Peekaboo.

I often hear people complain that they can't see the view through the clouds - the mountains, the other side of the valley, the sunset, or the moon. But moonlight through the haze has something going for it. Something I don't think we give it nearly enough credit for. Rising over a city like a distant spotlight, blurred and unobtrusive, it waits for attention gently instead of commanding; it asks for nothing but offers what it has - light despite the obscurity. It lets me take it as it is.

Traveling demands attention - constant vigilance, stimulus fighting each other to be the most noticeable. Learning to put that aside, it's amazing what comes into view.

Already my memories are becoming hazy - what did I do in Hampi? Where was it that had that really incredible temple with Ganesh that was being covered in quarts of milk? Who was it that told us that story of... When did I...

And through all of it, if I stop being anxious about forgetting, I remember a feeling, or a sound, or the look of a child from the seat in front of me on the bus going to wherever. Maybe these memories are a little out of context, detached from their origin. But does that really matter?

If my stories, when I get back, are missing pieces or divorced from space and time, forgive me. But know that they are perhaps even more important for that very reason.

Borderlands.

Pulling into the border town of Sunauli, rickshaw-wallahs yell through the windows and block the exit of the bus. Some only offer a ride to immigration, others are willing to change our money, do our paperwork for us. Only a few hundred meters away, I need one last chai in India before I go. Tucking into a dhaba, the scene seems fitting. Dirty tables, greasy food, the owner's young daughter serving us and getting twice the amount of pakora we asked for, the street in front if us lined with trucks and teeming with all kinds of traffic. Leaving feels much easier than just a few days before.

If we weren't paying attention, we would have walked right into Nepal. Because India and Nepal have an open border with each other, the immigration "office" is just a wooden shack easily obscured behind the vehicles and people walking through. Our paperwork is ridiculously convoluted, the border "guard" looking at our Indian visa saying that they expire today - as if we didn't know already. Sending us on our way, Nepal's immigration office seems pleasantly professional, organized, and straightforward. "Welcome to Nepal."

A four kilometer bus ride takes almost an hour, the bus packed by the bus driver literally picking people up and squeezing them into spaces I didn't think were possible. The roof of the bus is full. We should have walked.

The ATMs don't want to work. I've been in transit for well over 24 hours now. It's hot and dusty. The street food looks slightly different. Signs are almost all in Nepali. We had planned on getting on another bus to Lumbini. I don't want to.

So we don't. And, after finding a room and eating, I embrace the reality that I don't have to.

Maybe it was the exhaustion from a long day of travel. Maybe it was some sort of reaction to crossing into a new country. Maybe it's the acknowledgement of our time on the other side of the globe almost being at an end. But I feel like I'm in a liminal space, between worlds. Like I've taken in my fill and need some time to process while I'm still here.

One last eight hour bus ride, we've arrived in the Kathmandu Valley. The rain is refreshing, and walking laps around the Boudha stupa with hundreds in the evening, that feeling of liminality - of being still yet moving forward, of being here in a foreign country but preparing to go there where things are supposedly familiar, where things are the same as in India, but different - isn't so hard and scary as those first few hours.

It's a lot like that feeling of being on the verge of something, but without knowing where the edge is and what's coming next.

It's like being in no-man's land.

It's good.

Little things.

So much has happened, and there is so little I've mentioned.

Like walking to the source of one of the world's most important and holy water sources, the Mother Ganga, getting burned by the sun and chilled by the glacier at the same time.

Like eating momos and tingmo until I thought I would burst.

Like almost loosing our fruit to stealing monkeys on a bridge in Rishikesh minutes after having a conversation about whether or not it was in fact the bridge famous for fruit-stealing monkeys.

Like wandering through the previously secret garden of salvage scrap and rock art, a labyrinth of fantastic proportions in the most elaborately planned city in India.

Like knowing we would be here during mango season, enjoying kilos of them, and then being pleasantly surprised that it was also lichee season, and eating even more.

Like attending a candle-light vigil down the streets of Dharamshala twelve hours after the self-immolation of a Tibetan nomad in Eastern Tibet.

