Hello all,

This last installment of the India journal is regrettably very late. My excuses for this are excellent and you can read them nearer the bottom of this page. For the sake of completeness, here's what I can remember of those last few days, and what it was like to get back. I've rolled my sleeves up and everything.

I left you in Srinagar, Kashmir, about to return home. We'd missed our chance to book a bus back to Delhi which had air conditioning, so we were faced with 25 hours of taking it in turns to sit by the window as the air (which steadily climbed from 25 degrees to 40 or so throughout the journey) flooded in and cooled us slightly more than the stagnant stuff in the aisle. We stopped for Chai soon after daybreak, only to discover that our exposed skin had been coated in a film of black, greasy soot overnight; despite the light overnight traffic, the air blasting across our faces and arms had been thick with pollution. My skin itched, my hair was matted and stiff, the skin behind my glasses seemed to be whiter than the rest of my face, and the water I washed myself with returned to the sink as streaks of some vile dark brown suspension on the white porcelain. All hail the catalytic converter.

We had a blow-out quite early on. If the bus had lacked doubled-up rear wheels we could have been in a lot of trouble on those windy, hilly trails, but we'd long been tired of worrying about our fate. It's a philosophy that you have to adopt on Indian roads, and I found myself wondering what spiritual influence was keeping more accidents from happening. Maybe there was something to those flashing dashboard shrines, and the wonderfully garish stickers of Gods and gurus that adorn the cabs of almost every vehicle. All illusions were shattered when we stopped in Jammu to replace the spare tyre with one pilfered from a bus graveyard there; dozens of buses were lined up waiting to be assimilated, some merely retired, others looking like they'd been picked up, chewed on and discarded by gargantuan toddlers. Besides that, the journey was quite uneventful and a bit depressing as we descended from the cool of the hills to the sweltering heat of the plains one last time. We befriended a couple of British film students along the way who were flying to China that evening for the next leg of their world tour, and offered to let them use our shower in the hotel we found when we arrived in Delhi. They filmed us playing a few songs with the ukelele and offered to send us the films when they get home so we can stick them on YouTube and you can all poke fun at whatever ridiculous traveler's garb we were sporting at the time. Enjoy the rest of your trip, you two. It was a pleasure.

We ended up spending the rest of the day with Guy and Andy, going back down to the underground bazaar to pick up three more David Beckham 'Ride the rider, side the slid' t-shirts and a pirated copy of recent bollywood release 'Namaste London'. We bade our new friends farewell in Parikrama, Delhi's revolving restaurant in the sky, where I remembered the waiter from when I'd eaten there six years previously. It takes an hour and a half to make one revolution, which I still found to be a disappointingly long time. I mean, what use is a revolving restaurant if your food doesn't gradually slide away from you across your plate?

The next day was our last in India, and we spent a good part of the afternoon making recordings. We got a good take of 'Road to Kashmir' featuring a powerful improvised bass drum which involved Joe thumping a foam mattress with a drumstick. We recorded a possible silly bonus version of 'Flies (with your compound eyes)' on the back of a cycle rickshaw as we trundled through the streets around New Delhi railway station. In addition to these original songs we recorded a couple of covers that we'd learned so Joe could practice the Ukelele, which had become anthems for us - a gorgeous song sung by Louis Armstrong and written by Irving Berlin by the name of 'The song has ended (but the melody lingers on)' and Dylan's 'Honey, just allow me one more chance'. These recordings will be a fantastic document for Joe and I, and will hopefully go some way towards giving a sense of the feel of the trip, both in the songs and the recordings, which have all been made very much 'on location'. I'll be a unique piece of work.

After a lovely evening sharing stories with my uncle and aunt over dinner at their house in the Defence Colony district of Delhi, Joe and I parted ways and I set off for the airport in a taxi. It felt peculiar to be making this short journey alone, and I was suddenly aware of the value of Joe's unfaltering companionship over the past eight weeks; through being lost after dark in Srinagar, through the extreme physical challenges of our high altitude excursions, through the maddening, sleepless journeys over mountains and deserts, through the illnesses and the bartering and the drugs and the heat, at least one of us remained cool at all times. Cheers mate.

My flight had been delayed by a couple of hours, so after I checked in I retired to a bar to smoke the rest of my cigarettes and spend the last of my rupees on Kingfisher beer. I made some interesting aquaintances in the cramped smoker's section, and I ended up swapping a few of my euros for a few hundred of their rupees so I could buy more Kingfisher, and they fed me more cigarettes. By the time I got on the plane, I was fairly plastered. Up we went; I remember eating a meal and having a nightcap to well and truly see me off.

When I woke up the next day I was 11km above Hungary, and I felt rough. It was perfect. I soon found myself stumbling through Amsterdam airport to my next flight in a bleary and confused state, having nearly lost my temper with a lady at the connecting flights desk. I don't really remember that flight at all. When I got to Manchester, the last thing on my mind was having a swift fag while I waited for the National Express to Bradford. I felt plain wrong. On the coach it became clear to me that not only was my head nursing a hangover, but my gut was nursing something altogether more sinister that I have to presume originated from the meal on the flight last night. Later I would consider this ironic and amusing, but for the time being I felt sick as a dog. I couldn't have planned it so perfectly.

