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.
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| Villagers on the way down the hill |
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| Trail to entrance of Great Himalayan National Park |
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| View of the river from the trail |
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| Local architecture of village home. Notice corn drying on roof |
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| Bird-spotting |
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| View from the trail |
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| About 2 miles up the trail |
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| 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.
