I have now been home for a good week or so. Lots of rest, recovery, and starting to train for the AT (so so excited to get out there), and leaving for a splendid LA trip in a couple days! Excitement all around! Anyways, here is an account of the last week or two of my trip to India. Forgive the brevity.

From Delhi I took a fast train to Amritsar. The smoke in the fields that the train rode through was astounding. In some places the visibility was almost less than fifty feet. I read and dozed. I was still quite tired from the marathon, both from the lack of sleep and the exertion. Luckily my choice to ease off the gas paid off, and my soreness was mostly superficial.

Amritsar is a small city in Punjab, in the Northeast of India, about 30km from the border with Pakistan, which is another 10km from Lahore. It is the home of the holiest site in Sikhism: the Golden Temple. I only spent one night in Amritsar, but I entered the temple complex twice, taking in the energy of the thousands of pilgrims reaching their destination and the collective reverence for the place. The little I learned about Sikh culture and beliefs is beautiful and moving, with heavy emphasis placed on the value of all life and protecting our loved ones. The Golden Temple is also home to the largest free community kitchen in the world.

I also visited a museum all about the Partition of India (the largest human mass migration in history!), and I took a cooking class where I learned how to make Latcha Paratha and Khadai Paneer, as well as Paneer Lababdar, all three of which have become probably my favorite Indian dishes.

From Amritsar I took a night bus (perhaps my worst of the entire trip) into the Himalayas. I got off in the wrong place around 5am, two hours before sunrise, and took an odd series of expensive taxis to my destination of Kasol. Nestled in the middle of the Parvati Valley, Kasol is a stoner/hippie tourist town that is often used as the base for further exploration of the area. I checked in, dropped my bags, and, despite the absolute lack of sleep, spent the whole day walking up the closest slope I could find (and then back down). It is impossible to describe the level of refreshment I felt. Solitide, quietness, fresh air, and nature were things that I had not experienced in weeks, with perhaps the exception of the desert in Jaisalmer.

The most exciting thing to see in Himachal Pradesh, or at least the place that I’ve wanted to go to for the longest, was Malana. To reach Malana, one must take a taxi from a town called Jari, and get dropped off at the construction site for a huge dam. From there, one can choose to pay for the (surprise) much more expensive second leg of the taxi, or to walk for about 5 miles up a mountain. I opted to walk, mostly out of frustration with the scam, and the very quickly hitched a ride after walking a mile or so up the steep mountain road. The driver was bumping Bollywood music and offered me a toke of his Malana Cream.

Malana Cream is one of the two things that the village is famous for; it is the name of their local strain of Hash, rumored to be ultra strong and some of the highest quality in the world. The other thing that Malana is famous for is their no-touch policy. You see, the residents of Malana believe themselves to be of such a high stratum of caste that for any outsider (even if you’re from the next village down the valley) to touch anything is complete pollution. This means no touching walls, no touching people, and certainly no touching temples.

After the three mile hike into the village from the road (down to a rickety bridge crossing and then back up about a thousand feet), I entered the village and saw the no-touching signs. A minute or so later, a little kid ran up and grabbed my leg. I spring back, horrified that I was about to get fined (or worse, perhaps stoned, as I’d heard about in a click-baitey YouTube video), and looked back to see the kid’s mother smiling and shaking her head. Phew! A moment later, an old man in a woolen blazed approached me and asked if I wanted to buy some hash.

Well, when in Rome. He told me where I was allowed to sit (in a little patch of dirt and rubbish) and he squatted down about five feet away from me. We haggled for a few minutes over price, quality, and quantity, and he took out a little pocket scale to mass out the right sized ball of resin. He placed it in a little baggie and tossed it towards me, and I placed the cash down where he could reach it. In the whole exchange, we never were within a foot or two of each other. Later, when walking around the main square, I was invited to sit with a group of older guys who were passing around their chillum (a pipe used to smoke charras/ tobacco and hash). They even offered for me to take a turn smoking the pipe with them, which I obliged after they rolled the smoldering clay tube to me. It was quite a cool experience and their hospitality was genuine, but the blurry boundary of personal contact did leave me puzzled, tough not complaining.

I spent the rest of the evening in Malana enjoying the local delicacies in the company of some Indian tourists from Delhi, reading my book, and enjoying the view. At an altitude of 9000 feet, the panorama of the sunset was to die for, and I got to share it with a flock of bold sheep who seemed to think that I had something to offer them.

The next two days I spent in a small village called Tosh, again mostly relaxing. Good food, a little beer, and plenty of time walking in nature was doing wonders for my scrambled and tired mind. On one hike I met a man from Nepal called Debid, who ran a small cafe in a tiny village about 3 miles up the valley from Tosh. I wouldn’t be surprised if I was his first customer of the week, between how horribly inaccessible his cafe was and the joy with which he greeted me. We shared chai and talked about hiking and enjoyed the view.

The final chapter of my time in Himachal Pradesh was in Manali, the biggest town of the area. Again, I took it easy, with a few days hikes and lots of time spent reading and writing. The biggest highlight in Manali was that I was there during Holi, the festival of colors! The main commercial strip of the town is called Mall Road, and it was filled with roaming groups of friends playing with the colored powders, haranguing other groups, and just having a big party! I wandered around by myself, with a couple of bags of color purchased from one of the many vendors, wishing people Happy Holi, and usually getting a smear or cloud of color on me for it. It was a blast!

I discarded those completely destroyed clothes, bathed, and got ready for my last night bus of the trip, to Jaipur. There I did a little bit of final shopping, for things that I didn’t have to carry around for much longer, spent a night, and caught a bus to the Delhi Airport, where I made my tired yet triumphal exit from India. What a trip.