A fellow poster told me I should start a thread about this, so I figure it’s worth a shot. For the last month or so I’ve been doing research in Himachal Pradesh, shuttling my butt around northern india and generally sticking to Dharamsala and its immediate environs, where I’ll be until at least early june.
So, ask away!
Does the locals have any equivalent of the mythic Yeti?
What, I live in the Himalayas and have not been asked the same question.
You been shelled yet? Chinese, Indian, Pakistani?
Are you a child of wealth?
Seriously, can you explain what you’re doing there? I think you’re involved with the Tibetan community in exile. How good is your Tibetan? Where did you study it? Are you a Tibetan buddhist? Have you met the big guy yet? How accessable is he these days? Do people therwe eat tsampa and drink yak butter tea? do you and do you like it? is there anything left from the British hill station? Are you doing any trekking? how ‘high’ are you and how high are the nearby peaks? Do you know how to do the tantric throat chanting?
Have you frozen any body parts off or had some near misses with severe frost bite? Have you had snow blindness? Do the locals often break into Hindi dance?
Do you ever get to Leh? Got any pictures of what it looks like these days? How are things between the Muslims and Buddhists?
Nothing to ask, but for people wondering what Leh and surroundings look like, visit my photos page at http://www.erbay.nl. I was there six months ago motor biking through Northern India for a few weeks.
Met a Lama yet?
Have you been on, or do you plan to go thru the Khardung Pass?
When you make pancakes, do you use the high altitude directions?
Excellent photos, but I was hoping for a shot of the town, alas.
It looks an awesome journey. Did you ride your motorbike from Srinagar to Leh? How long did that take you? Would you do it again?
Not many shots of the town itself, although there was a mask festival going on which you can see on the pictures. Here is one of the town gate (unedited): http://www.erbay.nl/DSC_1361.JPG.
Did a trip from Amritsar to Delhi through Leh and the Rohtang Pass. We tried the Kardung Pass too, but snow stopped us 500 meters from the top. It took us about 4 weeks. I would definitely do it again, if only to conquer the final lap of Kardung La. Kashmir and Himanchal Pradesh are one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been to. Almost did get snowed in on the way to Keylong and heard that the bikers two days behind us had the be choppered out, but that’s all part of the adventure, as was the altitude sickness.
I’ve noticed no tensions between Muslims and Buddhists when I was there by the way. I think the problems are more between the Hindus and Muslims. I’ve heard there was a missile attack on Srinagar only a few days after we left.
Two questions:
1): those Himalayan glaciers-are they all going to melt in 25 years (like Al Gore says)?
2): those mountain streams in the country-are they all polluted? I guy I knew was in the Peace Corps in Nepal-he got hepatitis from drinking from a stream (out in the middle of the woods)
Did you see any ice hockey being played? I hear they are all mad for it, and it makes me chuckle.
Did you visit Lekir? Lamayuru? Rizong?
Were there soldiers in town?
Did you cross the Zoji La pass?
I’m a linguist, and my big thing is experimental phonetics, so I’m basically here talking people into letting me stick things on their neck and tongue and having them try to read out long lists of seemingly random words and phrases while said uncomfortable instruments are still in place. 
I’m not a Tibetan Buddhist (or any religion, come to think of it), but my house is right next to a huge monastery and I try to take the opportunity to attend events that they open to the public.
I do speak Tibetan, but it’s still pretty crappy IMO- I have about two years of university courses, and I’ve been getting a crash course in local dialects since I’ve arrived. The dialects are actually the hardest thing for me, right now- it seems to be fairly standard practice to initially teaching colloquial Tibetan with the Lhasa dialect, since you stand the most chance of talking to the widest variety of people, and so my Lhasa dialect is actually pretty decent, but everyone around here seems to speak the Khampa or (fake shudder) Amdo dialect. Khampa dialect is pretty close to Lhasa, but a lot of the vocabulary changes in really random and unpredictable ways- case in point, the verb when you ask to take a photograph is “par gyap” in Lhasa dialect, but “par jo” in Khampa. And Amdo is basically incomprehensible unless you know what’s going on, but it’s a little more systematic.
