Dear Canada

Dear Canada,

It has been long since we've talked; the trust between us has been growing thinner for some time now, and I confess that I've withdrawn from you. As a child I thought so much of you, was proud to know you. But as I've grown up...well...

You told me when I was a boy that if I went to school and wrote enough of the right things down on pieces of paper, then they would give me a different piece of paper with a lot of letter 'A's on it. So I tried to do it, but this proved more difficult than I imagined; there were quite a lot of pieces of paper that I need to write some promises on before I could go, and even then the schools wanted me to give them several thousands pieces of paper every year, just to let me get to the part where I wrote the write things down on still other paper. All of this you told me I should do, so I could get the piece of paper with all the letter 'A's on it, although in the end I must have written down some of the wrong things, because the paper that I got at the end had a few B's on it, and a C or two as well. But, they told me that with this sheet of paper, the one with the first little bit of the alphabet written prominently upon it, I would be able to find places that would let me give away the vast majority of my waking life in return for many, many more pieces of paper, on which there would be colors and numbers and dead people—the very same ones I was required to deliver thousands of each year while in school. And with those pieces of paper, at long last, I would be allowed to have television and clothes and cars and sunglasses, and in those few remaining hours each day that were still mine, I would be happy.

Yet, Canada, I didn't have anywhere to get those thousands of pieces of paper from. Thank goodness, you came to my rescue. You, Canada, offered to lend me, a Canadian, all those thousands of Canadian dollars that were yours and not mine, saying that I could pay them back, you know, when I graduated. All I had to do was write my name down beside many pages of promises you had written for me, and everything would be fine.

Well it was never fine, Canada. You were always very late with those pieces of paper, and sometimes  you managed to lose the paper with the promises you made me sign on it, making the thousands of papers very late. And while you were doing this, I was living in fear. I was afraid I wasn't going to have rent, or food; I was afraid the school wasn't going to let me write down the right things, and that I wouldn't get my sheet of paper with all the A's on it. I was usually late in buying the big books full of papers with the right things on them, but those were the right things that I was supposed to be writing down so I could get the paper with the A's on it. This was very worrying for me, Canada, and sometimes I think that some B's ended up where the A's were supposed to go. But, you correctly pointed out that, in the tiny print on the promises you made me sign, there were instructions I had followed incorrectly, and so it was really my fault all along. Sometimes, though, it really was your fault; and on those occasions you were happy to pay someone who had no authority whatsoever and was not responsible for  your mistakes to apologize to me on your behalf.

Well I'm all grown-up, now, Canada. I know what all those pieces of paper are called; the degrees, the essays, the contracts and the applications. And oh yes, Canada, I know all about the ones you call dollars. And as I've grown—ironically, because the money you lent me allowed me to listen to experts who were kind enough to tell me what you're all about—I've failed to understand a few things.

Why do we own so many tanks, Canada, and so many guns and helmets and planes and uniforms? I don't seem to recall us having been invaded—ever. And I think those tanks were rather expensive. And I think you bought them, with Canadian dollars, before checking with all of us Canadians to see if we had any other ideas for those dollars. I think, for example, that I, a Canadian, would rather not have borrowed so many dollars from you if I'd known at the time that you had enough dollars lying around to invest in looking for a fight. And I think that there are quite a lot of very large businesses around that have been collecting quite a lot of those Canadian dollars—why is it, again, that you've been giving them tax breaks? They seem well-enough off to me; I don't think the men that run them would have to borrow any Canadian dollars from you if they wanted to go and get degrees.

When I was younger I understood that when you borrow some dollars, you have to give back more than you borrowed; it just seemed to be a matter of course. But after a while I started to wonder why it was that I had to give back more than I borrowed. I mean, I only borrowed the money so I could go and give my life away to a company that would give me back a little bit of the money they made from me; and, we both know it was always the plan that, when I finally did get the money from the job that I got with the degree, you were just going to take a nice big piece of it anyway. Don't you make more money if I make more money? Why do you have to charge to give me permission to make you more money? It isn't very clear to me, Canada, and I should point out that I do have the degree now.