Like having round after round of cards and drinking chai with bus and taxi drivers while stranded in the Pin Valley - and winning my fair share of the hands.

Like drinking a beer in a restaurant next to a table with a Hindu, a Muslim, and a Sikh - all businessmen - two enjoying beer and one orange juice, all laughing and sharing a meal.

Like playing catch with kids and learning all the games that can be played with a ball without exchanging a single word, but plenty of smiles and laughs.

Like learning how two people with one shovel (and a piece of rope) is indeed more effective.

Like watching monks slip away from monasteries to smoke cigarettes, drink Coke, and eat chicken wings.

Like having a man who just pulled me out of ten foot deep mud kindly brush the hair out of my face for me.

Like sharing a simple meal with a sadhu in his cave in the mountains.

Like discovering how effective a piece of slate and a good rock is better than any mortar and pestle.

Like becoming suddenly aware we were in the Himalayas walking along a still-closed road because of snow and ice in sandals.

Like coming back to Delhi and, finding it much less overwhelming, realizing how long we've been in India.

The road is totally gone.

From Dhankar, you can see where the Pin and Spiti rivers meet, where the Pin Valley begins. If you follow the road all the way down, you reach Mudh at the end of the road, and from there, just start walking towards the Pin-Parvati Pass. At least that's what the plan was, but sitting with chai and looking on with awe was good enough most of time. With Kungri on the way back towards Spiti and word that the murals really are worth it, we stayed in the monastery guest house that wasn't technically open, but the monks let us stay anyway. The morning of the 5th, the bus was supposed to come at 7:45 or so. Standing waiting for the bus, watching boys brush their teeth at the water pump, a bull go a little mad and run in the opposite direction of the herd, the kids run towards the school when someone yelled from the rooftop. At 8am we got word that the bus was not coming, so we hitched a tractor ride down to Gulling, 2km away. Spiti is incredibly isolated, so that was the only bus of the day. We settled down at the dhaba for chai and waited for any vehicle going to Kaza, about 35km away, not even. We considered walking, but thought, nah, something will come. By 2pm we were starting to get impatient. Not a single vehicle going to Kaza. Finally, around 3pm, three boys crammed us in with them in their hatchback and we started making our way to Kaza. About 6 1/2km down the road, we slow down, saying "What is that?" The road was blocked by a huge chunk of earth. Okay. We think, no worries, we'll walk around it and try and catch another ride. Until we walked up to it and looked behind it - glacier slide.

The road is totally gone.

About 40-50m wide of liquid earth, boulders and ice flowing across what used to be a bridge. We turn around and head to Gulling, yelling at cars and motorcycles headed in that direction that they're going to have to turn around. We ask locals how long they think it will be - one day, five days, a month...

After we get a room at the only guest house in town, we settle in the dhaba and watch as the rooms fill up. Most people have nothing with them, having planned on only taking a day trip from Kaza. Luckily, aarak (barley wine) was in good supply in town, and us and four Indian tourists settle in for a night of talking. Like I expected and what no one wanted to admit was that there were going to be many nights like this.

It got worse every day. The slide didn't stop, and the sludge caused the Pin River to flood over the road. An entire village nearby had to be evacuated. It got wider, and deeper. Slides like this are incredibly dangerous. Every day we waited to see if it was crossable and, when a few days after the slide a tractor full of people covered in mud driving through town yelled at us, laughing, "Don't go! Don't go!", we agreed.

Some other people who were stuck managed to cross relatively easily on the 8th early in the morning, but by the time we got there, it was flowing again and too deep to cross. Again, being so isolated, there was very little equipment available to use (and no petrol on that side, so the bulldozer ran out of diesel by the 7th), and it just kept coming so there's nothing they could really do. On the 8th we got word that the road wouldn't be crossable with vehicles for weeks, probably more than a month, so they were going to build a cable car. On the 9th, we got there first thing in the morning to cross on foot while the sludge was more solid and before the sun warmed up for more slides. Well, it had gotten worse over night, and a section of the road before was completely underwater, so that we had to climb way above it. We waited for hours watching (and helping) the locals try to build a cable car. By noon, it looked hopeless. The crossbar for the cable was being held by a man holding a rope crouched on the side of the mountain. The cable wouldn't get sturdy. The water and sludge was starting to flow heavier. The road flooding more. Some locals started crossing on foot, using what of the cable they could to hold onto and walk on. From our side, there was about 20m of deep sludge, then 20m of rock and muddy water that was sturdy, then about another 20m of really deep, really thick sludge. A British tourist standing next to me, watching the locals, asked "Would you do that?"

