Howdy to Saudi
June 20 in Saudi Arabia ⋅ ☀️ 37 °C
I met Thomas on the airline cruiser coach to Heathrow, already saddened that the driver had loaded my rucksack into the hold in a way that had probably crushed my pastel de natas. We watched the bus altitude meter read 6ft the whole journey, as we sailed up and down the Chiltern hills, presumably measured from the road rather than sea level.
At Terminal 4, we breezed past security, then the animal relief area, and onto our Saudia flight to Jeddah. Aboard the Boeing 777, the cabin crew inexplicably handed us a boiling wet wipe, followed by a handsome banquet of fruit platters, and access to arcade games (Angry Birds and Zoonicorns).
At King Abdulaziz airport, we said Howdy to Saudi and treated ourselves to a MeccaDonalds on Middle Eastern soil. We were going to need all the fuel we could get, especially landing into Delhi on zero sleep ...Read more
Delhirious and Defeated
June 21 in India ⋅ ⛅ 38 °C
We were processed like cattle, shuffling through a sterile hall of endless immigration forms and thumb-print scanners, watched by military men armed with AKs beneath signage riddled with typos. At arrivals, we bought SIM cards from the world's most nihilistic seller and marvelled at our Indian rupees, each banknote printed with a slightly different angle of Mahatma Gandhi. The metro, too, was surgically clean, blissfully silent, and humming with an artificially cool breeze. We sat in the sleek carriage, watching the city pass in deforested chunks, almost fooled at how chill it all appeared to be. Then the doors hissed open at New Delhi station and we climbed the steps to the street above.
The stench hit me first, thick and greasy, a sticky barrage of rot, sewage, and spices that clung to the humid air, surging upwards in the baking heat and violating my wrinkling nostrils. I tried to hold my breath but the atmosphere was persistent, burning my throat with concentrated ammonia from public urination mixed with the heavy, stomach-turning rancidity of festering excrement. Beneath that was the smell of stagnant, grey water and the sickly, cloying honk of garbage that had been liquefying in the sun for weeks. Every breath felt like inhaling poison amid a relentless, screeching cacophony: the insane, constant blaring of tuktuk horns, the hollow drone of "chicken biryani" ringing over a tannoy, and the abrasive clamour that seemed to erupt from everywhere at once, as tuktuk drivers chased us for business, like a swarm of blood-hungry sharks in a feeding frenzy to a pair of sorry sardines.
Our walk toward Hotel Ajanta took us through streets choked with people, gaping with deep potholes, and obstructed by open drains, utility cables, and encroaching vehicles. At our hotel, a secure, air-conditioned refuge, we took a second to acknowledge our overwhelm, attempted to reframe our outlook, and ventured back out toward the Red Fort. As it turned out, our tuktuk driver had actually dropped us off at Jama Masjid, a Mughal mosque where we mounted the minaret and were badgered with selfie requests. But between there and a stop at India Gate, we were plunged back into the carnage.
Chandni Chowk is the densest market of Old Delhi, and it honestly shocked me. We saw people driven to horrifying extremes. A group brawled in dirt, rocks in hand, while others with awful disabilities were begging for their lives. The squalor was undeniable.
When it was time to leave, Indira Gandhi Airport felt like a hallucination of normalcy. The quiet luxury of the airport felt ironic compared to the mayhem of the streets. At least India has its humour, the food court had a restaurant that called itself 'Burger Singh'. At McDonalds, I had a "Maharajah Mac", Thomas had the grilled paneer burger. We felt very grateful.
That said, Delhi was no disaster. We expected mayhem and we got, well, what we asked for. India is rich in colour and flavour, and to witness such a wildly different culture from our own where risk is just so accepted and newborn babies travel by hanging off the back of mopeds is a real living experience.Read more
Leh of the Land
June 22 in India ⋅ ☁️ 13 °C
It felt like we'd barely even stepped onto the flight from Delhi before the tannoy crackled with the news that we were coming into land. Already? I hadn't even had a chance to tear open my plane food, a meal which called itself a chicken junglee sandwich (probably for the best).
As we descended through an alabaster veil, the clouds dissolved into wisps, and an arid moon-like landscape emerged out of the milky haze. The land below was a tectonic skeleton, jagged with barren peaks and mineral-rich earth, while giant Himalayan massifs loomed beyond, dappled in deep snow and hoarding rain clouds from ever reaching the interior.