Yep, that's right—I did get my degree, Canada. I got it, and I got a pretty good one, as far as they go. There is a man called the Dean, and he put me on his list because I had written down enough of the right things to get enough A's to impress him. And because, at the end, I wrote a very large amount of the right things down on a quite a lot of pieces of paper, my degree is one with honours on it, although I confess that I'm not quite clear on why it is more honourable now. But I think I must have misunderstood the procedure, a little. When I was at school, I found it all terribly exciting and interesting and I fell rather in love with the things I saw there, but I guess that was a mistake. Because the things I came to love—all about people, and culture, and how we live together on Earth and have for thousands and thousands of years, and about all the exciting things we've been doing while we're here—don't seem to be worth very much to the places that will trade me my life for a little of the money they can make from me. So even though I put the right things down on paper, and in return I got one of the very best pieces of paper I could get, the piece of paper I'm supposed to make, which is a list of all the reasons of why people should trade my life for money (a resume, you call it) doesn't qualify me for very much that I wasn't already qualified for. But that's ok—you gave me a whole six months to get all that sorted out before it became time for me, a Canadian, to give you, Canada, back your Canadian dollars, which are yours and not mine.

And now it's time for me to confess; I confess that I made a mistake, although I didn't know that I was making it at the time. Somewhere, in one of the paragraphs of promises that I had to put my name on was a line that said something very important, and it was my job to read it. I put my name beside the promises, afterall, so it's really my fault that I didn't read it. Not that it would have mattered much—if I didn't sign your promises, you wouldn't give me the money, so I couldn't give it to the school, so they couldn't give me the degree, so I couldn't write that I had it on the resume, so the companies wouldn't trade my life for the money I needed to get happy on the evenings and weekends. But still, to be fair, I should have read that line. You see, I read the lines that told me all of the wonderful ways you'd help me if, when my six months was up, I didn't have the money to give you. I read all about complicated things like 'eligibility requirements' and 'marital status' and I even taught myself to use your 'income calculators'. I read the line that said you would only help me if I signed another page of promises; I just missed the one that said I had to be standing on top of you to sign them.

So now, Canada, I am far, far away from you. I've come here with my partner, a wonderful woman that I met in the school you lent me the money to visit. And while I was in that school, I learned quite a lot about what is happening to your brothers and sisters, those other countries in the world who are not Canada. So now I am in one—one that is called India, and it has been my dream for quite a long time to come here and learn from it. But you see while I'm here I need very badly not to give you the money you let me borrow for just a few more months; you know, just like your page of promises said I could if I was ever in trouble. After that, I'll go to still another country that thinks my piece of paper is pretty impressive and would like me to teach its citizens how to speak my language so they, too, can get money and degrees and resumes. But the problem is, Canada, you are not here where I am, and you will only help me if I come and stand on top of you to put my name on another page of promises, even though I can leave again afterwards and all will be fine. And if I don't come stand on you, and if I, a Canadian, don't give you, Canada, all those Canadian dollars which I owe you because they are yours and not mine, you will write some very bad things on some other pieces of paper. You will write that no one who controls paper should trust me, and because my beautiful partner has agreed to be at my side forever (a promise she did not need paper for, but which you made us write down anyway because our promise to each other wasn't good enough for you), if you write those bad things down on that piece of paper you call a 'credit history', she will have to bare the consequences of my reading error too.

So understand this Canada: for her, and for the babies we want to make some day, if I have to, I will come and stand on you and put my name beside the promises on the page. But if I do, Canada, I will be giving up a dream I have had for a very long time, because even though you have no problem with me leaving again, I will have exhausted my supply of the right papers and will have to start again. Sadly, if this happens, I will be probably have to forfeit my beautiful partner's dreams too. So understand this, Canada: if I do have to come and stand on you in order for you to help me with my myriad paper problems, it will only be for her. For my part, Canada, I would happily let you waste your ink on your credit reports; I would happily let you wish and hope and plead for the return of your Canadian dollars for the rest of my life. If it weren't for her, Canada, I would, in a moment, forget you and all the ways I thought about you when I was a boy. But I made a promise to her, Canada—and I wrote it down on my soul, not on your silly papers with your silly judge confirming that I had—and it's a promise I'm going to keep. I don't know, yet, what's going to happen because this is a brand new maze of papers for me, but two things are clear: the first is that, because I have chosen to commit my love to another, I will not be allowed to go and forget you; and the second, dear Canada, is that if you make me come and stand on you to protect my family at the cost of my dream, I will nonetheless never, ever forgive you.

