Beautiful Bhagsu

After two planes, one painful night train in sleeper class, two public bus rides, one rickshaw, and one torrential hailing thunderstorm that stranded me with my bags in two different cafes, I finally made it from Ho Chi Minh City to Bhagsu, India. 'Twas an excruciating and illuminating twenty four hours that had me in tears by the time I was trekking up and down the hill in futile search of Best View Guesthouse where my Berkeley friends were staying (I think when it comes to fatigue I'm not far from an infant: When I'm tired and I can't get what I want, I cry.)

In the end, however, I was blissfully pampered by cookies and chai and friendship and an exquisite traditional Odissi dance performance (featuring our very own Natalia Pinzon: she was AMAZING). Bhagsu -- the little village above McLeod Ganj, home to the Dalai Lama when he's not traveling the world -- well, it's Berkeley in the Himalayas, what can I say. I recognized the attire and the attitude immediately: Scarves and homemade jewelry and dreadlocks and yoga and wide-eyed spiritual earnestness. Although this expat hippie enclave is obviously "not India," per se, it is still utterly beautiful. At an altitude of almost nine thousand feet, the air is crisp and alpine, and despite some daily rain, is sunshiny, warm, and dry; the village of Bhagsu and its charming guesthouses climb up the rocky ravines among countless footpaths that lead further and further up the mountainsides or down into deep valleys and waterfalls. My room cost me two dollars a night (wow), smelled exactly like the mildew in the family homes in the Adirondacks (very comforting), and every morning I awoke to the moo-ing of a sweet cow named Joshi who licked our hands like a dog and provided all the rich milk for our masala tea and mango porridge.

Bhagsu residents (and by 'residents' I mean tourists; they make up the majority of the population and certainly dominate it culturally) are as draped in colorful fabrics and liberal eccentricities as any Indian-influenced Western community (I'll say it again: Berkeley!!). It's awfully predictable, but so lovable for a hybrid hippie like myself that even I got sucked in enough to extend my stay a few more days. Everyone's from everywhere -- all over Europe, South America, Israel, India -- and as is my wont, I fell in to the francophone community pretty quickly. The food is delicious, if not very Indian; most restaurants brag in that puzzling way that they specialize in "Italian, Israeli, Chinese, Thai, Tibetan, Indian, and Continental food," as if so many cuisines in one restaurant could feasibly be called "specialization" (my favorite in this regard is the one that above this lengthy list aptly calls itself "Mystery Cafe.") But Tibetan momos, or steamed dumplings, are delicious... and where else in India can you so feasibly get raw beet salads, muesli, and brown rice as a matter of course? Many of the shanti-shanti expats here have fallen in love with locals and started jewelry shops, sweets shops, or yoga and massage schools. You can take classes in everything -- from traditional Odissi dance to tabla and flute and sitar to belly dancing, silver jewelry making, chakra healing, ayurvedic medicine, every kind of yoga and meditation (including a Vipassana retreat center). Once you spend a little bit of time here (i.e. a couple days) you start crossing paths with the same people and, like at Burning Man, develop deep-rooted, serendipitous friendships with whichever creative-crazy fool you happen to link arms with for a few hours.

It's also amusing to me that the hash-smoking culture here is so widespread that the infamous "Bhagsu cake" -- described at every single restaurant as being both "the" original and best, and touted far and wide as Bhagsu's claim to fame -- is SO obviously a stoner's creation. Buttery graham flour crust, covered in a melting layer of caramel and chocolate. A cross between candy and cake; very addictive. Made for stoners, by stoners, clearly!

I had some breakfast one day with a decidedly eccentric German ex-photojournalist named Deter who's been living in India since 1981 (and claims to be "trapped" in Bhagsu). He has an endless reel of theories and philosophies, built up over the years into a grizzled, Socratic wit. His "Holy Grail": "To make all the world belly laugh. Our only salvation is in comedy." He did strike me as someone you could imagine sitting in meditative pose in a corner somewhere, a laughing Buddha, belly shaking and eyes narrowed to gleeful slits. He obviously liked to think of himself that way, imparting his age-old wisdom to young, energetic protegees like myself. (I asked him if he'd ever thought of doing stand up comedy, and he said, "Oh no, no need to stand up. One can do this lying down." Mwa, ha.)

While I want to make a living telling stories -- a.k.a. through media -- Deter made the not-too-surprising claim (especially for Bhagsu) that "no one is living in reality anymore. Only a mediated reality." Basically the Be Here Now speech, in the sense that all the television and movies and books and preconceptions and projections we layer over ourselves and heartily embrace are just blinding us to what is really here right now. Okay. But he seemed to damn even absorption in a book, which, for me, is one of the ways I find myself the most wholly present. Is it so bad to have ideas, to want to tell stories and read other stories to make sense of our lives? Am I too much of a scholar to be a yogi? But Deter, too, is clearly a scholar -- the kind of fellow who mentions a book and then brings it out of his dusty bedroom -- so I know that this was just a pontification he was trying on for size. (The man was full of pontifications and assignments: a biology graduate named Pierre was urged, in my presence, to discover ways to replicate the bioluminescence generated by fireflies and use it to light people's homes).

