India – Harper’s Bazaar
Published in Harper’s Bazaar, By Rachel Ward
India, with all its maddening visceral intensity hurls itself at you from the moment you lose your luggage, hit the wall of heat, breathe your first acrid breath and get squeezed between two honking trucks on a road without lines, rules or driving licenses. It’s a big dipper ride with all the colour, glitter, fairground magic and music from go to woe. I screamed with delight and exhilaration for ten days and, now, a week back on to terra firma, I’m still trying to regain my balance.
Of course there are a million and one choices for travel in India, but having been twice before I was keen to get off India’s well – trodden paths of luxury hotels, monuments and busloads of other tourists to her lesser known landscapes, people and living cultures. Shakti’s Village Experience offered just that; an intimate snapshot of day-to-day rural life in the foothills of the Himalayas. Accompanied by local porters and guides you step out of the modern world to walk the paths and stay in the homes of what is still an astonishingly traditional and uncompromised part of India.
But if India is about anything it’s about her social contradictions and so to savor it all, there’s a lot to be said for topping and tailing the trip with a little Moghal pampering at the newest and arguably the swankiest hotel to grace Delhi’s accommodation options, The Aman New Delhi, a veritable palace of cool grandeur, jasmine aromas, floating marigold petals and hushed spas. From there it is a rude plunge into the post-apocalyptic world of Old Delhi’s railway station. The train north leaves late at night and, through the mayhem of sleeping corpses and artful stacks of hessian-wrapped and sewn freight I follow the lead of my elusive luggage perched high on a porter’s head. There is mild anxiety in sharing a six-berth cabin, but it is soon dispelled by a pile of clean cotton sheets, a feather pillow (curtesy Shakti), a clickity overhead fan and a clackity track.
The bond with your Shakti guide begins when he nudges you into consciousness at the other end of the track. It’s the end of the line and early morning in Kathgodam, (the Kumaoun region of the Western Himalayas.) The temperature has dropped 25 degrees. There too is our driver, ever ready with bottled water and a cool, damp towel. Make no mistake, I might be dressed in hiking boots and bum bag and, according to my travelling companion, looking like a Canadian lesbian, but this trip is not about roughing it. Every need and comfort is catered for and the charm and obligingness of Indian hospitality…? Well, suffice to say that at some point it even provoked a text message home along the lines of, “ever thought of moving to India?”
As we climb to 5,000 ft, on a single lane road with an endless succession of hairpin bends, I am merciful for the ubiquitous horn and the distractions of daily life. The concept of the pavement has yet to reach India so with shops, homes and lives open to the road, it ‘s as entertaining as reality TV. Just watch for the odd trajectory of spat toothpaste or cold tea.
Our walk from Almora to the first Village starts after lunch (a delicious panoply of colour, spices and salad choices.) It’s harvest time and the terraces, dug into every available foot of farming land are now blond with wavering wheat or neatly ploughed and the wheat, now bundled, lying out to dry on roofs. The houses mostly conform to a traditional design. A small, rectangular, white washed box with bright blue doors and elaborately carved window frames. As cattle and goats are often housed on the ground floor, a flight of steps painted terracota with a traditional ‘apian’ design is the distinguishing feature.
For the next two days we meander along paths connecting village to village, through rural country and life so picturesque that despite my ridiculous walking pole, I get so distracted by the beauty of a team of ploughing buffalo or women in fields or chasing monkeys or soaring eagles that I keep falling off the path. One forgets – living in the era of the raunch fashion culture and increasing tubbiness – just what we have lost in our over abundance and nose-thumbing feminism. The woman here may be confined to a life of servitude and oppression but aesthetically they are leagues in front. The dignity and femininity of the woman whether walking tall in a pink sari and half a field of wheat on her head or her bejewelled hands pulling on buffalo teats or herding goats in bare feet, what would otherwise pass as couture evening-wear is a sight to behold. But after two nights in their, albeit, spruced up neighboring spaces and sharing tea and rot (small round flat bread) with them in their tiny, earthen floored living spaces and observing their endless daily tasks, I could only marvel at the fortitude of these women in a world bereft of washing machines, Coles and new age men. But then, half the joy of these close encounters is to reconsider one’s own domestic life. One thing’s for sure, I fancy myself in a sari but I’m way too useless for this subsistence living lark or sharing such a small space with half a dozen in-laws, not to mention conjugal sex without a squeak.
