adventures in srinagar

It's often said that Americans are ridiculously ignorant of the geography of the rest of the world. Travel is thought to be the cure for this ignorance. However, even among those of us who travel, ignorance can rear its ugly head. For example, my recent trip to India began as a boondoggle based on geographical perplexity. I'd long wanted to go to Ladakh, a remote Buddhist part of northern India, where Srinagar is the jumping off point for many treks and explorations of the mountains and temples. When I saw a conference in my field being held in Srinagar, I immediately sent in an abstract, knowing that this was my chance to finally visit mystical Ladakh. Driving my desire to visit India was the fact that my brother and sister-in-law had recently moved to South India. I hoped to convince them to travel the length of the country and join me for a weekend in Ladakh. Throughout the process of writing the conference paper and securing funds from my department I never bothered to verify that the conference was being held in Srinagar, Ladakh. It was only when I began to make my travel arrangements in India that I realized the conference was being held in Srinagar, Garhwal, Uttaranchal. And thus an adventure was born . . .

I arrived in Delhi in the middle of the night, after nearly two days of traveling, during which I had taken in stunning views of the sea ice, crisscrossed with deep blue fissures, breaking up along the Russian coast; realized how much Seoul resembled the New York City area, with its many rivers and random outcropping of rocks and trees; and zombied through 18 hours in Singapore's airport, disappointed that the transit hotel was full. I had reserved a room at a guesthouse and arranged a car to pick me up so that I wouldn't have to begin my time in India by getting ripped off. But, plans are wont to go awry, and the driver was nowhere to be found. After multiple calls to the guesthouse, and an hour's wait, the driver collected me, only to deliver me to a guesthouse with no open rooms. “Just wait here for some time,” I was told. It was now 2 am, and I was in no mood to wait, especially when I had to catch an early morning train. “Which way to the train station?” I asked, and plunged into the night, dragging my rollie behind me.

The driver suggested that I at least go to the all-night restaurant and have a cup of tea. There, I met the French woman who had shared my ride to the hotel, also waiting for her room. By the time we'd finished our tea, the inn had rooms for each of us, and I sank gratefully into a three-hour nap on a none-too-clean mattress. Welcome to India!

As I headed toward the train station in the meager light of dawn, the driver appeared again (do these people ever sleep?) and tapped me on the shoulder, reminding me to “talk to no one, look at no one, trust no one.” Good advice, as the throngs of rickshaw wallahs, taxi drivers, ticket fixers and assorted touts were eager to separate a foreigner from her money as quickly as possible. By keeping my head down and ignoring all unsolicited advice, I was able to purchase a ticket and board the train to Dehradun, where I'd catch a bus to the conference in Mussoorie, strangely pronounced just like the Midwestern state where I grew up. Another foreigner I met at the conference wasn't so fortunate with her travel arrangements. Arriving in the wee hours of the night from France, she had been convinced that it was impossible to take a train to the conference, and instead hired a car for the princely sum of 200 euros (my roundtrip train fare was just under rs. 1000, or about $22). During the conference, she sent the car back to Delhi rather than pay the additional rs. 1000/day the driver was demanding for food and lodging. When I left Dehradun, the driver had yet to return to collect her, despite repeated calls to the travel agency and the driver himself. But I'm getting ahead of myself . . .

I arrived in Mussoorie, a fading hill resort where the British went to escape the wilting heat of the plains - Delhi can get up to 114F before monsoon - to find little in the way of conference hoopla. A few nervous looking college students huddled around a desk, shuffling papers. They directed me to a room, but could not provide me with an agenda for the conference. I coaxed some warmish water out of the geyser (the externally controlled hot water heater prevalent in South Asian bathrooms), bundled up in all my clothes, and fell asleep. At more than 5000 ft. of elevation, Mussoorie was chilly in early March, and snow lingered just above the town. However, no heaters or fires warmed the hotel.

Later that night, my roommate, a young Indonesian woman studying in France, arrived. She and I comprised the International part of the International Conference on Ecotourism Planning and Management. Most of the participants were male students from various Indian universities.

At the opening session, a seemingly testosterone-induced fist-fight very nearly broke out. The Chair of the session, a retired military officer, said that he'd run the session with military precision, limiting audience responses to the speakers' presentations to actual questions. When he abruptly cut off a professor's lengthy critique of one of the presentations, a shooting match began. The professor and his entourage moved toward the dais and then stormed out, followed by the session's chair and his entourage. Subsequent sessions, held in an icebox-like room of a sagging cinder block hotel, were calmer.

On the final evening of the conference, an American woman who operates a nearby farm and retreat center, arrived to give the opening talk on the following morning. The few foreigners - a Canadian and a British woman had dropped by - immediately congealed into a tight group around her. “You must get out and see some of the mountains,” she exhorted us. And so it was decided that we would all pile into her truck and visit her project, a few hours' drive from Mussoorie, the following day, as the conference was ending one day earlier than planned.

We drove through badly eroded and deforested hills. Apparently, all the wood had been taken to build the resort towns, and now little was left to hold the topsoil in place. Cactus and other succulents were taking over what had formerly been lush forest. The American woman had found a small piece of intact forest, with a dilapidated Forestry Office cabin on it, and converted the piece of land to a preserve and retreat center. After hours of driving through arid moonscape, we reached her graceful six-sided cabin the middle of dense pine forest. It was a relief to be in a clean and comfortable space, heated with a cozy wood fire!

The next day, she showed us the property - orchards, a chicken coop, guest cabins, vegetable gardens - all tucked with the pine forest, and described her battles with the Forestry Department to preserve the land. We drove down to her other project, at the base of the mountains, where dozens of orphans are housed and educated on a beautiful organic farm. She told us that she had been a minor movie star in Hollywood, appearing in movies with Dustin Hoffman, before deciding to come to India to study with a guru. Her guru told her to meditate in a cave on the banks of the Ganges for a year. During that time, children kept coming to her, and she realized that her calling was to care for them. She got a medical degree from an Indian university so that she could better help the children, and founded her orphanage. As she saw the larger systemic problems that were affecting the children - lack of water and fuelwood, lack of education - she began to work on larger issues.

My time at the orphanage was brief, however, as I had a train to catch to get back to Delhi for my flight to the south. The route to the train station took me past the headwaters of the Ganges, where countless pilgrims bathed and worshipped. The sky was suffused the pink glow of sunset. The dark mountains contrasted with the colorful clothing and implements of the pilgrims. It was one of those iconic Indian scenes that appear in all the travel guides and brochures