The Long Transit

McCleod Ganj. I never really thought of coming here, but it's fairly convenient to the mountains of Ladakh in northern India, and there is an airport of sorts nearby. I had no interest in hassling with Delhi, so better to just hide in the hermetically sealed environment of Indira Gandhi Internatinoal Airport and catch out on the next flight full of monks.

My flight from San Francisco was painless, other than the fact that it was long. Flying in over Hong Kong for my transfer to the second leg made me nostalgic for the place - I haven't been there since 2005 (which incidentally was the last entry in this blog). It still looked great from the air, the sea surface ruptured by a host of islands reaching skyward at the mouth of the Pearl River, dozens of small uninhabited ones, and several larger ones, including the main island of Hong Kong, discernible by the skyline, distinct even from straight above. A thin haze sat over the place, perhaps the smog from China's factory belt in Guangdong province, maybe incense lit for the suicides at Foxconn? Or maybe that's just the tropics from above, sweating and green.

On the leg to Delhi, I watched Hard Boiled (a John Woo classic cop vs. triads HK movie) and waited. The city didn't really heave into view; it materialized faintly out of the mist, smog, and dust at night. An airport is an airport anywhere, I suppose. This seemed nice and clean and the gentleman staffing the immigration post was even more perfunctory than those in the EU, and considerably less interested in me than the folks at the Department of Homeland Security. A stamp and I was in. The catch was that I had to wait for my cycling partner Martin for nine hours in the airport. Nine hours is a long time, especially after a 24 hour flight from SFO. The only hint that this was India was the fact that the airport was overstaffed (human labor is cheap here); the piece of polished floor I called home was buffed no fewer than eight times.

A group of Iranians came and sat down next to me, conversing away in Farsi, so I stretched my brain a little and picked out the words I knew. After a while, I asked them in Farsi if they were Iranian (I knew they were, but it's an icebreaker), and we chatted (primarily in English - my Farsi is limited to the basics, some food vocabulary, and the word for window). In the end, I was offered, politely refused twice, and eventually accepted a roll of lavashak (a crepe made of pureed and dried fruit). I watched groups of tourists, returning emigrants, and a shift change from the military guards on duty, fighting sleep off as best I could. Finally, Martin showed up, and we looked for the domestic airline counters.

"They are in another terminal. Take a bus."

Hardly hermetically sealed, this airport.

The buses plying the road between the international and domestic terminals are far from modern, a good indication that even at the airport, the "bright shining India" of the brochures is still down at heels. The overhang for ground transportation stank of diesel, and it was miserably humid and smoggy. On the road, we jostled with bicycles, mopeds, motor rickshaws, and lots of vehicular traffic on our way to the domestic terminal. Outside, the fecund tropics conspired to pull down whatever people have built. Mud and water pooled in ditches, vines washed over old walls and derelict buildings like a tidal wave, ready to overwhelm them, break them down, and then recede into a sea of green. A few dozen cows picked their way through the thickets and trash as we drove over rumble strips and make staccato movements toward our exit. We were stuck in traffic for fifteen minutes. I have a vague recollection of JFK airport being like this in the 80s, the same bus, the same traffic jam, but that's been a while.

At the counter for Kingfisher Airlines, we showed up with our luggage three hours before the flight.

"A bicycle?" the man behind the counter asked. "I think you have 80/20 - eighty percent no chance, twenty percent chance. It is a small plane, you know?"

I suggested that they tie them to the roof. He stoically said it was not possible.

"How about one on each wing to balance it out?"

"No, that isn't possible either." He looked at me with a straight face.

"I'm kidding," I offered.

"Ah." He laughed; a smile washed over his face. "You can't be sure until you are boarding the plane. You have to check there."

So we waited and ate, I a masala dosa, Martin something from KFC. A few backpackers were around in the waiting area, charging smartphones, Skyping, typing on netbooks. I felt old fashioned; I had a headlamp and that was about as modern as I got (outside of some climbing/camping gear). Martin is considerably more up-to-date, complete with charger, two phones, a netbook, and other things I don't know about yet. Call me outdated, but travel doesn't really feel like travel without a little bit of disconnection from home.

We flew in a prop plane to Gunar, which is the airport for Dharmsala, which is itself some 9km distant from McCleod Ganj. I didn't want to take a cab, but Martin was tired and his bicycle needed more reassembly than mine, so we hired a tazi. We wove past bullocks, children, pedestrians, and lots of men pissing on the side of the road, and then climbed relentlessly up the mountainside about 900 meters and 25 kilometers to the seat of the Tibetan Government in Exile, past tea estates and verdant pine forests on a potholed narrow road.

The town is a strange mix of tourist ghetto and Tibetan exile community. The volume of tourists was unsettling to me, many of them the spun out seekers you find all over India, but in a very high concentration. Travellers have a penchant for "going native" in India; every other Westerner is wearing a dhoti or shalwar kameez, or something made of hemp fiber. Beards and big hair are de rigeur for men, sandals and flowy skirts for women.

Of course, the crowd might have been on account of a session of teachings by HH the Dalai Lama at Namgyal Monastery. Apparently a group of Korean Buddhists had requested an audience or discussion, and it was thrown open to everyone. So we went: why not? I filed in with all of the prostrating Westerners and took a seat. He walked by with a security entourage; the atmosphere was really charged, I have to admit. People were ecstatic as he walked by, smiling behind his big glasses and thick eyebrows. I sat in the crowd for the full two hours, just watching the people around me (I couldn't understand a word of what he said, although a large part of it was chanting sutras). Tibetans follwed along in religious texts and took notes, monks seemed to doze, and the foreigners sat around with earphones on, listening to translations in several languages broadcast at different frequencies, some slouching, some in seated yoga poses. Again on his way out, the awe of the crowd, the security detail. And then we filed out under the cool rain of the monsoon and the mumbling of a thousand ecstatics.