Introducing: Lha

Ninotchka is away on a five-day meditation retreat, and so I've got our new new home to myself. We've moved once more, for what I anticipate is the final time. The place we had found had its merits, but the management left something to be desired; with winter encroaching and nothing even resembling a tenancy board in sight, we opted for more secure environs. And these we found via the director of the organization Ninotchka and I are both working for, currently. Lha Social Work is one of the major NGO's here in McLeod Ganj, whose mission (perhaps obviously) is the social well being of Tibetan refugees. Nawang, the director, set us up with a room in their volunteer accomodations. The price is just slightly more than we'd hoped to pay, but there are a number of advantages (not the least of which is a meager wi-fi connection), and, unlike the guest houses that litter the town, the residents of our building are primarily here for longer periods, which gives us a chance to build a little more substantial relationships with people.

But of course our living arrangements are of minimal interest beside the work we've both undertaken. Ninotchka, like so many International Development students before her, grew jaded by the implicitly capitalist framework of development initiatives and thus, by the end, despaired of her degree. Yet, ironically, she's undertaken a gig which makes quite excellent use of the skills she acquired, despite her exhausted enthusiasm for International Assimilat—err, Development. I, meanwhile, was profoundly moved and inspired by my grooming in social-anthropological perspective, and have largely been inwardly critical of what has clearly become an unsavory addiction to computers. Yet, I am nonetheless playing at computers once more, and my thirty-grand investment has precious little to do with it. This time, at least, my digital dallying has a benefit beyond the wanton sustainance of an insatiable appetite for puzzle solving.

Explanations of Ninotchka's work I'll leave to her to recount on her own blog. Mine, at least, has two components; web design for the organization itself, which is (for reasons I'll spare you an extensive elaboration of) a deliciously exciting enterprise and one which is, for the moment, summarily out of my league. And that fact alone generates most of my enthusiasm, because now I've got both a legitimate reason and a real-world time frame in which to teach myself how to come through on the promises I've made. I'm confident that there are enough recent undergraduates reading this to appreciate the bitter-sweet ecstasy of just how much one can really achieve under the impetus of gut-rending anxiety. Meanwhile, my other contribution to Lha is by quite a huge margin the more gratifying of the two: Photoshop class!

To be clear, I am by no means even marginally qualified to teach a Photoshop class by the standards of, say, a professional media design company situated in Western commercial spheres. In the context of a mountain-top town full of refugees, however, I am quite simply all they've currently got (and indeed, I'm pretty confident this is the first time Lha has ever offered a class on Photoshop, however  elementary). So, having dispensed with the question of qualification, what remains is to impart in ten hours all that I am able of the knowledge I've gained from a ten year-long quest to believably place the heads of various mammals onto the bodies of various reptiles. This is, of course, quite impossible—but therein lies the delicious agony. How does one responsibly choose for others which parts of the whole must be done without?

Today marks my third day of class, and after this week I will teach the class to another set of students three more times, whereupon there'll be a break until next year. Now, let me state: I've been blessed with the quality of the teachers I've had in my life—there really isn't any other way to explain it. I mean, it not only defies chance, but in fact strings chance up by its laurels and jeers at it, to consider just how many truly caring, considerate, and talented teachers I've  been in sat in front of, since the age of five onward. I've had a few teachers who were apathetic, impatient or debilitatingly embittered, so it isn't just that I exaggerate the merits of those who've taught me. Teaching truly is it's own skill, and, having happened into the tutelage of an unreasonable number of people possessed of it, I've spent quite a lot of time contemplating pedagogical questions. A tangent: one of my oldest and closest friends happens to be one of the most innately talented people I've ever met; the guy can just create, and when he does, small marvels tend to be the consequence. I've harried him for years about passing along the trick, a request which has been generally met with his insistence that he has no idea how he does it and thus that he is unable to properly explain it. Now, to be fair, over the course of our relationship he's done a pretty grand job of it nonetheless, but then again I am, in fact, a very good student (that is, when I want to be....) and have tried very hard to learn from him. The point of my digression is just to demonstrate that it's just not enough to be great at a thing to teach it. Understanding what it is you know, what steps are required to know it, which tangential or supporting bits of information are necessary to support a deep understanding of this thing you know, and then being capable of expressing it all in digestable increments is a wholly other talent. And I admit—this is something that I think I can do quite well, or at least, potentially would be able to do quite well with a little more practice in patience and organization. In general, my exposure to such truly excellent mentors/educators/teachers accounts for a very significant part of the person I am today; I really, honestly do feel a responsibility to carry that torch, so to speak. So, with a very great enthusiasm I have undertaken the rather tiny responsibility of teaching the basics of Photoshop.