The air is thin on the western edge of the Tibetan plateau, and thankfully, so are the crowds. Our declarations of "no symptoms" on an Ebola entry form a final, bureaucratic reminder of the chaos of Delhi, we emerged from the terminal in desperate need of rehabilitation. A gentle taxi ride took us through the stark, sun-bleached outskirts of Leh to the doors of the Thangkop Guesthouse, where we were welcomed by the warm and weathered Dolma.
She was the antithesis of the city we had left behind: composed, compassionate, and quietly charming. Her home was to be our sanctuary, a quiet base in a town that turned out to be a high-altitude melting pot.
Walking the streets past mud-brick buildings and spirited strays, we watched monks in dark maroon robes collecting alms with practiced humility as prayer flags of the majority Tibetan Buddhist population swirled overhead, and Arabic banners fluttered on mosques wailing calls to prayer, and bronze statues of Ganesh peered out from shop windows. We had arrived at the confluence of Hindustan and Central Asia, where India meets China meets Pakistan, and they'll each squabble to tell you Ladakh belongs to them.
48 hours to acclimatise, those are the rules. So after countless cups of tea and lung-busting breaths, we set out to explore the city, starting with Leh Palace. Its nine stories are supported by medieval timber and meticulous stonework, and we meandered from temple to stupa until a black storm rolled menacingly into the valley. Our first day and it'd already rained in the moonscape desert. That's once in a blue moon for you, or in this one, an ochre one.Read more
Hemis Fear
June 23 in India ⋅ ⛅ 13 °C
We were bolting along the Leh-Manali highway and gawping at a white boulder field of stupas, when our taxi driver tapped the brakes causing us to pull up at the side of the road. Two men tore open the sliding door, and gleefully hurled two packages in at us, before slamming it shut and sending us back on our way. Thomas and I looked at each other, bewildered. Had we just been handed a bomb? We peered into each of the bags, and untied them tentatively to find a collection of food: orange juice, bananas, crackers.
It was an important date in the local Buddhist calendar: festival day at Hemis monastery, commemorating the life of Guru Padmasambhava, the man who brought Buddhism to the Tibetan people! And free food was just the first evidence of the festivities...
As we passed beneath a gateway carved with fanciful depictions of tigers, dragons, and ornate patterns, the scale of the event had very much become apparent. People had flocked from all over the union territory, crammed into buses and clinging to the back of trucks, and local families were dressed in their finest traditional woolens and turquoise jewelry, while a sea of parked cars stretched for miles down the mountainside.
After finding our homestay, we headed straight into the carnival, ascending past baby monks (or as Thomas kept calling them, chipmunks) jumping for joy on bouncy castles and trampolines, then adult monks crowded rowdily around a green-felt betting table, and even a young monk shooting tourists excitedly with his toy gun.
At the top was the monastery itself, a tiered amphitheatre carved into the mountainside, one of the barren Himalayan peaks that framed the action. We poked about until we found the main courtyard, dripping in vibrant colour and crammed with expectant tourists squinting into the high-altitude sun. Frilly silks hung from each ledge, and ropes cordened off the stage like a wrestling ring, where monks wore opulent brocade robes.
Their walkout music was the deep, droning vibration produced by long, telescopic copper horns, beneath the semi-rhythmic metallic clashing of cymbals. They were accompanied by the steady thrum of drums, and the voice of a man who had definitely lowered the pitch of his voice by at least two octaves to impress the ladies.
But the monks' performances were less about RKOs and more about traditional Cham dancing, which involved spinning methodically in clumsy circular patterns. It must have been sweaty work, as they balanced heavy masks on their heads, meant to represent wrathful deities with bulging eyes and jagged teeth to scare away evil spirits.
Two evil spirits that remained undeterred were Thomas and I, and we stuck around for the most captivating part, a performance from the "Kung Fu Nuns". They chopped, flipped and shouted 'AH!' in perfect synchrony, in maybe the most impressive group act since Diversity dazzled Simon Cowell in the Britain's Got Talent final.
As the day grew long, we climbed to another stupa, before retiring to our homestay, where the light was golden and the view was fleeting. Our host, Padma, lovely though she was, served us the middest rice and dhal I've ever eaten, then we headed up to possibly the hardest mattress I've ever laid on. A bad night's sleep and a squat toilet, that's enough to give anyone Hemis Fear.Read more
