THE LAND OF FLYING LAMAS & OTHER REAL TRAVEL STORIES FROM THE INDIAN HIMALAYA

by GAURAV PUNJ

  Arunachal is also a place where most road builders are women, earning their daily wages under the NREGA scheme. They break the stones and lay the tar; the only man around is the contractor.

  7. Army. It’s present everywhere and in huge numbers. Mini towns have been established by the army, with a thriving market, a community park, a school, etc. Most of the time on the road goes in waiting on the side as army convoys pass by. Well, in the first place there are roads because of the army, so one shouldn’t complain. In case you were wondering where all the country’s expenditure on ‘defence’ goes, don’t look beyond Arunachal. But then you hear stories about Chinese preparation and the infrastructure they have and you wonder, is it enough?

  8. Before crossing the Sela Pass, while you are still in the greener side of the Himalaya, the best place to spend some time is Dirang and the Sangti valley. A wide, open valley with a river flowing through it, yellow fields on its banks, and yak breeding centres above in the meadows, it’s a gem of a place. It is fast gaining popularity as one of the best birding destinations in the eastern Himalaya but there is so much more to it. Dirang is a town on the main road but has a charm about it that for some reason is missing in Tawang. The nearby old village of the Monpas, with its stone houses and intricate web of alleys, has to be seen while it lasts.

  9. As you cross the Sela Pass, you leave the greater Himalayan chain and enter the trans-Himalaya, and the similarity with Tibet, Ladakh and Spiti becomes apparent, especially in Tawang and beyond. Tawang has gotten the lion’s share of the largesse offered by the government and the army in particular, and although it can’t compensate for the years of neglect, it has surely burdened the inhabitants with a problem of plenty. Everything is subsidized: electricity, solar panels, vegetables, kerosene, liquor, everything. More freebies, less expenditure. Tourism is now a bonus income at best, which comes with its share of troubles – service. Why would you want to work when you have enough just by virtue of being here, you get my point? So overall it falls a bit short on the warmth factor, compared to, let’s say, it’s spiritual sister, Leh.

  10.So am I saying ‘avoid Tawang’? Nope, just go with the right expectations and understanding of the people, their past, what they have gone through, etc. And don’t stay in a ‘hotel’ in Tawang, find a homestay or a smaller guesthouse and your experience is likely to be better. However, a couple of days are more than enough in Tawang; any extra days are better spent in Dirang.

  Epilogue

  Trekking — the Way of the Wise

  By Rujuta Diwekar

  The rhododendron theorem

  Benefits of trekking (OR how it helps you become a fat-burning machine)

  What to eat on your Himalayan trip

  The higher way

  ‘But the Himalayan terrain is tough, nerve-wracking and challenging.’ No, it’s kind, considerate and caring. The challenge really is you and your concepts about your fitness (or lack of it).

  There’s a reason why an ancient civilization like ours showed the wisdom to place the Himalayan pilgrimage at the Vanaprastha stage. When you are old or at most middle-aged, when your knees are not as strong, the strands of grey are visible, the wrinkles seem to be staying on your face … okay wait, don’t get depressed. It’s that beautiful stage in life where you realize that the body ages and changes, you don’t. The phase in life where you are more mind over matter. At a stage in life where you would have dispensed all your duties, enjoyed all sensual pleasures and primarily gained two things (other than weight):

  1. The luxury of time

  2. The wisdom to undertake the journey within

  These then form the only two prerequisites you must have to make a journey to the Himalaya – time on hand and the ability to get over yourself. (And this applies to everyone, regardless of age, gender or fitness levels.) The valleys, meadows, passes and mountains build the physical fitness; it’s a by-product of the Himalayan journey, not a prerequisite. So don’t ever let your physical fitness decide whether or not you are ready for a ‘trek’. I am sure GP’s writing has gripped you enough and you have learnt that trekking is just a glamorous name for walking.

  And if you can walk from your bed to the bathroom you are physically fit to take the journey to the Himalaya, albeit the GP way. And no, he hasn’t discovered or invented this way, it’s the way of the wise, these paths have always existed, frequented by monks, shepherds, sadhus, sanyasins, yatris, yogis and the like. Now people like GP simply use these paths or their wisdom of gaining height progressively so that the cardio-respiratory system can adapt, of moving through beautiful pastures, meadows, valleys so that you can learn how vegetation adapts to changes in height, wind direction and sun exposure, and through villages where you can unlearn and relearn your concepts of gender equality, history, wealth and happiness. In short or short mein bole toh – paths which use interesting teaching models and are compassionate towards both a weak body and an opinionated mind.

  The rhododendron theorem

  Hey! Sorry, my brief was only to write about how trekking or travel in the Himalaya helps you get fit so I am gonna just stick to that.

  Now, to understand how the Himalaya builds your fitness naturally, I am going to have to introduce the rhododendron theorem. No, such a theorem doesn’t exist, but using these kinds of terms gives rank 35-holders (or lower) like me a feeling of payback. So here goes, the theorem in two parts:

  a)The height of the rhododendron tree is directly proportional to the partial pressure of oxygen or availability of oxygen.

  b) The lighter the colour of the flower, the more concentrated is the haemoglobin (Hb) in your blood.

