Arrived in Kaza in Spiti Valley, visited Tabo Monastery
I've just arrived in Kaza, a small town in Spiti Valley that serves as a government administrative center for Spiti Valley.
The connection here is too bad to upload photos. I have two weeks of photos from Spiti and Kinnaur Valleys, but I probably will not be able to upload them until I get to Manali.
In general there have been non-working phone lines, television with about five local channels, no internet, and no mobile phone service. If you saw these places, you would understand why. Spiti Valley is a dry valley with steep walls. It reminds me of the canyons in Arizona or Utah. The roads are one-lane dirt or broken-paved. In many places they are blasted out of the side of the cliff, leaving what looks like three-fourths of a tunnel: rock below, high-side, and above, but nothing preventing the bus from going low-side, over the cliff to the river below. There are many switch-backs and the road from a distance looks like a pencil-line drawn along the side of the cliff. There is little vegetation and the geology screams at you as you look at several thousand feet of rockbed in the opposing cliff wall. Beyond the immediate cliff walls are high Himalaya peaks covered with snow.
In Kaza I hope to catch up on my email and watch the semi-finals of the World Cup tonight and tomorrow. I was able to watch only two other nights the past two weeks because of unavailability of ESPN in the small towns in which I have been. So I missed all the giants get knocked out: Brazil, Argentina, and England. Tonight I need to stay awake for the 12:30 AM start, which I know is difficult for me. But I resolve to rise to the occasion.
The last two nights I spent in Tabo, about 40 kilometers and a 3-hour slow bus ride from here. Tabo is the home of the Tabo Gompa, a world heritage site. Tabo Gompa is a Buddhist monastery built over 1000 years ago in 996 AD. It has been visited several times by the Dalai Lama. He plans to retire there when he finishes active work.
http://www.stirn-vanham.com/P
http://www.aarogya.com/tabo/m
If you saw the place you would find it an interesting place to retire. It is in the center of the dry Spiti Valley. It is a two-hour drive over rough roads to the next town. It is very cold eight months of the year. It has a community of monks living there and a school for children. I found it a very peaceful place to stay. I stayed in the guesthouse run by the monastery. It has a small library with a comprehensive collection of books about Buddhism and the Dalai Lama and Tibet. The old monastery also has irreplaceable frescos and statues of the Buddha in the temples of the complex, which look like a group of adobe houses from the outside.
I also attended a 6am puja with the monks in the monastery, which consisted of about twenty minutes of chanting mantras and forty minutes of silence. It was so calming that afterward I went back to bed for two hours.
Tomorrow is the Dalai Lama's birthday. He resides in McLeod Ganj near Daramsala, which is further west in this state of Himachal Pradesh. This is where the provisional government of Tibet resides as was allowed by the Indian government several decades ago after the Dalai Lama and many Tibetans fled Tibet due to the Chinese takeover. Here in Kaza there should be some celebrations such as dancing tomorrow on his birthday. I believe he will be 72.
The previous three nights I was in a small town called Nako even further east of here. Nako is perched high on the wall of the valley. To the west is a great view of the Himalayan mountains. To the east, if one were to climb high over the valley wall, one would be in Tibet. I'm told that through the pass just to the south, one or two Tibet refugees a day cross the border into India. To counteract the presence of Chinese military troops across the border in Iran, there is a visible presence of Indian troops and military bases. They are called the Indo-Tibetan Border Police Force. Because this is a controlled area, I was required to apply for an Inner-Line Permit. This allowed me to travel up the lower end of the Spiti Valley near the Tibetan border. There were two checkpoints in the Inner-Line zone, where all of the foreigners had to get off the local bus and show our permits and have our information recorded in a log. If for some reason we were deemed undesirable, the police could have denied our desire to continue and sent us back.
I received the Inner-Line Permit in Rekong Peo, which is the administrative town for the Kinnaur Valley. I stayed in the town of Kalpa, 600 meters above Rekong Peo. These places, like Kaza now, were large enough to have ESPN on the cable and poor internet service. Rekong Peo is where I wrote the previous rushed blog entry.
Kinnaur is a valley greener than Spiti, but with the same dramatic landscape. I walked through farms and pine forests above Kalpa to get a good view of Kinnaur Kailash, a massive mountain across the valley.
Some Indians make a difficult religious trek circumscribing Kinnaur Kailash. When they do, they end up in Chitkul, a tiny town at the far upper end of the Sangla (or Baspa) Valley. This town gave me a feel for the local Kinnaur culture. Because these valleys were very isolated before Lord Governor Dalhousie of India decided to build the Indo-Tibetan highway in the mid-1800s, the people of the valleys of Himachal Pradesh had there own distinctive look, culture, and language. In Chitkul this was evident in their dress: flannel caps with a thick green velvet band and wool suitjackets. (I assume these came about after European influence.) They also looked different than the people of Kullu and Spiti Valleys, with long noses and faces. Very little English was spoken there. I believe tourists showing up there is a relatively new thing, as mostly I was stared at or ignored as something alien. There seemed to be a wedding going on everyday, with a caravan of cars of the groom coming from the neighboring village to pick up the bride and bring her back.
There are only a handful of tourists going through Kinnaur and Spiti. They are mostly tourists who have some time on their hands, because it takes a long time to journey between towns on rough roads. The choice is either local bus or hired jeep, both equally harrowing. The towns, especially the smaller ones, have been especially pleasant and peaceful to stay in, and the temptation has always been to stay another night.
The valleys are changing quickly. I am glad I have had the opportunity to see them now. The Indian government is building like crazy: damming the wild rivers in multiple places, blasting the cliff walls to build more roads, and putting up power lines. In the villages, the traditional stacked stone and timber houses are being overshadowed by quickly-built concrete guesthouses. The attitude seems to be build, build, build, with little thought to the impact on the environment or the people. I spoke with an engineer with the electrical power agency in Kinnaur, who said that out of one thousand Nepalese working on putting up power line towers, two hundred have died doing this dangerous work. I just hate to see a beautiful place get ruined.
Since there are only two ways to visit these valleys, clockwise or counter-clockwise, I have been seeing the same travellers from town to town. Most are Israeli, as they have a lot of time on their hands to see a place such as this. It's a great way to travel, as we end up eating together at night, staying in the same guesthouses, and figuring out how to get to the next town.
Well, there are a number of things to see near Kaza, including the Ki Gompa, Dhankar Gompa, and the Pin Valley. I will balance these with seeing the finals of the World Cup. Then probably back to Manali.
I would like to go Ladakh after that, but I am realizing I will run into a visa problem. My six-month visa will expire August 7th! It's hard to believe it has almost been six months in India. I have to figure out the best way to make a run to another country such as Nepal, Thailand, or Sri Lanka, or see if I can get it extended.
Happy Fourth of July everyone, a day late. I am thinking about a glass of red wine, a steak, and fresh vegetables, somewhere in the Finger Lakes in Upstate New York!
Mark
