Getting over India

Ok I've decided to complete writing about India. It's been nearly two months since I've returned and I've seriously neglected my legion of blog fans, who have been salivating expectedly over how this story ends. I'm going to do this in "typefast" or rather "skimming over the details because they're not so clear to me now."

I left Manali after doing more of the same and rode down to Kasol. There, I spent a few days lounging in the Green Valley restaurant reading and smoking. In my treehouse guesthouse I spoke with an Israeli jesus lookalike who explained to me the fundamental connection beween hinduism, jusdaism, and all the other isms plus christianity and I thought he was objectively intersting until i realized i was being converted. I took a bong rip and slipped back into reality.

I took off for Melana, a village on a hill famous for it's "melana cream" and for its strange melana people. The walk up from where I'd parked my bike took two hours of nonstop stair climbing. I burned more calories in two hours than I could of on a treadmill for two days. A young boy lead the way, all the way to his father's guesthouse.

I ended up staying there, the food being rather bad but the room pretty nice. The view was absolutely stunning from the roof of this place. A bench, on a roof, with 360 degree view of gorgeous green mountains. the weather was also perfect. Two Israeli's joined me at the guesthouse and we commenced major nonstop chillum hits. We bought a gangload of genuine melana cream from the owner and remained in a state of serious highness for a four days. We played poker, ate parantha with nutella, read books, gazed aimlessly and slept a lot. The two guys were students at Tel Aviv University on a month long India journey, having been here before, and coming back only for the Melana Cream and Kasol.

I took a walk a couple times through the village itself, and was stunned by how closely the reality of this place resembled the stories I had heard of it. The kids and people were filthy, the houses made of rotting wood and covered with bushels of grass for the winter. The dirty kids jumped out of the road when I came through, believing, as the parents had told them, that they were "holy people" not to be soiled by foreigners. Signs read "do not touch anything or anybody" and "stay on the path" etc. Fine 2000 Ruppees. I went to the shop to by some chocolate to feed my munchies, and had to point to what i wanted from the outside. The owner than put my stuff in a bag and placed it on the floor for me to pick up. Everybody was looking at me with an aura of superiority, as if they knew something about me that I didn't. I tried hard to think why these people could possibly believe themselves to be holy, and how they could look at me and feel they were in a better position, living here among the cow dung, the dirty water. I'll give them the pristine natural wilderness and the great ganga, but c'mon. Anyways they've been working on building a road to this village so that it's no longer reachable only by five thousand stairs, adn once that's finished the whole culture will meet its doom, i'm told, as visitors flock from abroad and outsiders come to trade and live here.

I left Melana and Kasol thoroughly in love with India and wondering why I was leaving to go back to the modern world. I rode the bike down to Delhi but stopped in Chandigarh, a "modern" city in India and the capital of Himachal. The city reminded me of Brazilia, the capital of Brazil, and it was actually designed by the same idiot european architect. The city is straight line grid of ugly neighborhoods. It's something out of 1984, filled with Seikhs, absolutely lacking in everything that's wonderful about India. The restaurants are aweful, the vibe is constipated and tight, the weather humid, the wind lacking, the streets congested, is their anything positive? no.

I left and cruised down to Delhi a week from departure. In Delhi I ran into old friends, returned the motorcycle and managed to not pay anything extra, bought gifts, walked around, tried to inhale every cubic ounce of delhi air so as not to forget, took some pictures, was disgusted by the heat, and left to the airport. I just summed up a week in three lines, but honestly theres not much to say about Delhi that was different from the first time around.

I am now back in Israel. I've been here for two months and I've started business school. I am in a relationship with the girl I met in India, and I may or may not continue writing in this blog. I have a feeling I'll be in India again.