10 Not Out - Dalhouise, Khajjar, Chamba

Hello all,
Its been a while since we have written and a lot has happened since then. So settle in, this might be a long one.
Its about 11:30am here and I am sitting on a balcony looking out over the Chamba valley, across an alpine river and up along mountain peaks to the horizon. There is a light breeze and the weather is pleasant compared to the rest of India, which is, from what we have been told, unbearably hot. Today has been the first ‘free’ day since we arrived, so I am nice and relaxed except for the wasp patrolling from time to time.
When we last wrote, I think we were about to leave Dharamasala and my clothes were pink. That night we ate at a Tibetan restaurant. I ordered ‘momos’, which are steamed dumpling-like things. They are a lot like Gyozas, in fact I’m not sure what the difference between gyozas and momos are. Either way, they are delicious and come in huge servings.
At eight the next morning, we took the local bus to Dalhousie, north and west of Dharamasala, very close to the border with Kashmir. Technically, Dalhousie is not that far from Dharamasala, but between the narrow mountain passes , steaming trucks coming the other way and the innumerable bus-stops, it took us 7 hours to reach our destination. On this trip we sat towards the front of the bus. Kate and I, for most of the trip, shared a seat for three people (like one of the STA bus seats at home). Kate sat near the window, and I sat near the aisle. For good portions of the trip, however, we would squish over and share the seat with someone else. Three-people seats are not made for three people. Once three people are one the seat, so begins a silent and unacknowledged war for bottom-space. Being on the aisle, in this journey I was on the front line. We shared the seat with a couple of well-proportioned women at a number of points on the journey. At first there is the squish and wiggle, and being polite westerners, I probably gave up too much space too early. But every bump or favorable corner is opportunity to reinforce your position or acquire more territory. By the end of our bus-journey, I had realized this was not a game of niceties, squish or be squished. In all this was a long and exhausting journey. I hadn’t minded the previous bus, break-downs and landslides kept us entertained. This bus journey was just cramped and hot.
Dalhousie is a small town high in the mountains, about 2400m above sea level. Like many of the places in the hills, it hosts spectacular views and is a popular tourist destination for locals. After the worst cheese sandwich of my life (at the hotel) we walked around Dalhousie. First, we checked out a local Tibetan market, and I bought four shirts for the princely sum of $10 to replace the pink ones. Actually, one of the shirts is okay, its pink, but the green stripes on it make it appear as though it was meant to be pink. I am keeping that one, the rest are gone to me.
We visited two churches, a protestant one and a spooky catholic church further up the road. When we visited the catholic church it was getting to late afternoon and the clouds were thick and moving quickly through the streets. The church rises out of the promenade on a hill. The building is over a century old and made of sandstone that has darkened and decayed over time. It is enveloped by dense woods shilloutted against the fog. We strolled around the church grounds, past some ducks and hens and a very well manicured garden. We met the rector of the church pacing up and down a path near some red and yellow flowers. He was a tall, but elderly man with a paunch and glasses that made his already goggly eyes bulge further. ‘I have to be out here every morning from 4am and every afternoon from 5pm to ward off the monkeys’. He pointed us over to a gun resting aganst a pillar. ‘You need to fire it more than once to scare them off’ he said. He then directed us to his painted corrugated iron roof. ‘I keep it well-maintained to provoke those layabouts down there [the locals] into doing something. Look at them, they can’t even be bothered to paint their roof’.
After leaving the church, we walked back down the promenade towards the Tibetan market. We passed some Tibetan rock paintings (quite recent) and we tried to explain to Shakti the difference between graffiti and public art.
We had dinner at a restaurant called ‘Napoli’, which did serve some pizzas and Italian food. I had the mixed vegetables, but we all shared food. The food is still fantastic. Even the simplest of dishes are tasty. I am getting a bit of a reputation as the person cleaning up what other people can’t finish. You get surprisingly large servings of food. We are eating well.
Our hotel in dalhouise was pretty average. We were beginning our trek early the next day and ordered our breakfast the night before to ensure it was ready at eight. They forgot mine, so I ate what everybody else couldn’t.
We left by car to the ridge (around 2400m) where we would begin our trek. We met our guide, Manu, who is a quiet guy with long, black hair and a beard. We found out later he is also an excellent cook and has trekked for years to some of the most remote areas of Northern India.
