Salon Wanderlust | Spiritual discomfort

[Salon Wanderlust: Travel with a passion]

T A B L E_T A L K
Roughing it after 40: Boomers and their parents discuss hitting the road in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk

R E C E N T L Y

Adventures of my youth
By Louise Rafkin
Can midlife travelers recapture the carefree wanderings of old?
(06/15/98)
Suddenly last summer
By Hal LaCroix
Babes, buzzwords and biz-bonding at the Nantucket Film Fest
(06/12/98)
Letter from Jakarta: After the sky falls
By Jeff Pulice
When expats flee, foreign guys become very attractive -- and other bits of wisdom
(06/11/98)
Are we the world?
By Andrew O'Hehir
Despite our uneasy place on Planet Soccer, the United States will be one of 32 nations vying for glory as the globe's most passionately watched sporting event begins
(06/10/98)
The Internet comes to the Outback
By Simon Winchester
A 7-year-old boy's life changes forever
(06/09/98)

Browse the
Wanderlust Feature archives

SPIRITUAL DISCOMFORT . | . PAGE 1, 2, 3
Maria and I wedged ourselves -- along with six chain-smoking men -- into a 1950s-model Ambassador taxi, which blasted north along twisting mountain roads. The driver's strategy around hairpin turns was to barrel through them as quickly as possible, so as to minimize the time spent in the danger zone. (He was only egged on by poetic roadside signs like "Life's a Journey -- Let's Finish It" and "Corner Cutters Drop Dead Into Gutters.") When I dared open my eyes, though, the drive was spectacular -- terraced green valleys, rugged hills thick with birch and pine and, snaking along below us, the silver ribbon of the Bhagirathi River, one of the two strands that come together to form the Ganges. As we climbed higher and higher, snow-tipped peaks began poking up in the distance, then vanishing again, in a kind of strip-tease hint of pleasures to come.
Ten minutes after Maria and I arrived in Uttarkashi (a sudden snarl of traffic, temples and shops, lodged in a bend in the river) we met a wilderness guide drinking chai at the Belur Hotel. He was a gentle, somber man named Jai Singh, who taught at a local mountaineering school. Jai Singh informed me that the information I had gotten in Rishikesh was incorrect. (This wasn't surprising -- information, in India, is composed more of rumors than facts, and the truth must be arrived at by carefully comparing multiple versions of the same story, like scholars analyzing Biblical texts.) The road was open as far as Hirsil, 12 miles from Gangotri, he assured me. From there, we could hike to Gangotri in a single day.
Maybe I'd been drinking too much chai. In a burst of caffeinated enthusiasm, I hired him.
The next morning, I left Maria to explore the joys of a new guru, and with Jai Singh as my guide, scrambled into a bus heading north and up. We drove to where the road was blocked by an avalanche, at an altitude of about 9,000 feet. Then I hoisted my backpack and began to hike.
Aside from an occasional rock slide or avalanche, the path was clear; the climb was steady but gradual. When the pilgrimage season opened, Jai Singh explained, the road would be roaring with buses and jeeps, delivering loads of pilgrims, boom box-toting picnickers and Western backpackers. But now it was blissfully deserted. Until the paved road was built in the 1960s -- as a military response to tensions with China -- the only way to get to Gangotri from Rishikesh was on foot. I was grateful that I was getting a taste of the original flavor of this pilgrimage.
The only other pilgrims we passed were a few solitary sadhus, tramping along in ragged robes and sandals. There are millions of sadhus in India -- the wandering ascetics whose path of renunciation has been an integral part of India's social and spiritual fabric for over 3,000 years. Living on alms -- and traditionally forbidden to stay in any one place for longer than three days -- most of them wander from holy site to holy site, practicing ascetic rites and rituals designed to break their attachment to the world and bring about blissful union with God. Others live in solitude in remote mountain forests and caves. Many modern Indians complain that most of these "holy men" are simply beggars in orange robes -- what I'd come to call "pseudo sadhus." But few will risk offending a genuine saint by refusing alms.