Tibetan people are quite shy and introspective; on the whole, loquacity is not a well-regarded character trait, nor is impatience or hastiness. So, those of you who know me well can appreciate that some restraint on my behalf is required to be an approachable guide (a euphemism, I know). The first day went wonderfully well; my lesson plan imparted all that it was intended to in almost perfect use of my allotted time. Yesterday, however, was something of a disaster—I just talk too damn much—and my 'thirty-minute' lecture ended with a confused group of students trying frantically to add color, with techniques they had witnessed but never used, to a large grayscale robot in the remaining twenty-minutes of class. But on the whole everyone is proving really grateful, if a little too deferent for my comfort (I am altogether squeamish about being addressed as 'sir'). But, for my first venture into education, I've drawn a pretty great lot of students; they are all incredibly intelligent, respcetful and studious. Also, I can't help but admire how willingly and reflexively they help each other, especially with understanding what the hell the white guy in the front is gibbering about. More than a few anglophones have advised me that my speech treads dangerously close to incomprehensible at times. Thus, to a group of Tibetans for whom speaking English is generally a fledgling practice, I clearly sometimes represent an unsurmountable deluge of unfamiliar vocabulary, bludgeoned enunciation and relentless pace. In short, good will really can overcome all varieties of cultural discrepancy, but not without trial.

Anyway, its wonderful to have responsibility again—to feel enmeshed in a social frame—and it's a relief to fel properly settled and thus eligible for routine. I'll see if I can't get a photo or two of the class, and maybe I'll  even get round to posting some of the shots I've gathered of McLeod... probably... 

Tempting Fate on the Mountain Face

Life in McLeod unfolds; we have our permanent residence now, a high-ceilinged room with a side kitchen and private bathroom, complete with a large balcony facing the valley. It's nice, but it's inhumanely cold for the moment, despite our space heater, until we make some progress on insulating the room; we spend quite a lot of time in bed, for the moment. There's not a lot else to tell; most of my time has been spent studying Buddhist literature, attending lectures given by prominent monks or else practicing my as yet lamentable powers of meditation (it is my experience that learning to meditate meaningfully is approximately as long and difficult as weathering a second childhood, only without the advantage of utter credulity). Since expouding on Buddhist theology and metaphyisics isn't likely what anyone reading this is after, I'll offer an extended anecdote instead.

Five days ago I did my first true and proper stupid (linguistic jiggering dedicated to Sam) that, following the ensuing segue I'll relate or, perhaps, confess [those who prefer succinct retellings, this is your cue to skip ahead]. I'm not precisely renowned for being the most thorough or cautious fellow, but generally I like to think of myself as an intelligent risk taker; since my history of escaping all varieties of tight squeeze by breathtakingly narrow margins defies chance, I prefer to imagine that it reflects some variety of skill. Indeed, a skill I've tried to develop. Some five years ago I was offered a piece of advice that came with an implicit challenge, the latter being an accusation that I was almost certainly incapable of appreciating said advice, and therefore that it would regretfully be many years before I'd likely benefit from it. Two things ought to be said about this. Firstly, I now realize that such a 'challenge' is almost invariably true of all good advice given to young people,  so the advisor in question was, in  his way, cheating, not clairvoyant. Secondly, since I was then twenty-one, it was nonetheless a perfectly sound and accurate prediction. Yet, by that culpable age I had acquired at least enough humility to guess that any understanding I imagined I had of my newfound  aphorism was inevitably inadequate or even flatly wrong. So I determined immediately to try and grasp that advice as early as I could, hoping to spend the least possible time without its benefit (and, admittedly, in a vain and uncessary attempt to prove my self). While exploring the rabbit-hole opened by this advice continues as an expedition unending, by now the meager insight I've gained has generally helped me quite a lot. On this occasion, however, I utterly ignored it, much to my detrement. Now, for the moment you've all been waiting for; what is the advice in question? I've introduced it at such length because of it's deceptive simplicity, and so it goes: don't take stupid risks. Innocuous, I know; had it not been offered with its challenge as a qualifying hook, I would almost certainly have dismissed this out of hand as obvious and uninteresting. But instead I've contemplated it rather at length, and so felt quite foolish this week to discover how badly I'd bungled abiding it.