The taxi home, the obligatory cuppa and then straight to bed. I tossed and turned and groaned and grumbled. My innards moved around inside me, a big self-stirring stew. Semi-delirious, I studied the geometry of my room and its contents, looking for symmetry. I tried to make sense of the baubles that hang from my ceiling over my bed. Why they had been arranged in such a way? Was there a formulaic pattern to the length of the threads each one hung from which was more effective, somehow more perfect than another? If I move my head to one side a few inches, these three would form a perfectly equilateral triangle. Hmm. More to the point, why were they there at all? I struggled with these infuriating quandries as I wallowed in my sickness, my tiredness - I'd travelled several thousand miles west, but I still had four and a half hours to conjure from thin air. And my plan was working - I felt ill and disorientated and I genuinely did not want to smoke. I have not smoked since. I thus declare the trip 'successful'.

So, I've been pretty busy since then. I've had such little time to dedicate to writing, having just returned from a fortnight in Poland with my dad, where I was introduced to members of his side of our family that I'd somehow gone 25 years without having met. I may write about that if enough people express an interest and if I can find time to scratch my face. Either side of that, I've been re-acclimatising to the familiar, finding it at least as strange as anything I've seen on my travels, and making the first steps towards resuming a more stationary existence in London some time in August.

One last thing - the album, entitled 'Horn Please! Govinder the Holy Ukelele (preparation)', is currently being complied and it'll at soon appear on myspace. We plan to make it available in imitation-fake style on CD. Maybe even cassette? We even talked about doing a two man show of the songs when we returned, and - Joe, I hope you're still up for it - I'm still game. I'll keep you all posted. While there is already a selection of the best photos to peruse on facebook*, the 'Govinder' myspace site may have more and will probably be the new permanent home for these journals when one of us gets around to putting it together. Don't hold your breath. You'll go blue.

Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed it a fraction as much as I did.

All the best,
Nick x


FIN



* If you're not a member of facebook, you can see the India photos by going here:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=36599&l=5dc34&id=664130516

...and the Poland photos by going here:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=36591&l=75485&id=664130516

Hello all,

 

Our stay in ..:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />Srinagar continued to be nothing but idyllic and the town was quiet the whole time we were there, at least in the areas we frequented. From our houseboat on Nageen lake we did hear occasional bangs in the distance. Fireworks perhaps, but during the day? And the smoke could've been from burning waste. It's the way they coincided that caught our imaginations. We lived and now I am telling the tale, so it's all good, but I'm quite sure that you'd have to be extraordinarily unlucky to be caught up in any scuffles. The abundance of military police in the town might make you feel otherwise - khaki on every street corner, patrols scouring the town every day, sandbag pill-boxes at junctions, armoured vehicles, the works. They charter entire hotels along the main tourist boulevard and deck them out with bundles of razor wire at the gate and around the walls. It feels like a city under occupation, and for the many Kashmiris who just want to get on with their lives it effectively is - the Indian army, controlled from Delhi, has national political motives behind its presence there as much as an interest in protecting the people who actually live there, many of whom would like to see Kashmir granted independence.

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Alas, as we have witnessed on so many occasions during our trip, the Indian approach to problem-solving is rather more confrontational than in the West. Take bartering with a rickshaw driver, for instance: you have to firmly employ a set of unspoken rules in order to reach a compromise or you will get screwed over almost every time. It can be a very satisfactory way of going about things, as after a good barter with a reasonable outcome both parties are happy and have earned a certain level of respect from each other. The situation in Kashmir is obviously more complicated, as the bullish nature of the antagonists is not supported by one reasonable outcome. India and Pakistan want it all, and the Kashmiris generally want neither. What a pickle.

 

I mentioned that we'd be visiting the vegetable market on Dal lake (pron. 'Dhale') in the previous episode, and it turned out to be one of the highlights of the whole trip for me. Setting off from the houseboat in our Shikhara (small paddle boat, a bit like a gondola) at 4am, we got under our blankets and registered the events of the starting day through half-sleep, lulled by each push of the paddle by Sharif the Shikhara-wallah. An hour or so later, the deep blue everything had turned into a purply grey, and the director of the morning was slowly turning up the contrast when we passed under a bridge and arrived at the market. We were in the company of about thirty other shikharas, ours conspicuous in its cheerful yellow livery, bobbing and milling around tightly in an area enclosed by a few buildings on stilts, a small island and the long grasses. The sellers had predominantly harvested their crop from the floating vegetable gardens on Dal lake itself. I've seen them, they exist; no idea how it works - clumps of soil and roots on the surface of the water, marrows, watermelons, cucumbers above, roots below. I suppose it's a natural hydroponic system, but how it all floats is a mystery to me. There's a hubbub, a fight breaks out between two traders, quickly resolved. We're offered peas, coriander, flowers and seeds, and we're reminded how long it's been since we last cooked ourselves a meal.