The first 3km of the trek was flat and on a wide road. For the next 5km it was steep downhill through a black bear sanctuary, although apparently poachers have significantly lowered the probability of ever encountering one. We descended past a village nestled into the side of the mountain and to the river in the bottom of the valley. These villages practice ‘step’ agriculture, where a ‘step’ is cut into the mountain and crops are grown on the flat part. They grow corn and rice, and herd goats and buffalo. We passed through much of the village, exchanging ‘namaste’’s (hello) as we did. At the bottom of the valley, beside the river, we stopped for a lunch of fried rice. Kate managed to fall in and drenched her shoes, socks and pants. She wasn’t hurt, and we had a spare pair of socks.
The 3km walk the other side of the mountain was hard. It was getting very hot and humid and the ascent required a number of pauses along the way to catch our breath and take on some water.
At around 3pm, and after a short, flat walk along the road from the ridge of the mountain, we entered Khajjar – our stop for the night. Khajjar calls itself mini-switzerland. There is a sign in town pointing north-west that says 6194km to Switzerland. Khajjar is a very small – little more than a communal area and some hotels. In the middle, there is a wide grassy area populated by tourists, people selling drinks and horse-rides, cows, goats and sheep. We have no idea who owns the cows. However, there are apparently bovine retirement villages and orphanages from which the residents roam freely in the day. This patch of grass is the centre of town and a dot on the vast, rising and falling pine forests.
Kate and I thought we would spend a quiet afternoon sitting on the grass, watching the afternoon pass by. No such thing in India. Within 5 minutes we had been offered two horse-riding tours, some drinks, a song, and were having numerous photos with some friendly real-estate agents from Delhi. We got talking with the guys for quite a while, mostly about cricket (“Cricket is our religion and Sachin Tendulkar is our god”, “Ricky Ponting, we love ricky ponting”), but also about the recent assaults of Indian students in Australia. It is big news here, and seems to have been a real blight on perceptions of Australia. Anyway, we had good fun and hopefully changed some opinions.
There is an India-Pakistan match coming up on September 26th – the day we are in Amritsar. Everyone is gearing up for it. The rivalry between India and Pakistan is venomous. Many of the people we have spoken to share an intense disdain for Pakistan and a similarly intense nationalism. Many can recite the key battles in previous wars.
I’ll take a bit of a tangent, but so much of modern India is linked to the 1947 partition. Its not just the india-Pakistan rivalry. I am reading a book at the moment by William Dalrymple called “The City of Djinns: A year in Delhi”. Before 1947, Delhi was a fairly run-down, but still vibrant capital city, home to a mix of Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus. In 1947, however, the majority non-Muslims attacked and pushed out the Moselms of Delhi and they were forced to flee to Pakistan. In Pakistan, the Sikhs and Hindus of the Punjab region (of Pakistan, there is one in India and one in Pakistan) were attacked by the Muslims and many fled to Delhi. In many cases, people effectively traded houses. People fled with from Pakistan with little more than what they could carry, and took up residence in a home where people had been forced to flee to Pakistan with little more than they could carry. The great paradox of Delhi is, according to this author, that it is one of the oldest capitals in history, yet its inhabitants are relatively new.
Anyway, I am looking forwards to watching this cricket game.
The hotel in Khajjar was comparatively nice. It had a table-tennis and billiard table. I am undefeated in my three most recent international table-tennis tournaments. Dad will remember well the humiliation of Grajagan, and Shakti will remember the humiliation of Khajjar. I am also undefeated in two billiards outings.
The next morning we trekked from Khajjar to Chamba. Although it was a shorter distance, the heat made it feel much longer than the previous day’s walking. Again we walked through corn fields and rural villages. We walked through one village where a throng of schoolchildren must have heard us coming. They surrounded us, shaking our hand saying ‘good afternoon, good afternoon!”. Two dogs followed us all the way from Khajjar to Chamba as we discussed religion, the Indian political system and Pakistan. Shakti is the last child of three, so we also got onto discussing how organized the last child seems to be (Anna!), I theorized that it may be because the rules for the last child are a little more lax, so they make their own rules, impose their own order on situations? I don’t know, just a theory. Perhaps the rules for Anna weren’t more lax, I don’t know. I mean no offence by any of those ramblings.
