Though I really want to start with spewing venom on a(another) crappy Bollywood 'picture' I recently saw, I could let it hold while I spit out Spiti. Or more like, how it was when I was in Spiti, and whom I was with, and how it fed a new notion of the great Himalayas, and of isolation in my head. It was really my first contact with these rugged people whom I continue to find across the breadth of the Himalayan region the more I travel. It marked the largest barrenness I'd ever experienced, until then, and since, I've stared at, been in, and fallen in love with more of it, in different seasons. To shift the landscape to the other extreme, I also saw populated grasslands and deep wooded valleys by the end of our journey, as we exited towards Manali. It also marks the first that I fell in love - with a rock... or more accurately, with the figure emergent from the action of degrading forces on some rock - journeying between Kaza-Losar - of a girl sitting forlorn and staring into the vastness (and also the void). Love, love, love.
I wonder how it'd be now. "Ab toh tujhe Kaza mein momos bhi milenge - punjabi tadke ke saath," quipped Saurabh, who was the other half of the conversation that brought about this tribute to Spiti. Maybe even my love had gone elsewhere.
We recalled about the time we spent on just travel. Calculations showed it to be ~56 hours. Two and a thirds of days, of nothing but grinding of the hip bone against shabby seats (or whatever close passed off as a "seat") and banging of heads - against either the window grille (ouch!, it constantly reminded me of brain hemorrhage) or the shoulder of some fellow
And then I put sleep into the calculation, which was another 56 hours (not counting the hours of mixed-sleep-enroute); which means another two and a thirds of days of non-cognition. So, that totals to four and two thirds of days, not being upto anything. On a 7/8 day trip, if we knew we'd be dedicating a majority of time to doing nothing, we might have reconsidered. But that is only because we would've not known how it feels like traveling through Spiti - the painterly sparse landscapes, with human settlements marked in thin strokes across the canvas, or sometimes just a plain sight of lines and the sky intersecting. We won't have seen the unreal visions from Dhankar and Key Gompa (थुक जी छे, Lop Cha!), and the way the clouds against a crisp blue sky bring out the best in all photographs. We wouldn't have known the fun (and the intoxication) of pristine lakes in pristine settings, like the one we discovered in Dhankar where I swam with the Golden Trout, or the more-known Chandra Tal at one end of the Spiti valley where I almost drowned (since I didn't know swimming). Back then, even Rohtang Pass was a cruise (it hadn't been torn apart by landslides, up until 2008) and the valley didn't sound of only car/truck/minivan horns and ma-bhen-curses.
To end our conversation, it brought to my mind my pakka pakka promise to C about taking up Spiti for a challenge on the bikes for a whole week sometime this season. This would complete my "coverage" of this amazing region (Manali-Lahaul-Spiti-Leh), on sheer pedal power. I'd be seeing my bestest-version-of-isolation - in probably an even more isolated time, when snow wouldn't have gone away altogether, and when I'd have to walk with the bike on the shoulders at Kunzum La after an unannounced snowfall, and be the first to rescue this damsel-in-SUV-trapped-in-snow-with-cocker-spaniel-in-the-rear-seat-and-a-box-of-snickers-in-the-glove-compartment-and-a-really-wet-uh-smile. We have had this plan cooking for so long; that I wonder if it'd taste the same I thought it would; maybe there are some things that change with time.
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