 

We moor by one of the buildings, and go into a bakery to buy a little breakfast. I quickly have to duck, as the suffocating heat and smoke from the tandoor (clay oven) swims around the top of the room. They're making a batch of half-leaven round breads and we buy one each, fresh from the oven, before heading outside. Then we hear energetic Kashmiri music emanating from a small marquee on the island, and Sharif gets very excited. "You are very lucky!" he says, leading us inside. We go in - thirty or forty people sit around a band, complete with harmonium, clay-pot drum, percussion and a number of singers, all playing into one or two microphones which run through a single straining speaker. They even have a basic echo effect on the PA, it sounded just like the recordings you hear in the town. I made my own, of course - if anyone would like to hear it, let me know - it's totally stomping, not least for 5:30am. We're present at a wedding party, and while we're something of a curiosity, everyone was very welcoming. A group of four rather pretty Kashmiri girls beckoned me to come and sit with them near the front. They were quite forthcoming, apparently they found my Western complexion attractive, or at least intriguing. I had been told how to count to ten in Kashmiri beforehand, but it wasn't fresh in my mind so chatting them up was going to be particularly difficult. I made my excuses. It was all too familiar.

 

Later that day we moved to Jamaica houseboat on Dal lake, similarly luxurious and far cheaper, before moving again to Julliet (sic), a smaller, cheaper, more rickety and altogether more charming vessel for the last two nights. Each journey down the the walkway from the mooring point at the front of Jamaica to Julliet's door could've ended in a travesty, the rotten planks bending under our weight, and I think we were staying in the family's rooms; photos, bookshelves and personal articles in the cabinets, and a tapestry of Mecca on the same wall of each room. We sat on their kitchen floor and ate with them those nights, which was made particularly memorable thanks to a run-in we had with a rat which ended with the lady of the house whacking the pans with a great plank to scare it off. For a moment, she was the vision of an Indian Wilma Flintstone. She cooked us a small 'waswan', a Kashmiri feast which can consist of two dozen dishes or more. Ours had about four or five, and our hosts gladly finished what we couldn't eat. Kashmiris really know how to cook. Whatever we had, be it sweets, standard Indian vegetarian dishes or the traditional local meat preparations with their characteristically rich and thin gravies, each meal presented a perfect combination of virtuosic subtlety and outright quantity. Wicked.

 

Another aural phenomenon that I was delighted to record in Srinagar was the Azan (call to prayer) at sunset. The town is predominantly Muslim so there are mosques everywhere, and each evening at 7:45 they would all kick off with their impassioned songs, all singing in different keys in a fantastic holy din. Sat on top of Jamaica I was as high up as anything else on the lake, and so there was nothing to obstruct the passage of each voice through the air; they came from every direction, some feint, some clear, the air a sea of song. It's as though I had suddenly acquired the ability to listen to radio signals, and every channel was audible simultaneously. Again, if you'd like to hear it, it'll soon be in my archive if you're curious.

 

The difficult political situation in Kashmir has damaged its tourist trade to such a great extent that we were plagued by our hosts to bring a party of Westerners back with us - every conversation seemed to end with a discussion about it. So I need fifteen of you to go. Exactly fifteen, they didn't seem interested in any more or fewer. I imagine this might not happen, but suffice to say that it's a great shame that no one's going there any more - we saw at most 20 westerners there throughout our five day stay - as it truly must be one of our planet's great treasures, having so much to offer in terms of beauty, hospitality, cuisine, climate, wildlife, landscape, culture... The best that India has to offer, rolled into one troubled little corner. We were sad to leave that morning, both the lake and Mehraj the Shikhara-wallah who had been our loyal chauffeur on Dal lake; over the hours we'd spent in his boat we conquered our language barriers sufficiently to have a good laugh with him. We exchanged shirts. I'm wearing it now, it's white with a turquoise and blue floral pattern. I gave him the ludicrous 'ride the riders side the slid' David Beckham t-shirt in return, which probably meant more to me than it did to him.

 

-

 

I'll document the journey back to Delhi and my return to Britain in a final installment in a few days time - I think there's enough to digest here already, not too much I hope! But I'm home safe and sound, and currently writing from Edinburgh where I'll be for a few days before returning to Bradford and jetting off to Poland on the 24th. I hope to see some of you before then, and as always it's great to hear from any of you.

 

All the best,

Nick

Hello friends,

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The journey to Leh, and the journey to where we are now (wait for it, wait for it) are worth a full session of internet cafe time in themselves, by far the two most extreme and exhillarating journeys I have endured. The jeep picked us up in Vashisht at 2am, and when we arrived in Leh we had crossed the second highest motorable pass in the world. (The highest is to the Nebru valley, also in Ladakh.) We stopped at Tanglang-La ('La' means 'pass'), enveloped in a blizzard, where there's a small checkpoint, a few oil drums, a bhuddist gompa and a yellow sign Reading 'Tanglang-La, Alt. 17825ft - over 5300m. That's just shy of half the altitude that a passenger jet cruises at. Not bad for a city boy. I casually had a cigarette beside the jeep, and sure enough, I had to work hard to keep the blighter lit. Joe's words were, 'You must be fucking joking.' All in the name of science, I say.

 

The rest of the journey took us across desert plains, a dramatic sandstone passage that was how I imagine the grand canyon might look if not for being topped with the dregs of the winter's snowfall, and up a glacial valley that started out grand and alpine, and ended up monstrous, sheer and utterly himalayan. The pass is closed for most of the year due to snowfall, and the road is carved through the snow by bulldozers. It's summin' else.

