A Study in Starch

Tirthan Valley, Day 3 (October 11, 2014)

The next day we drove to the village of Gushaini and then walked the 8 kilometer (5 mile) uphill trail to the entrance of Great Himalaya National Park.  We didn’t intend to do a 10-mile roundtrip walk in one day but we decided we’d go as far as we could.   We encountered quite a few villagers walking down the path.  It turns out that there are a fair few villages along the trail and many of the residents do the trail daily from their homes to the main village of Gushaini. The architecture is fairly consistent here: a rectangular two-level structure, with the bottom floor used for storage and the top floor being an enclosed veranda wrapping around the sleeping rooms. 

Villagers on the way down the hill

Trail to entrance of Great Himalayan National Park

View of the river from the trail

Local architecture of village home.  Notice corn drying on roof

Bird-spotting

View from the trail

About 2 miles up the trail

Poor tired donkeys carrying sand up the hill for construction

Marina kept marveling at the fact that all building materials are brought up the hill, mostly by poor tired little donkeys.  Gautam had told us that he had seen a villager drag a log that was about a foot in diameter and 17 feet long up the hill.  The mountain people were tough, he said, and we had seen that ourselves.  Women bent forward carried huge loads of grass on their backs.  I thought of the old woman we had seen at the Golden Temple who couldn’t stand up, whose back was bent forward forever, and who could only see the ground below her.  A lifetime of carrying heavy loads would have done this.  How many others were destined for this?  Arguably, even the poorest person in Europe is much better off financially than the poorest person in India.  Europe has a large social net to catch those less fortunate; here there’s very little social welfare.  How is it that some people have the good fortune to be born in Europe or America and others end up at the bottom rung of the social ladder in India or China?  Is it simply luck?  I don’t believe, as the Hindus do, that one’s current life is determined by the bad karma of a past life.  That’s too simplistic, too easy a way to dismiss the misfortunes of millions, and probably an explanation derived by powerful priests and kings to keep the man on the street from striving to improve his lot.  It’s fashionable in certain spiritual circles to believe that the soul chooses its life before being born, chooses its gender, parents, and many traumatic experiences.  I’m not sure if I believe that either.  It’s more empowering than the Hindu belief (or for that matter the Christian notion of original sin) but it still seems too easy an explanation to dismiss problematic and thorny situations, and still has an element of holding a person responsible for being born into a bad situation.  Maybe we need to find a reason other than pure chance for winning the lottery of life to relieve our own guilt.   How else to justify to ourselves how some of us got so lucky?      

These and other thoughts occupied me as we walked the trail.  We were expecting to see a lot of birds and butterflies, but apparently, in India, even the birds get a late start to the day, and we didn’t see many of them until later in the afternoon on our walk back.   We didn’t have a pedometer with us so we couldn’t tell exactly, but after my legs told me that we had done approximately 3 miles, mostly uphill, we stopped in the middle of the path, sat down on a shaded rock, and ate our packed lunch.  We humans sure do eat a lot of starch, probably because it’s cheap and easy.  In America, you can have potato starch with your wheat starch (burger with fries), and in India, you can have the same (potato vegetable with wheat tortilla).   As I write this, I’m on the plane, and in the airport as well as on the plane, every meal option is primarily a starch: sandwiches, pasta, rice and veg.  It’s no wonder so many of us have the shape of potatoes. 

 

After our starchy lunch, we headed back to the lodge and Marina tried her hand at fly-fishing again while I watched the evening soap opera of birds at the river through my binoculars.  They chased each other around, guarding territory, they took baths, they fed on insects.  Remarkable.  The naked and untrained eye has no idea of the high drama going on in nature all the time.  

Rock 'n' Roll Quiz

Cross-Country Trip, Day 4

Sedona, Day 2

We started our first (and last) full day in Sedona with a 3.7 mile hike.  There are lots of hiking trails to choose from and we picked the one right outside our back door.   The trail was narrow, the earth red and the views spectacular.