Apparently I would.

When the friends we had made in Gulling started crossing, we realized that if we didn't go now, we may not be going for a very, very long time. So, before we had time to overthink it, we went.

The first 20m, Jon had his sandals ripped off by the thickness of the mud, and we were waist deep in mud. The cable helped immensely crossing that part. The rocky stuff gave us a breather. Then, the last part. The mud was so thick we couldn't lift our legs and started sinking. Locals were yelling at us to try to walk on the cable that was now under the mud, but it had gone too deep (about 6 people crossed before us). Jon yelled at me to start crawling, and that helped. It wasn't just thick mud - being a glacier slide, it was full of jagged rocks. Near the end, I was so exhausted I could hardly move. A local on the other side threw in a piece of wood that stuck on top enough for me to get my leg on it, and they pulled us out the rest of the way.

My pants got pulled off in the mud, Jon's got completely destroyed with rips from the rocks, his sandals broke, we were completely covered in mud from head to toe, we got scrapes all over our hands, feet, and knees, but we are safe, alive, and not still in Pin Valley.

Two people who crossed after us got lifted out of the sludge by a bulldozer. They looked so clean, I had to laugh. Having caught my breath, being able to think a little more clearly, the situation was suddenly painfully funny. Here, in Spiti, I had been thinking intensely on how little I was in comparison to my landscape. How easily it can overtake me. How wonderful it is to be so small.

The local police and army officials gave us a ride in the back of the truck to the junction toward Kaza. We hobbled out and down to where the river still ran clean. Another police truck drove us the rest of the way to Kaza where the seven of us, covered in mud, got some strange looks indeed.

That night, we got word that someone died, and that around 5pm, the glacier dropped a huge piece and made it completely uncrossable, destroying any hope of a useful ropeway. Today, the rest of the tourists who didn't cross with us on Saturday are supposedly being airlifted out.

I think crossing was a better choice.
 

It's a good place to remember that.

Sunday, May 27th:

We've spent a lot of time watching things change out of bus and train windows - from the plains to the hills to the mountains. Landscape changes, and with it, the way lives are lived. Time changes, too, especially where the warmth and light of the sun is imperative. Where what you do is directly for material sustenance rather than symbolic paper and metal to purchase things for survival. Where the earth is still understood as more powerful than the concrete buildings and tar roads and wells we impress on it - where these things are hardly even possible. Where no cars go. Where, 4000m above sea level your face turns pink in minutes and there are no trees to shade you from the sun. Where the sheep, goats, and yaks are louder than human beings. Where people always stop to say hello as they pass by. Time is different in the Trans-Himalayas.

Don't get me wrong - cities, packed with colour and spicy smells from dhabas and music and millions of beautiful faces are incredible, too. But here, now, in the isolated Spiti Valley where time is not still but dynamic, I feel that it is somehow impossible not to notice how powerful landscapes are and their effects on how we understand ourselves in our worlds. How, if constantly surrounded by structures we have made, by land carefully controlled and formed by our hands, we are bound to forget where and when we are. That we cannot possibly control everything. That we are remarkably and wonderfully only human.

It's a good place to remember that.

Wednesday, May 30th:

These roads shouldn't even exist. Hugging the sides of mountains with landslides possible anywhere, leading to trails where no cars go that point the ways to villages that seem even more impossibly remote. The horizon changes constantly, rapidly, valleys open before you, beckoning.

Taking the only way to Chicham, hanging in a metal basket 105m high above a gorge, smack in the middle with 55m more to pull ourselves across, I'm both intimately aware of my fear or heights and amazed at what a gorge looks like from here.

Remember when I said that even water tastes better boiled over a wood stove? Try yak dung.