Snowy Himalayan peaks soared ahead of us to over 20,000 feet. The slopes around us were thick with blue pine, rhododendrons, oak and horse chestnuts. We stopped at a mud shack for chai boiled over a wood fire, tasting of smoke and cardamom. As we approached Gangotri, we began to pass seedy clumps of deserted tourist bungalows, covered up to their windowsills in dirty snow banks. In a few weeks, Jai Singh told me, tourist buses would be bumper to bumper for two miles before Gangotri.
Finally, just as my ankles were starting to ache, we arrived at Gangotri itself, at 10,300 feet: a fantastically beautiful jumble of water-sculpted, caramel-colored granite, with the pale green river seething through it; and a fantastically ugly jumble of tourist hotels, growing on the banks in a giant fungus of cinder block and brick -- many of them still half built, with bristles of rebar protruding from their unfinished walls like punk hairdos. In the middle of them stood the ancient temple to the goddess Ganga, a squat stone cube painted sky blue and silver, sealed off with an iron grating until the opening ceremonies, three weeks away.
We paused below the temple at the bathing ghat marking the place where King Bhagirathi had meditated for thousands of years, begging the Ganga to descend from heaven to purify the sins of his ancestors (who had offended the gods by -- well, it's long story). As we dipped our fingertips respectfully in the icy water, we were greeted by a raisin-faced swami in an orange robe and orange slippers -- even his two remaining teeth were sort of orange. He escorted us to his rough stone shack, where he fixed us a heaping plate of rice and dahl and cup after cup of ultra-sweet chai, laced with ginger and pepper.
We spent the night in Danda Swami's shack, with snow falling outside and the wind hissing through the cracks of the wooden shutters. The carpet was burlap bags, the ceiling was a plastic tarp, the toilet was a snow bank 50 feet away. I was wildly happy. Finally, I thought smugly, I was on my way to a real adventure.
However, I wasn't yet at the true source of the Ganges. Over the centuries, the glacier has retreated from Gangotri, and now the actual spot where the water gushes forth from the ice is at Gomukh -- the "Cow's Mouth" -- another 12 miles steep climb on an unpaved trail. The trail to Gomukh was reportedly still impassable, but Jai Singh thought we might be able to make it through. He recommended that we take an exploratory day hike in that direction, to see what the conditions were like -- leaving our backpacks, food and sleeping bags in Gangotri. Our aim was to make it as far as Chirbasa, an evergreen grove in a valley halfway between Gangotri and Gomukh, before turning around and returning to our lodge in Gangotri to spend the night.
The trail was steep and narrow, slicing along the edge of precipitous hillsides and cliffs above the Bhagirati. It was occasionally covered in snow or buried by a rock slide or avalanche, and I was glad I wasn't carrying a pack as I picked and scrambled my way along. The sleek white slopes were broken by groves of deodar and bhujbas -- a member of the beech family -- on whose papery bark the great Indian epic called the Mahabarata is said to have first been written down. The sky was pigeon-gray, the peaks toward Gomukh were draped in clouds and the wind bit at my bare neck. But the climbing kept me warm, even in my windbreaker and light cotton pants, and I figured Jai Singh would steer us back if the weather got too threatening.
Not far from Gangotri, we passed a boulder that sported the spray-painted slogan "Holy man 400 mtrs. Ask any questions" -- with a wobbly arrow pointing down toward the riverbed. "Is there a sadhu living there?" I asked.
"Summertimes only," Jai Singh answered. "Summertime, so many sadhus coming, painting their faces, wearing robes and malas, getting so much money from so many tourists. Wintertime, going to Uttarkashi, going to Delhi, living in house with central heat, watching BBC, MTV, Star TV."
"How many of the sadhus we see are real sadhus?" I asked.
He thought for a minute, then answered, "Maybe 8 percent, 10 percent maximum."
Jai Singh's idea of a day hike was a little different from mine. Chirbasa, it turned out, was a good seven miles from Gangotri, at an altitude of close to 13,000 feet. By the time we sighted its cluster of pines, dark against the snowy slopes, my legs were aching, my breath was shallow and quick and I was sincerely regretting having brought along nothing to eat but half a Cadbury chocolate bar. "Half an hour more," Jai Singh said cheerfully. "One hour, maximum --" and suddenly the wind began to blow hard down the valley, and within minutes we were wrapped in swirling snowflakes so thick we couldn't see Chirbasa at all.