 

Leh took some getting used to - even after our high altitude journey and the treks we've been on, living at 3500m with 30% less oxygen at our disposal was a challenge, and short climbs left us breathless and pathetic. Still, the surroundings are phenomenal. Climbing up to the Shanti Stupa, a large domed monument for peace opened by the Dalai Lama in 1985, the town appears an oasis of lush green poplar trees amidst barren rock hills and mountains, distinct enough from each other to catch the light in a multitude of ways. There's not too much to do in the town itself - it's a good place to trek from, but we've had our fill of that - so we spent a lot of time wandering around and soaking up the unique atmosphere there; heavily bhuddist, there's gompas and monasteries wherever you look, and it's close enough to Kashmir that many restaurants offer this particularly rich and subtle type of cuisine. We played football with the locals on the polo ground, for as long as our poor lungs would let us; explored the labyrinthine old town, honest and rural in its nature; visited the palace overlooking the town, in its poor repair it had a 'raiders of the lost ark' feel to it, and despite having stood for hundreds of years and the recent efforts to renovate it, it felt as though it could have crumbled at any moment. But Leh's landscape is its main attraction, and having seen that we were itching to move on.

 

I realise that not all who read this will be entirely happy about what I'm about to say, and I hope I'm not causing any sleepless nights for family and close friends, but after several weeks of very serious deliberation we decided to go to Srinagar, the capital of Kashmir, as our last stop before returning to Delhi. We've done our research very thoroughly, speaking to fellow travelers, locals, reading papers, checking official websites, and paying no attention whatsoever to anyone who might make money out of our decision to go there or not. While there were problems last year, relations between ..:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />India and Pakistan seem to have eased considerably since then, and all seems quiet, so we took the plunge.

 

We arrived yesterday morning after an almost sleepless overnight jeep ride, towards the end of which we noticed our driver's eyes drooping as we descended winding roads carved into the side of the mountains, which was truly alarming. But we arrived safe and sound, and our fellow passengers - almost all of whom were Kashmiris – were an exceptionally friendly bunch and would've made our journey quite enjoyable if not for the crushing discomfort of being hurled around in a bouncing tin can for fifteen hours.

 

The Kashmiris are very proud of their homeland, and rightfully so – their claims that Kashmir is the closest thing to a heaven on earth are not unreasonable. After the final mountain pass, we descended into the most stunningly beautiful valley; extraordinarily lush, the Indus river gleaming like a great flowing sapphire and nourished by the remains of glaciers which it occasionally passes beneath, the still water of the rice paddies at the base perfectly mirroring the hills above.

 

Last night and tonight we are staying on a houseboat on Nageen lake which we booked through a reputable agent in Leh. Lounging luxuriously on the veranda, we can perouse the astonishing wildlife of the lake – a multitude of eagles circle and swoop to the surface to prey on the many fish, clearly visible through the surprisingly clean water as they weave through the abundant aquatic plantlife. Dragonflies glide by every now and again – you frequently see them mating as they fly, leading us to believe that they must be at it like rabbits. The floating shop moors itself beside our abode several times a day, and we decline the offers of the good natured silver and papier-mache salesmen who pass by. We've already done our shopping for the trip.

 

Nageen lake is the more peaceful little sister of the famous Dal lake, where today we found our accomodation for the following two or three nights. It's literally a buoyant town – we glided down a commercial 'street' with all the usual amenities in our shikhara (a small, pointy passenger boat, propelled by one paddle) and tomorrow we're getting up before sunrise to visit the vegetable market there. Is there anywhere else quite like this?

 

We will return to Delhi on a direct 24 hour bus leaving on Sunday morning, the most efficient means of getting back in time for our flights home early on Wednesday morning. I hope I have not worried anyone too much - while there is an overpowering and slightly unnerving military prescence, we are being made very welcome by our hosts and the general public. Even the armed military policemen who grace every street are friendly, and we are forced to remember that they are there for our protection. The Kashmiris are very sad about the poor reputation that their little slice of heaven on earth is marked with, and resent the squabble that has taken place over their land. Relations between India and Pakistan are better now than they have been since before the trouble began, having improved considerably since a year ago, so there should be nothing to worry about. And if anything does go wrong, we'll probably be safe on a houseboat anyway. We're not concerned, but we're keeping alert as we make our way around, and any primary worriers can be sure that I'll be in touch as soon as we get back to Delhi on monday to let you know we're safe.

 

Hope you're all well and dandy, and thanks again to all those who are making checking my inbox such a pleasure. Take care now.

 

All the very best,

Nick x

Hello,

We've been exploring the Kullu valley for a week and a bit now. It's been a relief to settle in one area and relax for a short while after the gruelling schedule we set ourselves earlier in our trip. We covered a lot of ground - about 2000 miles, maybe - and it was knackering.

Having said that, Joe and I returned from a trek to a frozen lake in the crater of a dead volcano yesterday. It was a three day trip - on the first day we climbed up to the snowline (about 3700m) and camped there, the next day we climbed up to the lake (4200m) and back down to another campsite on the snowline, and then on to Vashisht on the third day in a final assault on our poor defenceless knees. Walking above the snowline was an entirely new game for me. We had to make some steep climbs and hairy traverses on the powdery slopes, and it's very easy to lose your footing - you have to jam your foot right into the snow to get a purchase. I slipped traversing a 35 degree slope, and it's very hard to stop sliding. I was clawing at the snow and trying to dig my heels in to slow my descent, to no avail; digging my walking stick into the ground halted me in a couple of meters, and then making back those few precious meters of progress, inch by inch. Trudge, trudge. It was truly taxing. On the other hand, when you're wearing sturdy waterproofs, top and bottom, and you're faced with a climb down a snowy slope, you've got to go on your arse. I woke up yesterday morning to a fresh dusting of snow outside the tent, thick fog... thinking about it, we must have been inside the cloud which bore the snow. And there's some amazing flora and fauna up there, grassy slopes alive with small, bright flowers - white, yellow and vibrant reds and pinks - and vultures circling above us, which was a tad unnerving.