The earth and rocks here are a beautiful deep red from the iron oxide and they produce a deep feeling of happiness.  Oh, sorry, no, that was the ice cream.  (Kidding.  I don't eat ice cream anymore.) 

After the walk, we made our way into town and wandered around Tlaquepaque, a little shopping village with archways, stone streets, and plazas that are reminiscent of old Europe.  

We meandered into the art galleries and gift shops to admire beautiful sculptures of bronze, wood and clay, most of which I didn't photograph because (a) it wasn't allowed and (b) I was too busy looking at it.   Here's one I managed to get:

Native Women in Clay

I don't how these wonderful artists pay the rent because I didn't see anyone buying anything except in the gift shops selling practical items like these signs.

We ended up at the Amitabha Stupa and Peace Park where Buddhist monks were chanting and conducting evening prayers, and Marina decided to build her own mini-stupa.

She became obsessed and couldn't stop building them and every time I turned around, she was building another one.   

One of Marina's many stupas

 
Our final stop of the day was the ChocolaTree for a cup of the nano-green tea and some more cardamom rose chocolate.  The silver-haired man behind the register recognized us from the previous night.  He poured the tea and put the tiny little cardamom rose chocolates in a waxed bag.  He offered us a free chocolate if we could guess the name of the band playing the song on the radio.  It was a familiar one from the '60s, used in a lot of movies.

"I'll give you a hint," he said.  It's the only rock and roll band with the same name as a chocolate."  Hershey's?  Mars?  M&M?  Milky Way?

The song continued, we sang the chorus ("me and you and you and me, no matter how they toss the dice, it had to be, the only one for me is you and you for me, so happy together, so happy together, how is the weather, so happy together") and still the name wouldn't come.

"They had a lot of hits after this," the man said.  We went through every '60s band we could think of: the Monkees, the Mamas and the Papas, the Carpenters, but none of them were chocolates.

He put another piece of chocolate on the counter.  It was the same size and shape as a Reese's peanut butter cup but made, he said, from the "finest cacao in the world."  The only ingredients were cacao, almonds and agave.  We decided to take two, and they sat on the counter waiting for us to guess the band's name.  Finally, we gave up.

"The Turtles," he said.

The Turtles?  We would have been there all night.

Then another classic rock'n'roll song started playing, and he said, "I like you guys so I'm going to give you another chance."

"Pink Floyd," I said.

"No, it's the Rolling Stones," Marina said.

"Correct," the man said.  "But name the drummer."

"Brian Jones," Marina said.  "He was one of the original members."

"Yes, but he wasn't the drummer."

"Let's see, there were three original members," Marina said.  "Mick, Keith and Brian.  Who was the fourth?"

"No idea," I said.

A line had started to form and he helped the customer behind us.  When he disappeared behind a back counter, Marina turned to me and said, "Quick, look it up on your phone."

"I'm not doing that! That's cheating!  Plus what if he comes back and sees me doing it?"  Two seconds later, the man reappeared.

"Bill!  It's Bill something," Marina said.  "His last name starts with W.  Bill Wyman."

The man behind the counter smiled knowingly.  I started to wonder if there was some sort of spiritual meaning to this exercise or whether this was the way white people bonded.  We were still standing at the counter with the chocolate in front of us and I just wanted us to pay for it and leave.

"You're on the right track," he said.  "It starts with W."

"White.  Wyeth. Wightman. Wyatt."

"How much is the chocolate?  Can you just ring us up?"  I said.

"You're getting confused by the first name. It's not Bill."

"It's not?  It's not Bill Wyatt?"

The man dispensed various liquids into a blender for the customers behind us.  "I'm going to give it to you because you're so close.  It's Charlie Watts."

"That's close to Bill Wyatt?" I said.

He shrugged, rang up $3 for one of the cacao cups and gave us the other for free.  That's right.  $3 for a chocolate the size of a single Reese's cup.  The chocolate was strong and bitter, and I'm glad we only had to pay for one.  

As we got into the truck, Marina said, "What does turtle have to do with chocolate?"

Sunset in Sedona

Mural outside ChocolaTree