Anywhoo, hmm, what other questions. I haven’t met the Dalai Lama personally but I did go to see him speak during Losar (Tibetan lunar new year), and I managed to get a pretty good seat. I believe he’s taking private audiences again, but I haven’t applied because he’s really, really busy and since I don’t think he would have a good reason to see me for 15-50 seconds I don’t want to waste his time. He is pretty accessible though- right now he’s giving his annual series of public teachings in Mcleod Ganj, and he tends to give short (or sometimes longer) addresses at random intervals during the year.
I have met a bunch of lamas, and a decent number of geshe (who are Tibetan dudes with the monastic equivalent of a PhD in buddhist philosophy- the high ones usually take 14-20 years to obtain). However, a lot of guys who successfully earn their geshe degree don’t stick around here: it’s a very prestigious degree, and a lot of the guys who don’t go to the tantric college afterwards either return to their hometowns to become teachers, get posted as abbots, or generally try to use their prestige to get posted somewhere more comfortable than Mcleod Ganj. ^^
I have met some interesting ex-monks as well: there’s a large community of Khampa (think nomads with attitude) guys here, and a number of them are in their mid to late 30s and decided to stop being monks for one reason or another. There’s actually one guy around here who stopped being a monk in his late 40s, which is unusual: most guys at that age would stick it out, but when I asked around I found out that after finishing his training the dude had been sent to a series of small monasteries to act as caretaker, and as a result he’d basically spent all of age 30-40 alone in small, unvisited structures. Since Tibetan monasteries tend to be both extremely strict and massively hierarchical he didn’t really have the option of protesting, and so when it looked like he was going to be sent on another 5-year stint alone, he returned his vows and went looking for better work elsewhere.
There are a bunch of soldiers in town right now, but I think a lot of them are on leaves that coincide with the breaks in school around here. There’s an air force base very close to my town, so we almost always see at least a few soldiers walking (or driving) around.
I’m a bit low altitude for the larger glaciers, and I have absolutely no idea about the climate side of things- I know they’re very pretty to look at, but you’d have to give me a technical degree and 40-60 years of living here (which ain’t gonna happen) watching the local weather before I’d be able to even hazard a wild-ass guess. ^^
The mountain streams around here aren’t that bad- a lot of people use them for laundry- but I would never drink from them. Food and water hygiene here are some of the best I’ve encountered in India, but it’s still essential, especially for us squishy westerners with no defenses against the local bugs, to be paranoid as hell.
So I eat at a lot of (trusted) restaurants.
I haven’t made pancakes for myself yet, but I’ve eaten them locally and they have that kinda dense in the middle, fluffy on the border texture I always get from using the high-altitude instructions, so I’d say that most signs point to “probably”.
Oh yea, and as far as the throat singing goes (it isn’t tantric in and of itself- there’re a massive number of chanting styles that vary from region to region, and some of them happen to be used in tantric ritual), it’s a funny story. I can do one style of throat singing, called Sygyt, but it’s actually Tuvan (and it happens to be basically the one form of Tuvan chanting that doesn’t have close relatives in Tibet). No matter how you look at it though, the religious chanting actually isn’t all that interesting musically: it tends to be very monotonous, and during memorization practice a lot of monasteries don’t even have specific melodies they use- everyone just sits there and essentially yells out the text at the top of their lungs.
Nomads, on the other hand, have awesome singing. The herdsmen in particular tend to know a bunch of good singing and chanting styles. But when you get down to it, monks are likely to be a better source for learning card tricks and ways to make fake farting sounds- they’re rigorously trained in numerous musical and chanting/singing styles, but it doesn’t tend to sound as exciting or pleasant as the secular stuff.
Hmm, I think that’s everything thus far.
Tuvan throat singing - isn’t that what the Gengis Blues guy learned? Paul Pena. Link: Genghis Blues - Wikipedia
Are there real nomads in the area? How is the cheese? Any good goat or yak cheese?
Any plans to go to Amdo or Kham? I spent time in Kham and loved both Kham and the Khampas. I was only on the border with Amdo in the Aba area.