  You know, as you ascend the Himalaya, the rhododendron tree undergoes changes in its size and the colour of its flower. It goes something like this:

  1500-2200m: Tall tree and dark red flowers

  2400-3200m: Shorter stem and pink flowers

  3200-3600m: Barely a shrub and white flowers

  Now let’s say you are going from Mussoorie to Yamunotri, if you do that in just one day, and you can, because the road network is pretty good, you are likely to feel sick, tired, agitated and most unholy. The reason is you didn’t apply the rhododendron theorem (RT). You have to have at least one night’s halt at every variety of rhododendrons. You can’t just go from red to white and beyond white where there is no vegetation; you can’t skip the night halt at every stage. If you do that, your body doesn’t get a chance to adapt, physiologically and mentally, to the changes in the environment.

  We humans have a beautiful system in place that allows us to adapt and in turn get stronger as a response to the stimuli. The stimuli of high mountain ranges, low oxygen availability, cold, winds and unpredictable weather gives the body a chance to rebuild its lost bone density and musculature. It soothes the muscles of the heart, increases the Hb concentration in blood, optimizes the pituitary and the endocrine system, eases the wrinkling forehead, refreshes the mind and anti-ages in every sense of the word. But to do this you need to take the paths that have been in place since ages to optimize the body’s response.

  BRO

  The paths we take now are those built by the BRO. You know what BRO is, right? ‘A cat has nine lives, but not the one which drives’, ‘It’s always risky to drive with whisky’ – the creators of other such profound philosophies for the road, these are the guys who keep our borders safe, the army’s Border Road Organization. They ensure that there is a road that goes from Dehradun to the last village in India, Mana (beyond Badrinath), or from Chandigarh to the last village on the India-Tibet border, etc. These are the people who built this unbelievable connectivity, these engineering marvels, making it possible for convoys of military to reach the border in less than two days.

  Now the irony is that time-strapped tourists travel to the Himalaya, use these routes for photo ops on Rohtang, for sight-seeing, or spiritual sight-seeing (Char Dh
am in eleven days) or take the flight to Ladakh (military airport again) from Delhi and make a big fuss about altitude sickness, fitness and the general nonsense that goes with it. The problem is that others back home believe it, believe that there is a lot of ‘hardship, health issues and other hazards’ when you go to the Himalaya. So they stick to the ‘safe’ route and do Char Dham, Ladakh, Rohtang Pass and still suffer the triple H. Triply funny, isn’t it?

  The benefits of trekking in the Himalaya

  Travelling to the Himalaya bestows many pathological, physiological and psychological blessings on us humans but we must have the stomach to absorb and assimilate them. And you all know that the way to get your stomach to function optimally is to sleep well. Now you see that’s exactly where the problem arises and that’s my main argument for following the RT. The Himalaya literally and figuratively takes your breath away and can leave you sleepless in the nights. This phenomenon is called ‘periodic breathing’. What happens is that in the night when you sleep, your lungs actually slow down the rate at which they are breathing and every few seconds suspend your breath, as in won’t breathe at all. This happens to allow you to accumulate enough carbon dioxide before going in for another round of oxygen. Technically this is in response to the low partial pressure of oxygen (lesser oxygen molecules available per volume of the same air as compared to sea level) to allow the body to match levels of CO₂ with that of O₂.

  So this is your cardio-pulmonary system, your heart and your lungs, doing their bit to help your body cope with hypoxia (oxygen ki kami) and it does this by, and this really is my favourite part, building more efficient oxidative pathways; in simple words – burn more fat!

  Here are just some of those adaptations your body goes through:

  •Uses/explores newer areas in your lungs to accommodate for your breath – i.e. increase in lung volume.

  •Builds more capillary network all over your body to make it easier for your cells to receive oxygen.

  •Builds more mitochondria in your muscle tissue – again to help you receive more oxygen.

  •Increases the concentration of haemoglobin in your blood – again to absorb more oxygen to beat that hypoxia.

  •More red blood cells – won’t bore you with a technical reason here, but essentially as more carriers of oxygen.

  As a response to all of the above and many more physiological changes in the body, it becomes a much more efficient fat-burning machine. Come on, you do know that higher lung volume, more muscle, more mitochondria, more Hb means more fat-burning than ever before (muscles are the fat-burning machines of your body) and higher fitness levels than you can ever hope for at sea level. That’s exactly why athletic federations the world over have disallowed all records above 1000m, because in the mountains you are physiologically aided or at an advantage to perform beyond your best. The federation sees this as an unfair advantage, an advantage that will be hard to replicate at lower altitudes or at sea level and will take the fairness out of competition. So now you know why the legendary Shankaracharya planned for this at the Vanaprastha stage, I mean it’s with climbing age that the heart and lungs need some aid, na. And there is no better way to increase lifespan than to travel to the Himalaya. Our modern techniques of bypass, stents and angioplasty sound so nauseous and crippling when compared to this beautiful, natural and wonderful nature’s gift!