The rest of the time, little Vashisht has been our delightful host, a pearl in the oyster that is the Kullu valley. This morning I got up at 5am to visit the hot springs. Set in a temple, you take your shoes off at the door and enter this wonderful little pocket of calm, right next to the vibrant village square with its snake charmers, candy floss (you heard me) and camera-happy Indian tourists. You walk through a narrow, dark stone corridor and into the spa, an open square space, steaming deliciously and a little sulphurously. You hang your clothes on hooks around the side, teetering around the narrow walkway surrounding the two baths. You wash in the first so as to not contaminate the water as you immerse yourself in the second. The water is quite scummy - I think this has something to do with the sulphur content - but it's deliciously, perfectly, revivingly hot.

Relatively few tourists go in the baths, and this was one instance when I was particularly aware of being the minority, with my chicken-white torso. It's not uncommon to be the subject of curiosity at any time in India, and we often recieve perplexed and unflinching stares, as if examining a specimen, but it's very rarely intimidating. A few days ago we visited a particularly dilapidated dhaba (cheap traditional 'cafes' where the best food and the dirtiest walls can be found) and we were made to feel quite unwelcome. Perhaps it was our social incongruity with the usual clientelle of this extremely basic shack kitchen. Maybe they were just unhappy in themselves, I don't know. It's rarely an issue, but an interesting one to face.

It seems that for many tourists, one of the valley's primary calling cards is the ubiquity of charas, an unadulterated variety of hashish which is produced in some of the smaller rural villages. It's so prolific that it's become normalised. People openly roll and smoke joints, even chillums, in cafes, restaurants, guest houses, and the propietors don't bat an eye. In fact, they give you a palmful of crumbs and ask you to roll a joint to share with them. Normalised, yes; illegal, absolutely. I would be telling a great big fib if I said we'd left it well alone, but we've been very cautious, and we'll be leaving it behind when we go North tonight.

We went rafting the other day, which started off cold, bumpy and exciting and quickly became merely cold and bumpy. The rapids here are nothing to write home about, despite the fact that I'm doing exactly that. The ride home however was a huge thrill. I would even say it was a dream come true. All this time, somewhere deep within me I have been harbouring a strong and quite inexplicable hankering for a ride in the back of a pickup truck, and I'm sure you'll be very glad to learn that I have finally achieved this goal. Sat on a pile of oars and lifejackets, with the raft strapped on the frame roof, dripping little bits of the river Beas on my shoulder. The view out the back was an enlightening insight into Indian driving habits, which you become acutely aware of when you can't see what's coming up ahead, and your jeep has swerved into the opposing lane, and the horn is blaring, angrily shoving our way through the pack and shaving one or two precious seconds off our journey time. The reason for the apparent hurry is beyond me. Yes, much more exciting than the rafting itself, but probably a fair bit more dangerous, too.

We leave for Leh tonight. The jeep sets off at 2am and arrives the same time the following day, having traversed some of the world's highest motorable passes, right the way up to 4800m. It's extreme terrain, and it's going to be an epic journey. A little scary, even. When we're there, we'll probably need a day or two resting while our bodies make more blood cells to compensate for the thin air at 3700m. Oh, I cannae wait!

I'd best be off. Keep writing y'all, and I will too.

All the best.
Nick x

Hello you lot,

Shortly after I wrote the last mass email from Delhi, I emerged from the internet cafe to witness the first hailstorm to hit Delhi in living memory. Balls of ice the size of grapes, golfballs - children were picking them up from the ground and eating them. It was wholly surreal.

Shortly afterwards we found ourselves on a cycle rickshaw heading for the bus stop where we'd leave for Rishikesh, noiselessly thumping through the potholes of Paharganj as pedestrians, motorcycles and other rickshaws swilled around us. It's a queer sensation, being on a cycle rickshaw - if you ignore the guy who's pedalling in front of you, you get the sensation of floating down the street, wordlessly parting the crowds ahead, it's dream-like.

An eight hour fight with consciousness during the bus journey to Rishikesh, in Ringo's words, 'like a spiritual butlins'. I quickly had to get over how ridiculous it might seem to be chanting 'Aum' with my eyes closed and my mind open, and generally being rather bendy and sweaty in the cobra pose, mountain pose, and lots of other asanas which don't have such a straightforward english name. I'd recommend it.

During the day it was stifling, so we spent the afternoons writing songs about flies and mountains, and visiting a massage spa. I had one Ayurvedic massage, which was pleasant but altogether unsurprising, and one Thai massage which was at points unpleasant and very surprising, but left me feeling amazingly refreshed and a bit bendier than I was before. I'd recommend that, too.