In a nutshell, I have come to three ways of identifying a stupid risk: 1) a stupid risk is one where in the the magnitude of the smallest possible benefit is less than the magnitude of the smallest possible harm; 2) if the smallest possible benefit is less likely than the least possible harm, the risk is stupid; and 3) if the possible harms are both of enduring consequence and essentially a matter of chance the risk is  either a vitally important or profoundly stupid one.  Counterfactuals abound, I realize; they're not hard and fast rules. But in the economy of lived experience these investments have paid worthy returns. Therefore, and regretfully, I can categorically say that I took a stupid risk late last week. I am, however, lucky enough to have learned, rather than died, from it. Parents and other people of greater life-learnedness than I, please read the following and appreciate that I won't do this again, so lectures and subsequent instruction not to become dead will be quite redundant. Thus concludes the prologue.

I had been itching to get up into the mountains; I can't explain the compulsion I feel to climb, but it's insatiable, absolutely primal and often quite capable of surmounting reason and common sense alike. I suspect that it's genetic, it's just too strong, too much like a biological urge. It's very honestly like a sexual attraction, not characteristically, you understand, but instrumentally; I just gotta climb stuff. Now there are a plethora of trails to go trekking along, but these are too easy for my liking (they amount to climbing several thousand stairs, which has precious little sense of adventure) and also they're invariably populated, which rather spoils my Crusoe-cum-mountaineer fantasies as well. So, I just went off in any old direction, off trail and up the mountainside. Since you can always see the towns strewn about the valley floor, it's quite impossible to get truly lost. I had water and proper attire and so I felt as though I was satisfactorily equipped for a morning trek. Here's what I didn't do: any research into the local flora or fauna, tell Ninotchka where I was going, or bring any means whatsoever of communication with me. Nor did I bring the ankle brace that I brought from home specifically for my bum ankle. The rest is quite easy to surmise.

Before I come to the truly stupid bit, there is one marginally stupid bit I'll share by way of warning and a laugh at my expense: always find out what the local plants can do to you before you go traipsing through them. While I didn't find any sort of lethally poisonous plants, I did find a variety of thorn bush that seems to have quite maliciously coated barbs indeed. In the forests of home, I learned early on that with jeans and a sweater on, one can tuck their head in and barge harmlessly through thorns, and so, employing my tried-and-true thorn-traversal strategy,  was grievously defeated. Walking through them left me with many dozens of raised welts from chin to shin that burned exactly like wasp-stings, for about an hour. In a word, it sucked.

But this proved to be the least of my worries. Moving around on a steep rocky slope half-way up the mountain, a piece of shale (appearing much sturdier that it actually proved to be) shot out from beneath my foot like a scared rabbit and took my weight with it. Sadly, my ankle went in precisely the opposite direction, and moments later, we were all quite unanimous in our heading, which was  rapidly downward. Now, I wasn't on a cliff face (nor did I try to climb or navigate any without gear or a companion—there are limits to even my stupidity). But I was quite suddenly two kilometers up, neither on or aware of how to find the trail, without communication and with a very sprained ankle. Having already broken this ankle once and sprained it, oh, four or five times now, I knew quite instantly what I'd done. The initial pain of this particular injury by now feels like an old, familiar and recurring enemy from some existential comic book, and as it subsided,  I felt very foolish. To be perfectly honest, my very first thought was for my capacity to walk, and upon finding that it was marginally possible, my very second thought went out to the purveyor of the afore-mentioned advice. It went something like "if I get out of this, he's going to kill me".