We stopped and looked at each other. "Blizzard," Jai Singh announced.
"Should we turn around?"
"Going back is not so good. Can't see trail, can't see cliffs. Could be some avalanche coming."
"Then what do we do?"
"We go on to Chirbasa. There is one baba staying there in a cave. We can spend the night with him, if he is having some blankets."
A surge of anticipation wiped out my anxiety. Food, camping gear, warm clothes -- what did they matter, really, if finally, after months of pseudo-sadhus, I would meet ...
"Is this one a pretend sadhu?" I asked.
"He is the real thing," said Jai Singh.
But when we made our way into Chirbasa, slipping and stumbling on hidden boulders as the trail fast disappeared under fresh snow, it wasn't a sadhu we encountered first. Instead, the tableau that appeared amid the swirling flakes was a tall, gray-haired man in a full-body Goretex snowsuit, accompanied by a porter and a guide, sitting by a campfire next to a brilliant orange dome tent. Water was boiling and the porter was arranging chocolate cookies on a metal tray. The whole scene looked like a Christmas-season TV spot for REI.
"I do hope you're not from L.A.," the gray-haired man greeted me in a "Masterpiece Theatre" accent. "People from L.A. are such total stinkers."
"San Francisco," I clarified.
"Oh, that's a tad better. As long as you're not into any of those spiritual fads, you can stay for tea."
I looked at the cookies, the bubbling chai. I know when to keep my mouth shut. I resolved that if pressed, I would tell him I worked for Plumber's Journal.
The man's name was Menno, he said; he was an advertising producer from London. He'd been trying to make it to Gomukh, but had had to turn back; even with ice-pick, snow boots and full winter gear, the trail had proved too difficult, with neck-deep snow and the threat of landslide and avalanches. "Last night, " he lamented, "I had to wipe my bum with snow."
"This wasn't a positive experience?" I asked. "You don't want to re-create it at home, with an ice chest next to your toilet?"
"It would have been all right if it had been a two-minute crap," he said morosely. "This one went on for hours."
I rubbed the crumbs from my mouth and looked at Jai Singh. "Maybe," I suggested, "we should go looking for that baba soon?"
N E X T+P A G E | Are rats spiritual?


	T A B L E_T A L K Roughing it after 40: Boomers and their parents discuss hitting the road in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y Adventures of my youth By Louise Rafkin Can midlife travelers recapture the carefree wanderings of old? (06/15/98) Suddenly last summer By Hal LaCroix Babes, buzzwords and biz-bonding at the Nantucket Film Fest (06/12/98) Letter from Jakarta: After the sky falls By Jeff Pulice When expats flee, foreign guys become very attractive -- and other bits of wisdom (06/11/98) Are we the world? By Andrew O'Hehir Despite our uneasy place on Planet Soccer, the United States will be one of 32 nations vying for glory as the globe's most passionately watched sporting event begins (06/10/98) The Internet comes to the Outback By Simon Winchester A 7-year-old boy's life changes forever (06/09/98) Browse the Wanderlust Feature archives		SPIRITUAL DISCOMFORT . \| . PAGE 1, 2, 3 Maria and I wedged ourselves -- along with six chain-smoking men -- into a 1950s-model Ambassador taxi, which blasted north along twisting mountain roads. The driver's strategy around hairpin turns was to barrel through them as quickly as possible, so as to minimize the time spent in the danger zone. (He was only egged on by poetic roadside signs like "Life's a Journey -- Let's Finish It" and "Corner Cutters Drop Dead Into Gutters.") When I dared open my eyes, though, the drive was spectacular -- terraced green valleys, rugged hills thick with birch and pine and, snaking along below us, the silver ribbon of the Bhagirathi River, one of the two strands that come together to form the Ganges. As we climbed higher and higher, snow-tipped peaks began poking up in the distance, then vanishing again, in a kind of strip-tease hint of pleasures to come. Ten minutes after Maria and I arrived in Uttarkashi (a sudden snarl of traffic, temples and shops, lodged in a bend in the river) we met a wilderness guide drinking chai at the Belur Hotel. He was a gentle, somber man named Jai Singh, who taught at a local mountaineering school. Jai Singh informed me that the information I had gotten in Rishikesh was incorrect. (This wasn't surprising -- information, in India, is composed more of rumors than facts, and the truth