After waking to the babble of Hindi chatter, the call of the cuckoo and the bleating of goats we feast on freshly milked coffee, roasted muesli and pomegranate, before heading down into the Kapcot valley and up the other side to our next destination, several hours drive away and 2,000 ft higher. Descending into the valley we leave behind the plantations of long needle pine, planted by the British at great environmental cost (for the commercial harvesting of its sap used in turpentine and paint) and head through the riverside town of Bageshwar. This route follows the ancient pilgrimage route to Mt. Kailash in Tibet, the abode of the Goddess Shiva and a sacred place for both Hindu and Buddhist devotees. It’s hot in the valley and, with the burning off-season at its height, smokey too. The river is full of larking boys, drinking cattle and women washing. We too swim and picnic on its shores. As always, beautifully laid out and endless choices. Particularly good is a delicious salad of red rice, pine nuts, coriander and sultanas.
Shakti Leti 360, the second part of the Kumoan Shakti experience is a permanent ‘camp’ situated on a spectacular ridge with 360-degree views. The camp is a discreet stone bungalow for lazing and dining with very comfortable individual bedrooms scattered around the ridge’s perimeter, each room offering different but equally magnificent views. Whilst one side boasts views to the white peaked Himalayan mountains, the other affords a birds eye view onto steep mountain terracing and up to the old oak forests and, higher still, the fabled rhododendron forests. We are just on the late side to see them in their glory and must climb another 2,000 ft, (a three hour, fairly demanding hike) to catch the last of them.
We start early to beat the sun, our tracker setting the pace, our guide regaling us with knowledge of the forest and its people in his perfect English. There are leopard, bear and wolves up here; we don’t see them and sightings are sadly rare and unappreciated by the locals whose livestock they value above what is to them no more than a pesky predator. Near the top, however we find a lonely shepherd, who tells us that he sees a leopard at least once every two weeks. These hardy men stay on the mountain with their flocks all summer. We offer to share our breakfast. He can’t believe his luck and departs with pockets full of home-made fudge. We see monkeys and the vast griffin vulture whose wingspan is over a meter, but, it’s the pom-poms of magenta, and pink rhododendrons against white peaked mountains and a deep blue sky that really impress.
Shakti 360 is a nookery in the heavens and there is little reason to go anywhere else but enjoy the views and fine Tibetan cuisine but there are walks to mountain villages in all directions or, if you’re lucky, as we were, stay put and have the action come to you. To witness the communal efforts of a roof being constructed on one of the Leti homes is to get a sense of how these communities work. Like an old fashioned working bee, family and friends pitch in and, after the added drama of blessings and sacrifices, are fed in return. We look on as a goat is dragged onto the roof, a shrine is constructed, prayers of gratitude are given and the goat duely slaughtered. It’s all riveting stuff and with 30 or more working men to feed, it’s as well the women have a huge cauldron boiling and many hands. It all seems effortless and after the cooking and cleaning is done, it’s home-made booze and hookahs (a smoke) for the boys and back to the fields for the girls.
Rural India is still shockingly patriarchal but, being in the depth of it all, you realise what a very fine balance it is to keep a country of 1.15 billion, mostly impoverished, people from imploding. I expect that there is always a Germaine Greer waiting in the wings to articulate a feminist revolution, but a country has to be ready to accommodate such a seismic shift. Without the women to haul the water, to sow and reap the crops, to husband the animals, to pound the seeds, to birth and care for the children, India would collapse. So much beauty, so much hospitality, so much food for thought, everything a travel experience should be, but, finally, I text home, “Change of plan. Waaay too spoilt, willful and noisy to be an Indian wife.”
Do’s and Don’ts
- Have a massage at the Aman hotel. Ask for Mia.
- Don’t open the half bottle of red wine in mini bar will set you back $200.
- Don’t give a beggar 100 rupes unless you can escape before the hordes descend.
- Don’t miss the bazaar in Almora. Very old town with brilliant architecture and authentic charm.
- Don’t miss The National Gallery of Modern Art in Delhi.
- Ask the tour consultant to fix you up with one of their fabulous guides for Delhi.
- Don’t miss the early morning laughing clubs in Lodi Gardens in Delhi.
- Fab India at the Khan markets in Delhi for new Indian wardrobe.
- For social and political India read Conversations with Arundhati Roy, for Delhi read William Dalrymple City of Djinns.
Aman Resorts
T: (91) 11 4363 3333
Shakti
T: +91 124 456 3899
