the
presumed seven thirty dinner, Hem had
come to me to cheerfully announce that I would have to make a new and later
international flight connection to leave India, since there was no way I could
fly out of Leh this month. The glitch of
the Ambassador Travel Agent was never corrected despite the notice of over a
month to fix it, and it seems I must pay for their mistake. This means, said hem, that I should spend
several days going with the Nepali team back to Simla which is, of course,
several hard days of road travel from here, and even then I am not yet at Delhi
from which a new international flight arrangement will have to be made, since
there is no way I can make it to the Lufthansa flight for which I should be
rendezvousing the day after tomorrow.
The crew here typically looks at a map and says—as they said yesterday,
“Why, Leh is only a few inches away—we can make that in an hour!” Even when it is pointed out that the true
distance is 180 km, they figure that in the US, such a straight distance could
be covered on the interstate in an hour and a half, and forget that this is on
unpaved single lane rocky roads along deep canyons on switchbacks that will
take more like two and a half days—and I am now in what passes for
civilization—Leh, with intermittent electricity, and even hot water for about
an hour a day! Now I must get to some
urban center, out of the “Hill Country”—which even includes Simla once we get
there, over three days away. So, kiss
off the next week at best, as yet another hard time roadwork imposition by the
staff of a negligent agency. If all goes well as it might best be turning out
after further scrambling, I may be able to make it to
As we sat discussing this, in came
the high school senior,
This evening, he elected to benefit the Lingshed-03 team leader with a
dissertation on parasitic disease. I
tolerated this for a little while before pointing out that he, a high school
student (he bridles back to respond that he is going to be going to college at
Berkeley next year) is talking to a tenured professor of Microbiology and
Tropical Medicine with a doctorate in tropical medicine and many years of
experience in tropical diseases in the three and a half times he has
experienced life than a snot-nosed kid with acne on his chest who is pontificating
on a subject he knows little about. He
responded that this was absurd since he has a grandmother who once had a
tapeworm, and nothing I might know or have seen trumps this bit of his
strategic advantage over me in knowing more about this subject than he. At this moment, the whole charade played out
not just with
Meanwhile, the others had all gone out to eat at someplace, presumably more sanitary, where they would not get worms from the contact with these filth-ridden Indian peoples, as Elvina is convinced she now has contracted and has consulted one of the more kindly disposed residents to suggest treatment, though symptomless, for the vile beasts she has no doubt contracted from touching down in India. They are all congratulating themselves on a successful trek, in which they can go home and show and tell how they had single-handedly brought modern medicine into the darkness to save a backward people—from worms?
With the exception of several stellar
performers who did superior work without complaining,