The thing about an ankle sprain (or at least mine) is that my ankle will bear weight sturdily and comfortably if burdened in some directions, but buckle with immediate and excruciating pain when imposed upon in others. And thing about walking is, we do it altogether intuitively, shifting our weight amongst and between our tendons without concern or regard.  These two truths do not an efficient system make, and  the bearer of an ankle thus busted is invariably required to suffer the tender experimentaion required to adapt their stride to ambiguous locomotive restrictions. On flat terrain, a sprain like the one I had is a painful inconvenience that slows progress to a pitiful stumbling gait. On the slippery shale of a mountain side, the thing was all but completely debilitating and very, very precarious. The rest of the story (thankfully) isn't very exciting, though it was unduly long and painful. I managed to go down the worst of the scree slopes on my ass, occasionally finding a brief respite on animal paths that offered a gentler way down (there are thousands of these crisscrossing the surrounding countryside; the goats and cattle roam freely through town and mountain alike, returning home on their own each night). But I had no idea where the nearest road was, and so was locally, though not absolutely lost. Civilization was in sight, of course, but ravines, cliffs and other impassable terrain (at least in my condition) made a geographical labyrinth of the way back. I ass-wriggled my way to the terraced gardens of an Indian community living in the hills. Winding back and forth along the mountain face (many dozens of times longer a route than was the vertical path I travelled on the ascent) I basically limped along the edges of gardens until I found a pathway into the courtyards of a few homes. There I was discovered by some very surprised Indian women—I don't think tourists make it out to that part of the mountain much—who were kind enough to point in me in the right direction, wearing sympathetic and deprecating faces which clearly suggested that foreigners have, perhaps as a consequence of too much time not spent trying to survive, bizarre yet inspired ways of being completely foolish. In the end, though, it was an old man who got me straightened out.

A man of at least seventy, bent and utterly reliant on his cane, came across me limping my way through his yard on the return from his walk. He spoke exactly this much English: 'no English'. But my limping was obvious, and by repeating the name of McLeod Ganj and waving my finger around ambiguously, it was quite clear that I was sorely (pun intended) in need of direction. So, together, we limped at a pitiable pace to the nearest road, each complaining in muffled grunts about our respective impediments. The road, I should note, I would absolutely not have found without him, because it required walking a small maze of foot paths, make-shift bridges and hidden stairwells.  I thanked him with a deep bow, and limped home. The rest of the journey was a dreadful three or four kilometer walk back to McLeod that was completely uneventful and relentlessly lacking in ibuproferin.

To conclude: my ankle, initially half again as thick as it ought to have been, is now fine, I am fine, and in retrospect nothing but a painful lesson actually transpired. I don't think I was ever in mortal danger, to be honest. But I certainly could have been if the fall had been a tiny bit worse, or if I'd been in a slightly more precarious bit of the mountain, or if I had been much farther from town.  So, the next day I proceded to get a cell phone for myself, thus putting Ninotchka and I in permanent contact, and to wear my ankle brace a little more diligently. But, there you have it, a confession of a clear-cut case of a stupid risk, not to be repeated but worth sharing,  if not to save anyone the trouble of learning it by the same means, then at least to have a laugh and a worried sigh at my expense.

Awe-Struck for Realz

So we're here at last; Dharamsala, or more specifically, McLeod Ganj, a town a few kilometers north of Dharamsala and the current residence of the Tibetan government in exile.

We've been here, now, for three days but I haven't been able to write because of an unfortunate tendancy I've developed of acquiring a new strain of influenza in every new region of India I visit. I've begun to make a collection of antibody souvenirs. This is round number three, and the pattern is becoming old hat; arrive somewhere new, take in the sights, immediately become bed ridden for three days. Then, precisely as I reach the cusp of wellness, proceed to infect Ninotchka, who in turn takes her shift in keeping our bed permanently warm. In any case, today is the first time I've felt capable of putting sentences together in a comprehensible fashion since I've arrived.

Now, to attempt to explain the experience of arriving here. As I've explained before, arriving at McLeod Ganj has been a journey two years in the making, and has for me all the trappings of a proper family movie; personal growth, interesting characters, adventure and at long last, a dream realized. It's a three hour bus ride up into the Himalayan mountains, and my sense of surreal expectancy rose with the climbing elevation; it felt like I was on a blind date with serendipity, and as we approached our agreed upon destination, I was desperately hoping she would measure up to her  surrogate in my imagination. The trip up the mountain is nothing short of perilous, or if it's not, then it's relative safety is at least thoroughly indiscernable. Swerving around hairpin turns in a bus travelling at break-neck speeds into oncoming traffic defended only by a horn and the driver's reflex is, I promise you, wholly terrifying, especially when the bus rides the edges of  precipitous drops into the valley below  so closely one cannot even see the shoulder of the road. And yet, we saw no signs of any prior wreckages, and my writing to you currently is clear enough evidence that the journey, however harrowing, was safe enough. As a scenic bonus, we were treated to a couple of troops of monkeys hanging about on the roadside, cleaning each other and watching the traffic pass.