When I told Deter I was going next to Varanasi, he immediately launched into a speech about a man who claimed that once upon a time Om was sung "in a spiral" instead of "in a direction." Apparently this voice guru was probably dead because he would have been well over a hundred if I could find him still living in Varanasi, but in any case Deter thought it should be my "mission" to find him and solve this "mystery." He slipped a note under my door that reads, in part: "The intention is to discover and record the musical and vibrational reality between these two symbols" (referring to two different representations of Om). "I think [the voice guru's] son should be able to provide you with other contacts that should be helpful. Among these are a Kundalini teacher who claims to teach Sanskrit eight times faster than at the university" (then he draws me a little map). "I suggest you treat this as a journalistic assignment with a tight deadline to save the world for comedy."

Yes, Deter. I'm on it.

In all, Bhagsu strikes me as a very good place to escape the world and write a book for a while. It has everything I'd want for that scenario: Stunning environs, very sweet (and sweetly insane) people, an incredibly inexpensive cost of living, and ample opportunities for spectacular hiking. Such hiking!! This was most of what I fell so madly in love with: First I climbed with Wallis to Triund, a ten-thousand foot ridge that acends from the villages below to a sweeping, staggering view of the snow-capped Himalayas; later I took a five-day trek to the snowier peaks beyond.

That was all the meditative medicine my soul needed: strenuous hiking, rugged shepherds and hundreds upon hundreds of maa-ing sheep and goats, sweeping, soaring, Sound of Music-style vistas, mountain thunder, spring flowers, snowmelt rivers, silence, rock caves to sleep in, and a new-new best friend, Cecile, a German Swiss who planned to live and meditate in one of those caves for a week. We spent one dreadfully cold and sleeting night bundled up in Snowline Cafe (one of the little tarp setups that serve piping hot chai and dal and rice), and the next one in her cave, smoking little beedis and singing hippie girl harmonies to the tune of her traveling guitar.

As I came down the hill back to Bhagsu, high as a kite on endorphins, I met so many wonderful people, learned so much from each one in a matter of minutes, and was so convinced that everything made perfect sense and had a meaning and a purpose and that every step of my journey was a metaphor for the entire thing, that I knew I had found at least my version of unmediated reality. Thank you, Himalayas; I'm coming back.

From Ha Noi to Hoi An

Yes, it's the inverse both in word and deed -- thank you, Hoi An, for bringing back the love! I was on the verge for a while there; up and down, middling, mildly frustrated with the whole Vietnam experience (despite my inevitable relishing of challenges overcome). Then I made it to Hoi An -- which, of course, bears its own brand of tourist-trail frustration, but there's something relieving about it nonetheless. Maybe it's the absolutely paradisaical beaches, the darling, crumbling architecture, the delicious seafood, the ubiquity of squeaky bicycles, the relative calm. It's a small enough town that you can hear yourself think. There are actually pedestrian streets with no motorbikes (gasp). Two white-sand beaches are only a couple of kilometers away, and a one-speed bicycle can be rented for fifty cents a day (a ratty little cruiser, but still! Ten thousand dong and no deposit! If I hadn't become a regular at the restaurant across the street, I could've stolen that thing, incognito). In Hoi An, I was able take the time and the personal space to pause, absorb and breathe, which I've decided is my favorite kind of travel: finding a smallish town to stay in for at little while, to go a bit deeper, instead of skimming the surface of too many "must-sees," constantly packing and repacking the bag and spending the whole vacation on a bus.

Hoi An's Old Town, made of relatively intact centuries-old buildings, bridges, and temples that blend Japanese, Chinese, and Vietnamese architecture and culture through the ages, is classified as a World Heritage site. Only recently a tiny fishing village with the benefit of these ancient treasures, it's now, of course, another buy-something tourist haven, bearing myriad tailored silk shops (yup, everyone and their mother owns a tailor shop in Hoi An. I never cease to be amazed by this kind of business model: They're succeeding; if we do the exact same thing, then clearly we will too. And of course the second I descended from a sixteen-hour bus in the broiling heat with a big backpack, I was accosted by a micromachine-talking tailor who shoved her business cards in my face and prattled on after my retreating figure that her shop was far better than all the others and if I was staying at the Dai Long Hotel then I'd better be careful since those swindlers were going to convince me I should buy from them... sound familiar? Jesus.) Lovely clothes all around, but it was too deathly hot to even think about entering one, in part because most advertised smart little European jackets (?!), and mostly because, what can I say, I was dog tired of being ripped off.