must be arrived at by carefully comparing multiple versions of the same story, like scholars analyzing Biblical texts.) The road was open as far as Hirsil, 12 miles from Gangotri, he assured me. From there, we could hike to Gangotri in a single day. Maybe I'd been drinking too much chai. In a burst of caffeinated enthusiasm, I hired him. The next morning, I left Maria to explore the joys of a new guru, and with Jai Singh as my guide, scrambled into a bus heading north and up. We drove to where the road was blocked by an avalanche, at an altitude of about 9,000 feet. Then I hoisted my backpack and began to hike. Aside from an occasional rock slide or avalanche, the path was clear; the climb was steady but gradual. When the pilgrimage season opened, Jai Singh explained, the road would be roaring with buses and jeeps, delivering loads of pilgrims, boom box-toting picnickers and Western backpackers. But now it was blissfully deserted. Until the paved road was built in the 1960s -- as a military response to tensions with China -- the only way to get to Gangotri from Rishikesh was on foot. I was grateful that I was getting a taste of the original flavor of this pilgrimage. The only other pilgrims we passed were a few solitary sadhus, tramping along in ragged robes and sandals. There are millions of sadhus in India -- the wandering ascetics whose path of renunciation has been an integral part of India's social and spiritual fabric for over 3,000 years. Living on alms -- and traditionally forbidden to stay in any one place for longer than three days -- most of them wander from holy site to holy site, practicing ascetic rites and rituals designed to break their attachment to the world and bring about blissful union with God. Others live in solitude in remote mountain forests and caves. Many modern Indians complain that most of these "holy men" are simply beggars in orange robes -- what I'd come to call "pseudo sadhus." But few will risk offending a genuine saint by refusing alms. Snowy Himalayan peaks soared ahead of us to over 20,000 feet. The slopes around us were thick with blue pine, rhododendrons, oak and horse chestnuts. We stopped at a mud shack for chai boiled over a wood fire, tasting of smoke and cardamom. As we approached Gangotri, we began to pass seedy clumps of deserted tourist bungalows, covered up to their windowsills in dirty snow banks. In a few weeks, Jai Singh told me, tourist buses would be bumper to bumper for two miles before Gangotri. Finally, just as my ankles were starting to ache, we arrived at Gangotri itself, at 10,300 feet: a fantastically beautiful jumble of water-sculpted, caramel-colored granite, with the pale green river seething through it; and a fantastically ugly jumble of tourist hotels, growing on the banks in a giant fungus of cinder block and brick -- many of them still half built, with bristles of rebar protruding from their unfinished walls like punk hairdos. In the middle of them stood the ancient temple to the goddess Ganga, a squat stone cube painted sky blue and silver, sealed off with an iron grating until the opening ceremonies, three weeks away. We paused below the temple at the bathing ghat marking the place where King Bhagirathi had meditated for thousands of years, begging the Ganga to descend from heaven to purify the sins of his ancestors (who had offended the gods by -- well, it's long story). As we dipped our fingertips respectfully in the icy water, we were greeted by a raisin-faced swami in an orange robe and orange slippers -- even his two remaining teeth were sort of orange. He escorted us to his rough stone shack, where he fixed us a heaping plate of rice and dahl and cup after cup of ultra-sweet chai, laced with ginger and pepper. We spent the night in Danda Swami's shack, with snow falling outside and the wind hissing through the cracks of the wooden shutters. The carpet was burlap bags, the ceiling was a plastic tarp, the toilet was a snow bank 50 feet away. I was wildly happy. Finally, I thought smugly, I was on my way to a real adventure. However, I wasn't yet at the true source of the Ganges. Over the centuries, the glacier has retreated from Gangotri, and now the actual spot where the water gushes forth from the ice is at Gomukh -- the "Cow's Mouth" -- another 12 miles steep climb on an unpaved trail. The trail to Gomukh was reportedly still impassable, but Jai Singh thought we might be able to make it through. He recommended that we take an exploratory day hike in that direction, to see what the conditions were like -- leaving