I write now from Vashisht, a small village near Manali at the northmost end of the Kullu valley in the state of Himachal Pradesh. Back in the hills, it's cool enough to go about your daily business in comfort and style*, and the mosquitos which had been plaguing me in Rishikesh are too feeble for mountain living. Opposite our spot high up on one side of the valley is an alpine scene of the highest order. The air is clean, the rooms are cheap, the food is good and the people are friendly. The local speciality is barbecued trout, and there's a short walk from our lodgings to a couple of astonishing waterfalls; we had a picnic of Yak's cheese sandwiches and mangoes there yesterday with a couple of friends we made on the bus.

Ah, the busride. From 3pm until 7:30 the following morning we sleeplessly endured an entirely new level of discomfort. At first, stifling heat. Then the sore bum. Later, the arresting electric shrine that hung before me in the middle of the windscreen, covered in green and red flashing lights. At one point, there was an Indian passenger sat beside me who had adopted the pose of 'the thinker'. He would drift off at regular intervals, and whenever the bus took a turn to the left he would lose his balance and his head would fall in a sideways arc, thus headbutting my upper arm. And everyone knows how hard it is to sleep while your arm is being headbutted by a dormant man. No?

I think we'll hang about in Vashisht and explore the Kullu valley for another week at least. There's lots to do here - rafting, trekking, fishing. Oh, and we found an English pub, where we watched the FA cup final last night. It was perfect - widescreen, sound system, pool table (reds and yellows) and other englishmen - totally surreal to walk in there from a dilapidated village road. Then on to Leh in Ladakh for the last leg of our trip north before flying back to delhi and home. Probably.

Hope you're all well, thanks for your emails, it's great to hear from you. Take care,
Nick

 

* I have bought some vaguely ethnic trousers. I couldn't help it, I looked too M&S, yknow? I have also aquired a simply amazing t-shirt from Delhi, apparently by Nike with a dubious screen-print of David Beckham's image, and the words 'Ride the riders, side the slid', 'He stand' and 'D&B - David Beckham'. It's quite special. Who wants one?

Yowzer,

It was only when I called my parents to tell them about the trek we were about to do that i realised that I was still unclear as to how we were going to complete a nine day trek in just six days - we had a flight back to Delhi booked for the 10th, so it was that or nothing. Turns out, the methodology was fantastically straightforward: we did it quicker. Quicker, in fact, than our guide Bizay had ever completed the trek, by sacrificing two rest/acclimatisation days and doing two days' walking in one. Bizay does the trek about 30 times a year.

The reasons a high altitude trek should not be completed hastily are twofold. Firstly, it's exhausting - 90km over six days ends up at 15km a day, and the paths are often very steep. Secondly, altitude sickness can come into play above 2500m, and most people need time to rest at high altitude in order to acclimatise. We both coped with excruciating pounding headaches. Joe vomited at 4100m after taking his malaria medication, and in the middle of the night I had to emerge from the tent to "get Bizay", which only amused me at the time. But we coped, and climbed a total of 2800m into the sky.

At 3am on our fourth morning we set off by torchlight to Goechi-La, and got as far as the first of two viewpoints at 4500m above sea level, where i saw one of the most awesome views i will ever see in my life. Khangchendzonga, running bronze medallist in the 'world's highest mountain' competition for countless years, lit by the rising sun, glowing and irridescent and just massively huge and big. A really, really big thing it was. My words, the photos we took, nothing's going to capture it. Sorry. Unfortunately, our heads were pounding with excruciating headaches due to the altitude, so I fear that even having witnessed it first-hand, I may not have soaked in its splendour as thoroughly as I would have liked.

I should say that at that point, the views were almost secondary to our sense of physical achievement. Joe and I are fairly heavy smokers, neither of us exercise regularly and the highest I'd been before last tuesday was Snowdon in Wales, which I'm guessing is about 1200m a.s.l. - right, dad? Since the trip, we've been feeling stronger, fitter, much less flustered by the physical and sensational demands of travelling through an unfamiliar country with 15kg strapped to our backs. And, um, we're still smoking.

Other interesting details about the trip include our entourage: 2 porters who carried camp equipment in huge baskets with straps resting on top of their heads, Bizay the guide, the chef who to our immense pleasure got too drunk to cook on the penultimate night (as we feel all chefs should from time to time), and two Dzos, a cross breed of cattle and yak, who carried the rest of the equipment and most of our own stuff, never complaining, docile, beautiful creatures. Joe and I carried light day-bags, and felt a bit ridiculous as the porters bounded ahead of us, apparently supporting their own body weight again atop their iron necks. Lavatory facilities were amusingly basic or entirely absent. And the good side of altitude sickness: when you're not feeling poorly, you feel, well, stoned. Honestly, in lots of ways, this last week has been one of the most fantastic experiences of my life. And if we can do it...

We're currently back in Delhi, and at 9pm tonight we're getting on a bus which will arrive in Rishikesh at 6pm tomorrow morning, where we hope to trek to the source of the Ganges, and check into an Ashram and do the spiritual thing, not necessarily in that order - we need a rest too. I'll be keeping an open mind to meditation, spirituality and Yoga while I'm there, but don't expect me to come back a preaching new-age wanker in tie-dye. You know that's not my thang. I'd like to clear my head, maybe my body, and perhaps get a bit more supple. That kind of thing. After that, further north we go, probably to Manali and then maybe Leh if we can be arsed with facing the altitude problems again.

Hope you're all tip-top n'aw that. Enjoy the weather in Britain, it's the best in the world.