Despite what I'd grown to believe was a Vietnamese inevitability (is it because they were once communist and are still ruled in part by that ideology that they are all so aggressively capitalist? Like a kid who's been refused sweets, who's always been told to share?), Hoi An is inexpressibly charming. Soft music croons through the motor-less paths of the old town center; silk and Japanese lanterns flow and twinkle; old houses hung with vines and creeping mold bear mother-of-pearl-plated mahogany furniture and exquisite China teasets; dozens of art galleries with gorgeous paintings face dimly lit cafes with delicious seafood and cheap beer and fruit juices galore, all lining a lazy brown river strewn with fishing boats.

To further this relaxed, self-pampering charm, I also took an overnight trip to Cham Island, a.k.a. Tropical Paradise, a jungle-rock-white-sand oasis with just two tiny fishing villages about 10km off the Hoi An coast. Though I thought I'd just be snorkeling, I ended up scuba diving for the first time in my life via a "discovery dive," probably something that would be totally illegal in the U.S. but got by for about 20 bucks in Vietnam: a quickie forty-minute tutorial and then all right, boys and girls, let's put on the gear and start breathing underwater. Absolutely petrifying, but glorious, and not that hard after all -- scuba diving is like meditating because it's all about breath. Yes, you're breathing underwater, and if you don't continue to believe that you can you're done for (rule # 1 of scuba diving: breathe, breathe, breathe). And so your breath is slow and concentrated and loud in your ears and in your being, and as you peer at enormous starfish and urchins and clams, you breathe, and breathe, in and out, and in and out, as steady as you possibly can under the circumstances. I gained so much gumption just from the experience (as our French instructor told us afterwards as we tremblingly peeled off our wetsuits, "It is lot of emotions, yes?") that I officially added "scuba certification" to the list of life goals.

Also, speaking of gumption, despite my deep-seated aversion to motorbikes I climbed right into the lion's mouth and let myself be convinced to daytrip from Hoi An with quaking arms wrapped round the waist of a fifty-year-old Vietnamese motorbike tour guide from Danang. He was a very good driver, and now, I must admit, I kind of love riding on motorbikes... Let me just be cliche for a moment and say "What a great way to see the 'real' Vietnam!" The sights I saw that day were breathtaking -- Ba Na Hills (a little Swiss-built skytrain up and up and up over lustrous jungle to a misty ridge and an enormous buddha), Monkey Island (a tangle of morning glories and another snow-white buddha presiding over the blinding blue sea), and the Marble Mountains (temples carved into limestone cliffs that were once islands when the whole of Danang was a mess of coral and blue starfish). And, another cliche, but Uyen, my tour guide, seemed the first genuinely kind and straightforward Vietnamese man I'd met. Well, okay, until he started to pick me flowers and say things like (I quote), "Sara, you so tender. If you were my girl, I take care of you all the time." Ugh. Still, he remained harmless, and thanks to Uyen I learned a lot about Vietnamese language and culture, grew to appreciate motorbikes (a huge step... perhaps in the wrong direction, but hey, I'm still in one piece), and had by far the best pho of my life (delectable Vietnamese noodle soup layered with spices and greens and slices of savory meat that you eat with a spoon and chopsticks at the same time; for some reason, I just love that, and intend to replicate the use of these two tools somehow in my own cooking soon enough).

Something I find interesting is that while every place I've been in Vietnam has been on the tourist trail, and sometimes to a nauseating degree, all this has happened in the past few years. The road to Sapa was only built about five years ago, and now the nonstop screech of construction blares across the mountainsides from dawn until dusk. Likewise in Hoi An -- always one or two of its pedestrian boulevards was being dug up and improved. Beach resorts are springing up along its coasts.

Where does Vietnam get the money, I wonder? I asked Uyen, and he said the government, and from family members working abroad and sending money home. But it seems like it must be more than that. If France is one big cigarette, Vietnam is one big construction site. It's really incredible. I'd be interested (and I'm sure saddened) to return to some of these spots a year from now and gasp at how much it's changed.

One more note on the Vietnamese tourist trail: when I stayed overnight on Cham Island, an Italian expat named Ivan who works with the Italian-run Cham Island Diving Center told us that "when you go where there are no tourists, you know that this is military country." Apparently he's been touring and working in Vietnam for years, and as an example of what he meant, he explained that once when he was riding his motorbike through the countryside and pulled up to a random town and entered a random hotel to spend the night, they told him he couldn't stay there since they weren't allowed to play host to foreigners. If he really wanted to stay the night, he'd have to go to the police and fill out reams of paperwork and subject himself hours of tortuous questioning with dubious results.

I'd have to do a lot more research about contemporary Vietnamese history to begin to understand this, but this man's tale gave me a feeling of deep relief: I wasn't just an incompetent traveler... Vietnam really does aggressively regulate its tourists' experience! It's hard to travel here for everyone, even for Ivan, who's had three years, while I had only three weeks. Phew.

Apologies for the delay....

Life (and India) got in the way. Tossing up a backlog of posts from the comfort of my sister's Yorkshire home...