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.