Take it easy,
Nick

P.S. I've stuck the previous entries on myspace as blogs, if anyone's interested. Tell your friends. Even better, tell my friends - I neglected to transfer many of their email addresses to my yahoo account. www.myspace.com/nicktrepka. Thankyou.

P.P.S. Mum, dad, the ear's sorted itself out, and I'm living in glorious stereophony again. Rock!

(Sent 2/5/07)

Alright,

I'm writing from Gangtok (alt 1600m, pop 35,000), the capital of Sikkim; a tiny little state in North West India which hovers in a little gooseneck of land between Assam and the rest of the subcontinent. To the South, Bangladesh. To the East, Bhutan. Nepal to the West and Tibet to the North. Appropriately enough, it's a fantastic melange of cultural influences. Bhuddist Pagodas, Hindu shrines, tax-free off licenses, multi-storey parking. Not that there's very many cars.

Joe and I have fallen quite hard for momos, stuffed Tibetan dumplings a little like dim sum, served with fresh chilli sauce. We've tried Tibetan tea, which is like a tea latte with a dollop of salty butter shoved in there to keep you on your toes. And we've drunk some of the worst cups of coffee we will ever be faced with. Still, the ol' gut seems to be working pretty well now, so I've nothing to complain about.

Before I tell you about our impending plans, I must tell you the spider story. It's not a long story; basically, Joe and I found a whacking great spider crawling over the cabinet in our room in Darjeeling. We were pretty worse for wear, which didn't help anything. It was big and properly hairy, like Gillian McKieth reborn as a tarantula (long, thin and vile) and about 10cm across. I brought the lonely planet guidebook down on it pretty hard, and Joe did the clean-up job. The goo was yellow and stringy. We still don't know if it was a dangerous kind of spider, but we though it best to err on the side of caution and crush it with a tome. Job done.

The jeep ride from Darjeeling to Gangtok was cramped, four hours long, and very speedy. Nobody, absolutely nobody managed to overtake our man. I got into the spirit of things by listening to 'Highway to hell' on my walkman - made it seem less dangerous, more plain reckless, which was preferable at the time.

Today Joe and I made our arrangements for the next ten days or so. Tomorrow morning we set off in a jeep to Yuksom (Alt 1700m), where we'll begin our nine day trek to Khanchendzongo, the third highest peak in the world, and only 13m the lesser of K2, at about 8500m. The trek is about 90km long, during which we'll attempt to climb to an altitude just shy of 5000m, and we'll end up just 10 miles from the big peak. It's going to be hard work, but Joe and I are feeling as fit as we ever have, and we've booked with a reputable trekking agency which will cater for our every need, besides the hat and jumper that I'm about to pop out and buy in a minute. We'll have yaks to carry our bags and the tents, a guide or two, and a chef. We're confident and very excited. We can walk at our own pace, and there's provision for stopping a day or two to avoid altitude sickness, which comes into play above 3000m. The conditions at this time of year are perfect. It all lined up, so we thought we'd take the plunge and see what happens.

Any worriers out there will have to wait until at least the 11th of May before I'll be in touch again, or be able to read your emails for that matter. There just aren't that many computers up there, and I bet mobile reception's going to be terrible. Sorry. Mum, dad, best assume that we're already taking any cautionary advice you have to offer. We're sensible chaps.

Must dash, I ought to be out there having capers, shenanegans and the like; not typing. Hope you're all as well as we are.

All the best,
Nick

(Sent 29/4/07)

Hello all,

A great deal has happened since Delhi, it's hard to know where to start. Yes, we took a 12 hour sleeper train to Varanasi, Hinduism's holiest, draped along the West bank of the most holy Ganga (Ganges), itself the lifeblood of the subcontinent. We took a boat ride along the river to see the many ghats dotted almost continuously along a 7km stretch of the Ganga. Ghats are the steps leading down into the water, and serve a variety of purposes. Some are used for bathing, some washing, others for worship, yoga, drying laundry on the hot stone, and of course the burning ceremonies. The whole thing buzzes with activity; we saw a corpse being wrapped in preparation for cremation, and 20 feet away there were children playing in the water and splashing each other gleefully. We stayed out of the water ourselves - it contains about one million times the safe amount of faecal bacteria reccommended for bathing. And the occasional dead cow. And the ashes of cremated bodies. You just wouldn't, would you?

Our time in Varanasi has been marred by our host at the hotel we were staying at, who seemed to find a plethora of ways of taking advantage of us, and the experience has hardened us somewhat. We're not taking any shit now, and it's good we had a kick up the backside earlier rather than later, I suppose. The other problem in Varanasi was gastric and very, very drastic. I was happily doing some laundry in a bucket in the bathroom; an hour later I was lying in bed with a high fever, feeling weak and dilerious, and so my close relationship with one particular toilet began. Honestly, I was a total mess, but it seemed to clear up and turn into straighforward dihorroea in time for our train to the East that evening. We had to get out of Varanasi, it had become unpleasant.

Ninety minutes in a dilapidated autorickshaw to the station; we crossed a floating bridge over the Ganga, lined with rotten wooden slats and complaining even under our modest weight. Then the highways at night, competing with freight trucks which dwarfed our little tin bubble, belching dust behind them.