  Detraining

  Don’t want to burst your fat-burning bubble, but just like the body adapts to cope with hypoxia, similarly when you come back home and take to slouching on your sofa, sinking in your car seat, etc., the body quickly adapts yet again to this routine and detrains itself (within a couple of weeks). Gone is that increased muscle tissue, mitochondria, higher concentration of Hb and what not. Your fat-burning comes down to what it used to be (poor and slow). But it’s not all dark and grim – you can keep up with the physiological magic of the Himalaya by committing to regular workouts (at challenging intensities) once back home. This gives your body a damn good reason to stay lean, fit and young. The trick is to log your first workout within forty-eight hours of reaching home. Workout or lose out!

  What to eat on your Himalayan trip

  First let’s talk about what not to eat. We now know that to supply more oxygen to the brain (or else you start seeing things), muscle tissue, heart, lungs, in fact to every cell, our body will need to suspend its mundane duties like digestion. And it hopes that you show the wisdom of not eating processed, sodium-loaded food, which other than loading your stomach will also load the pretty valleys and hillside with ugly plastic wrappers. Just like garbage-filled hills take away from the natural beauty of the Himalaya, eating the contents inside that plastic takes away from your physiological adaptations.

  At higher altitudes, as the air gets drier and as the resting heart rate increases, the body gets dehydrated quickly. One of the ways in which our body responds to altitude is by storing more sodium in its cells, allowing it to hold on to more fluids. Eating processed food that is loaded on sodium disturbs the natural balance that the body is trying to bring about and leads to bloating and swelling, specially of the extremities like the feet and fingers. Other than coming in the way of your adaptation response this can just take the edge out of your holiday because soon this leads to headaches, diarrhoea etc.

  So when in the Himalaya, just follow these three basic guidelines:

  1.Don’t eat or drink anything that comes out of plastic be it juice or biscuits/chips/noodles.

  2.Eat half the quantities (eat smaller meals more frequently) that you eat at sea level and drink twice the amount of water.

  3.Eat local food – jeera aloo, dal chawal, rajma, momos, thukpa (so much better than instant noodles), kuttu ki roti, namkeen chai, local dry fruits like walnuts and apricot, dahi, siddhu, poori, etc.

  Just these three will ensure that you are in a zone to let the body carry out its magic work and turn your body into a fat-burning machine. This way you will get less tired as you climb and also get thinner.

  Some food items you can carry with you from home to optimize the body’s fat-burning abilities:

  •Ladoos

  •Chakli

  •Thepla

  •Nuts

  •Fruits and dry fruits

  •Mathri

  All homemade, of course.

  Some people who come on GP’s treks scold him for faking my involvement in planning meals on his trips. Which dietician in her right frame of mind would ask us to drink rhododendron juice (so sweet), eat potatoes (so fattening), rice (so much carbs) and rajma (so rich), they say? But come on, you know that not only is this misinformation about the nutrients in these foods, but also about the adaptation process the body goes through. Trekking itself doesn’t burn fat, but following the RT and eating local is what puts the body in the right frame and gear to burn fat. Honestly, you don’t need a dietician to eat right on a trek; then again, if you feel trekking is all about a free pass to instant noodles and endless chocolate, then what you need is a slap, oops, education.

  Whisky is risky

  Alcohol and mountains, hmmm. CWH is such a party pooper that we have a ‘no alcohol’ policy. You may not be cool enough to understand that right away, but there is logic behind it, not some random whim. If altitude slows down digestion itself, how do you think the body is supposed to cope with alcohol? And forget everything that you know, alcohol won’t keep you warm, it vasodilates, allowing more heat to dissipate through the skin and makes you feel cold, brazen and out of your mind. If you really want to feel warm, just drink some water, wear some woollen socks and go to sleep, the body will do the rest.

  The higher way

  So I am not really saying that don’t take the highway to the Himalaya, I am simply saying do it while taking the higher way. The higher way allows you a night’s rest at a progressively increasing altitude, allows your body
a chance to adapt and your mind a chance to relax. In addition to the natural adaptation, following the RT also allows you the time and the luxury to eat fresh and local, and appreciate how cuisines differ over just a few kilometres, and how religion and culture influences food choices. Food does a very special thing to your mind, it puts you in a zone where you are ready to withdraw. Withdraw from the external world, the phone, BBM, cricket score, the BSE, the assignment submission etc. and to move inwards. Into the deep realms of your mind, to the reflection of the high peaks in the lake, the smile on sun-burned cheeks of a toddler, the colours of the puttu that women weave in the winters, the smell of the wooden windows on the stone floors, and inspire an unparalleled joy.

  You notice that you have forgotten the days of the week, whether it’s the mad Monday or the lazy Sunday, it won’t matter to you, the mountain gods will still smile at you and you will smile just like that. You begin counting shades of green and give up this stupid need to number/count blessings. You feel like you are in love, for the very first time, and there is no lust, just an overflow of raw, pure, unmasked emotion. You cry at the sight of the morning rays over the Chaukhamba peak and you do nothing, nothing to wipe those tears off your now glowing, radiant face. Ah! The romance, the spirit of the Himalaya, it will hold you, guide you, lead you, follow you, like your own being.