our backpacks, food and sleeping bags in Gangotri. Our aim was to make it as far as Chirbasa, an evergreen grove in a valley halfway between Gangotri and Gomukh, before turning around and returning to our lodge in Gangotri to spend the night. The trail was steep and narrow, slicing along the edge of precipitous hillsides and cliffs above the Bhagirati. It was occasionally covered in snow or buried by a rock slide or avalanche, and I was glad I wasn't carrying a pack as I picked and scrambled my way along. The sleek white slopes were broken by groves of deodar and bhujbas -- a member of the beech family -- on whose papery bark the great Indian epic called the Mahabarata is said to have first been written down. The sky was pigeon-gray, the peaks toward Gomukh were draped in clouds and the wind bit at my bare neck. But the climbing kept me warm, even in my windbreaker and light cotton pants, and I figured Jai Singh would steer us back if the weather got too threatening. Not far from Gangotri, we passed a boulder that sported the spray-painted slogan "Holy man 400 mtrs. Ask any questions" -- with a wobbly arrow pointing down toward the riverbed. "Is there a sadhu living there?" I asked. "Summertimes only," Jai Singh answered. "Summertime, so many sadhus coming, painting their faces, wearing robes and malas, getting so much money from so many tourists. Wintertime, going to Uttarkashi, going to Delhi, living in house with central heat, watching BBC, MTV, Star TV." "How many of the sadhus we see are real sadhus?" I asked. He thought for a minute, then answered, "Maybe 8 percent, 10 percent maximum." Jai Singh's idea of a day hike was a little different from mine. Chirbasa, it turned out, was a good seven miles from Gangotri, at an altitude of close to 13,000 feet. By the time we sighted its cluster of pines, dark against the snowy slopes, my legs were aching, my breath was shallow and quick and I was sincerely regretting having brought along nothing to eat but half a Cadbury chocolate bar. "Half an hour more," Jai Singh said cheerfully. "One hour, maximum --" and suddenly the wind began to blow hard down the valley, and within minutes we were wrapped in swirling snowflakes so thick we couldn't see Chirbasa at all. We stopped and looked at each other. "Blizzard," Jai Singh announced. "Should we turn around?" "Going back is not so good. Can't see trail, can't see cliffs. Could be some avalanche coming." "Then what do we do?" "We go on to Chirbasa. There is one baba staying there in a cave. We can spend the night with him, if he is having some blankets." A surge of anticipation wiped out my anxiety. Food, camping gear, warm clothes -- what did they matter, really, if finally, after months of pseudo-sadhus, I would meet ... "Is this one a pretend sadhu?" I asked. "He is the real thing," said Jai Singh. But when we made our way into Chirbasa, slipping and stumbling on hidden boulders as the trail fast disappeared under fresh snow, it wasn't a sadhu we encountered first. Instead, the tableau that appeared amid the swirling flakes was a tall, gray-haired man in a full-body Goretex snowsuit, accompanied by a porter and a guide, sitting by a campfire next to a brilliant orange dome tent. Water was boiling and the porter was arranging chocolate cookies on a metal tray. The whole scene looked like a Christmas-season TV spot for REI. "I do hope you're not from L.A.," the gray-haired man greeted me in a "Masterpiece Theatre" accent. "People from L.A. are such total stinkers." "San Francisco," I clarified. "Oh, that's a tad better. As long as you're not into any of those spiritual fads, you can stay for tea." I looked at the cookies, the bubbling chai. I know when to keep my mouth shut. I resolved that if pressed, I would tell him I worked for Plumber's Journal. The man's name was Menno, he said; he was an advertising producer from London. He'd been trying to make it to Gomukh, but had had to turn back; even with ice-pick, snow boots and full winter gear, the trail had proved too difficult, with neck-deep snow and the threat of landslide and avalanches. "Last night, " he lamented, "I had to wipe my bum with snow." "This wasn't a positive experience?" I asked. "You don't want to re-create it at home, with an ice chest next to your toilet?" "It would have been all right if it had been a two-minute crap," he said morosely. "This one went on for hours." I rubbed the crumbs from my mouth and looked at Jai Singh. "Maybe," I suggested, "we should go looking for that baba soon?" N E X T+P A G E \| Are rats spiritual?