The train was only two hours late, and the wait was made much more bearable by two German travellers we befriended there. An arduous 18 hours passed, and in New Jalpaiguri we climbed into a jeep which would take us up to Darjeeling. The fist hour was in the evening light, but before we could start the climb, we had to wait for 30 minutes at a police checkpoint - the roads are narrow and full of sharp turns so they try to employ a kind of one way system, unfortunately to no avail. The two hour climb was made in the dark; suggestions of the sheer drops by the side of the road appeared, but we were as glad as to not know how deep they were, most of the time. Our driver was good and got us there safely.

Darjeeling is fantastically beautiful. Dotted along a 2100m high ridge, clouds run below as much as above us, through the lush greenery of the tea plantations and japanese pines. We've not had a clear day yet, but if we do we'll be able to see four of the world's five highest peaks. It's small and very friendly and we're treating ourselves to some fantastic Tibetan cuisine. The Tibetan and Nepalese population here is as important as the Indian, which makes for a very different feel. We've strolled through the plantations, been invited inside a local's house, seen monasteries and shrines, and all the time the mist teeters around, changing the vista completely in minutes. I really do love watching it enveloping the landscape, it's gorgeous.

We're off to Sikkim on tuesday, most likely - India and China both think it's theirs, so it's bound to be interesting. India has laid its claim by tarting up the road system, so at least it should be comfortable riding.

Take care you lot,
Nick

(Sent 22/4/07)

Hello all,

Welcome to the first edition of my travel journals to home. So here I am in Delhi, safe and sound. This is me and Joe's third day here, traversing the bustling bazaars of this awesome, sprawling metropolis, grimy and bustling and amazingly welcoming. It's an assault on every sense - Britain seems monochrome and sterile in comparison. Little miracles happen on the roads continually as the cars, bikes and above all rickshaws swerve across each other's paths with the right of way unchallenged by the larger vehicle, and the air is full of the honking and buzzing of the drivers courteous enough to alert you to their presence. New smells arrive almost continuously - incense, urine, fuel, spice - one within paces of another. And it's about 40 degrees in the height of the day. Not too humid, so it's bearable, but still pretty agressive. We're taking it easy when we need to, and still making good use of our days, largely by immersing ourselves in the ambience of the place. It's a lot of fun.

Yesterday, Joe and I recorded the first song for the album we're going to make out here, it's called "Whiskey, Delhi, Ukelele" - slide blues ukelele a-go-go! We also met up with my uncle and aunty (hello Bill, Abha, thanks for the wonderful short-notice hospitality) who is in fine spirits and has turned his hand to acting and televised football commentary.

In two hours time, we're getting the Shivganga express to Varanasi, one of the holiest cities in India, thought of by Hindus as a bridge between mortals and the spirit world through freedom from reincarnation. This place is famous for the funeral pyres on the ghats alsongside the Ganges, which we're morbidly curious to witness. From there, we're planning to head further East to Darjeeling and Sikkim, for a taste of the bhuddist way of life in the himalayas just top the east of Nepal. The longer term plan is to then head back to Delhi and North, North, North, as far as we can before we're likely to see any AK47 shaped problems. We don't want that at all.

So now you know. We're both very well (if wilting a little - will be much more pleasant in the cooler hills) and I send my best wishes and love to all of you. I'll write again when we get to Sikkim, most likely. A week or so.

Take care,
Nick

Friends,

Yesterday, the time came for me to pull my roots from Edinburgh's rich and tangy earth. They had been happily furrowing there for almost six years, mingling among an amazing forest of friends who have seen me through what has been the happiest era of this particular tree's life so far. None will be forgotten lest I go senile, which in this day and age of advanced medical science is always an exciting possibility; at least then I can hope for some choice fairies to be away with, hideous diminutive reincarnations of yourselves with glinting wings and the larynxes of hamsters.

In the meantime, I have plans to execute. Every morning from the 20th of April until the 13th of June, I will be waking up in India and probably wondering what part of it I'm currently in. First and last, that part will be Delhi, and inbetween is anybody's guess, although you can probably safely narrow it down to the Indian and possibly Nepali Himalayas for a good portion of that time. Maybe Pune, maybe Lay, Shimla, Kathmandu, I'm not rightly sure. I'll be returning to the Trepka base camp in Bradford, before taking a short trip to Krakov, Warsaw and Catavitse to meet some of my Polish relatives for the first time. Again, back to Bradford.

Now, for all Bradford has to offer me - free accommodation, first-rate curry, a particular bench, peace and quiet (read boredom and solitude) - I'll only be there for as long as it takes me to find a promising patch to plant myself in England's sprawling capital. Not an easy task, but I'll do it. And why? I don't know if I should hope for better things than all the wonders of Edinburgh, I love her more than ever. However I can be pretty sure that things will be bigger there. And I like big things. Essentially, I felt it was time to move on and get some new experiences, and it has a lot to offer me as a musician.

"If you beat around the bush, you lose your push" (Beefheart)

"The bigger the cushion, the better the pushin'" (Zappa)

"A bird in the hand beats two in the bush" (Anon; not entirely relevant besides containing the word 'bush')

Anyway, by the time August comes around, I expect to be living in London. To my dear friends in Edinburgh, I'll promise to be back to haunt you from time to time, and if you would consider lending me your couch for a night or two then you can expect the same should you find yourself in London for any reason. Let's keep in touch.

Look after yourselves and each other. Love to many if not all of you. See you 'round.

Nick x