At long last, we arrived, and I simply haven't the literary skill to convey what I experienced, so cliche will have to suffice. We are in a historical moment wherein English, having suffered a rapid and abusive decline in the variety and character of its use, has had to witness too many of its most potent words fall victim to hyperbole, leaving them tired and worn thin, their novelty spent. Advertising has been too quick to spit phrases like 'awe inspiring' and 'majestic' at us, such that I think we've largely become jaded to the pure meaning these words are meant to invoke (and these words only refer to pure meaning, so their loss is worrisome indeed). Yet, this was my experience, and I haven't any other words to use, so you'll have to try and let them resonate for a moment if you care to appreciate the inertia of my arriving here. I enjoyed a deep and profound sense of wonder, a humility that shrunk my ego to a quibbling, voiceless speck, a true and proper awe. My breath tasted better and my lungs seemed suddenly unfit to accept enough mountain air to satisfy; as a philosophy 'must not blink' was once again reified. Transfixed by the visual flood of scenery and culture, I had no cognitive space left to concentrate on walking, and had to trust such matters to reflex (truly).

McLeod Ganj is a village of about eighteen thousand permanent residences built into the mountain side, and this I mean quite literally. The town is a vertical sprawl, buildings stacked on top of eachother in a staggered overlap, like so many shingles across a roof. Narrow stairways wind between them and amongst them in a fantastical array of labyrinthine architecture, walled in so tightly by the buildings they wander between that treading them leaves you with the illusion of navigating caves. There are 215 steps to ascend from the entrance to our cottage to the nearest street above, a lung-defeating journey we make several times a day (and one which is rapidly curing me of my habit of forgetting my wallet when I leave the house).  Tibetans, Indians and all variety of tourists populate the narrow concrete streets, and the artistry of Tibet bursts from every building, every corner, each window and stall. But the real marvel of the place, so far as I am concerned, is the mountains themselves.

From our balcony (and pictures, I promise, are forth-coming) we have a stunning vista of the Kangra valley. Across from us three distinct ridges of Himalayan slopes constitute our skyline, each one stretching up behind the other so that they look almost like two-dimensional cuttings. The valley walls themselves reach so far into the sky that they cause the sun to rise almost an hour late, so when it emerges from behind them at seven o'clock, the sun is already a bright, blinding yellow. The most distant layer of rocky spire is the first of the snow-capped peaks, the ceiling of the planet where even the Indian summers never reach., and having grown up in a media-saturated environment I cannot help but feel a sensation not unlike that of meeting a celebrity in person. From the nearest ridge we can often see paragliders, tiny specks or bulbous color on the skyline, floating toward us from the next town over, some forty kilometers away (yes; when you leap, you are so high up that you can cover upwards of 60km before touching down!). The temperature here is much, much colder; in the noon sun, its easy enough to get a sun burn in heat that approaches thirty degrees, but because the ground here never warms enough to radiate that heat back into the air, such that simply stepping into the shade almost immediately warrants a sweater. The valley is covered by pine and stubborn grass, which for all the world feels like home but for the kilometers of elevation.

Finally, the socio-cultural atmosphere of the place is not like anything I have ever experienced; there is an energy, an essence, or perhaps simply an disposition if you like, of gentleness. Or peace, or harmony, or maybe just innocence; it's not easy to pin down, and maybe it's necessarily idiosyncratic. The Tibetan people have smiles that spring to their faces by ancient reflex, and although the bustling tourist industry and encroaching poverty do indeed force a thin film of needy commerce and contrived cultural commodity over the busier parts of town, there is nonetheless a pervading sense of well-being and harmony throughout the valley. Certainly people do what they need to to survive, but the culture of Tibet has been vigorously maintained here, and it shows. In the Buddhist tradition compassion is absolutely central, and it's palpable here, the concern and care, the willingness to extend oneself on behalf of another, a freedom from the burden and turmoil of inward frivolty; it's inspiring and daunting all at once, the latter sentiment being an indication of how much I have to learn from this place.

Unlike the weeks of lolling around in Mumbai, in only three days I have already more stories to tell than I can or ought to fit onto the page this time round, but I'll make a point of sharing some of the adventures that are unfolding a little more frequently so as not to skimp on the good bits. We've already had the chance to meet some amazing fellow travellers, from Scotland, Holland, England, Switzerland Chile, and Australia. Suffice it to say for now, then, that we are here and we are finding the place to be immensely satisfying.