We also got talking about fighting. Shaki could not believe that I had never been in a fight, and described how he has a reputation for fighting, but hadn’t been in one for four years. In india (or Rajastan perhaps) fighting isn’t what we might imagine it to be. Fighting begins with an open handed slap, and then usually defuses before more drastic measures are taken. If it does not end with the slap, punches are employed, and its gloves off from there.
We arrived in Chamba at around 1:30. Much of Himachal Pradesh was ruled form Chamba and the centerpiece of the town is the king’s palace – decked out in bright green. Chamba sits at the bottom of the Chamba valley, on the banks of the Ravi river, the most rapid we have seen yet. We didn’t spend long in Chamba, but it had a nice vibe. We stopped and watched a local cricket game for 15 minutes or so before getting on a local bus and riding for an hour to the base of the ‘hill’ we are staying on. All in the party (except Manu) were exhausted. It was getting late in the afternoon, but we had another km uphill to do. We trudged up to the place we are staying –orchard hut – to be greeted with some decked out chairs, cold water (its clean, from a spring here) , some chai, a fez-like hat and another red dot.
As a piece of trivia, the red dot in the middle of the forehead is a traditional welcome. It just means, welcome to our country, or welcome to our territory, or welcome home. Apparently after a long day at work, the person at home will greet their spouse with one of these red dots. There are other reasons why some people wear them, like as a symbol of marriage, but the main purpose we are aware of is as a welcome.
This place we are staying is amazing. From our balcony we look out over the mountains and the river. The garden is manicured, there is no rubbish, the rooms are simple, but cleaned and maintained, it is very quiet, the food is all home-cooked and unlike anything I have tasted. If we were satying any longer than three nights, I would be a balloon. The air is clean and I am no longer pulling balls of black snot out of my nose.
I went for an early morning swim before a breakfast of ‘pooris’, thin pieces of deep-fried Indian bread that are extremely addictive, bananas, yoghurt and chai.
Normally today there is an orientation walk to the village further up the hill, but, today, the cook at the place we were staying was getting married, so we were invited to come up and join in the lunch festivities. We walked up the hill, again past cornfields and extraordinary views to the village-house at the top of the mountain. Mostly it was a mutual staring competition, particularly with the kids who stand two feet in front of you and gaze. We felt a little like we were intruding, but the hospitality was great. For lunch we sat on the ground and at rice with a local kidney bean based dish (it really is amazing, it takes 4 solid hours of attention to cook and you can’t get it anywhere else), some dahl and two sweet-potato-based dishes, one lemon, one much sweeter. One guy there was very very drunk (it happens at weddings everywhere!).
It was an arranged marriage, and we briefly met the bride and groom. The groom was polite and happy, wearing a suit under a vest studded with tinsel and adorned with 10 rupee notes. It was a sparkling money vest and we had seen them on sale before in Mandi. The bride looked very young. I’m not sure how old, but probably no older than 16 and possible younger. She was short and small and covered in a red, hooded outfit with gold lining and sequins all over it. From under the hood, she wore a gold ring through her nose, half the size of her face. She looked terrified.
We swam again after descending the hill (but not after having a eye-off with some massive buffalo coming up the track). Kate and I relaxed for the afternoon and watched the sunset from our balcony.
Dinner once again was superb, we had a capsicum and paneer (cottage cheese) dish, and many others that I can remember now. Its all haze of culinary ecstasy. Breakfast lunch or dinner.
After dinner we watched our first bollywood movie – ‘lagan’ – a story about how a group of villagers in Rajastan stave off oppressive British taxation by winning a cricket game against all the odds. There is so much more to say about this, but I am completely out of writing stamina and am going for a last swim.
Briefly, today we have been relaxing. We had breakfast, then read in bed for a while, watched a cooking demonstration, had lunch and I have been writing the bulk of this post since then. The last three days have been very relaxing, very quiet, beautiful and serene. Tomorrow we embark for Amritsar and from here on in, it’s the bustle of India’s big cities. I wonder how much we will miss this.
I hope you are all well. Thankyou everyone for sending us messages and photos, we love hearing from you.
Love Kate and Charles.