Mountain Smiles Continued

Ok, I lied. I wasn’t ready. At all.

Have you ever woken up before your body? Where your eyeballs are darting around behind your eyelids, willing them to open; your body’s as heavy as lead and no matter what signal your brain sends, your limbs refuse to obey? Yeah. Scrambling up a mountain for 6 hours induces that same affect. I didn’t try too hard fighting it though. I just laid there on the hard, unforgiving bed, enjoying the sudden awareness of every muscle in my body. I was reminded of a story I read in one of my hippy, spiritual books where an apprentice monk kept asking his master, ‘how does one be present?’ day in and day out, wanting his master to give him a plain language answer- but being ‘present’ is not a concept to be understood purely on an intellectual level. It must be experienced. Fed up with the apprentice monk’s incessant questioning, the master sent him away with a huge load on his back to the top of the steepest and tallest mountain in the region. ‘Deliver this load and you will understand what it means to be present’. The monk couldn’t see how that would help him understand, but obeyed anyway. It was the hardest climb of his life and his load was an absolute bitch to carry. Once he reached the top he was exhausted, sweaty, shaky and weak. He dumped his load and fell to the ground, relishing the end of his errand. He was so tired he couldn’t think of anything. Suddenly, he was aware of every twitch, pain, pore and fibre in his body. He felt the breeze caress his sweaty skin, cooling it down. He could smell the grass on which he lay and heard the subtle sounds of nature surrounding him. He looked around and his eyes widened in awe of the beauty. He smiled. He was present.

My experience wasn’t quite as romantic as that, but it falls in the same genre.

We had 5 more hours of trekking before we reached Chamba Town. Down hill. Which seemed like a relief…but once we started, we were a convoy of stiff-kneed, whinging Westerners. Ow ow ow ow OW OW OW OW OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWW. I loved it! I thought it was hilarious! But that’s usually my reaction to anything. Why take the situation so seriously? It’s only temporary.

The biggest test of the trek though, wasn’t the heat, wasn’t the lack of shade, wasn’t the protesting muscles, nor was it the annoying spring in Sahil’s step as he bounded from rock to rock DOWN the mountainside- it was waiting for the bus.

Karin and I trying to make sense of the Crazy Lady at the station. That's not me being mean! The locals told us she was!

After a 2000m descent, a hearty lunch and a pep-talk for the last leg of our journey to Orchard Hut, we waited for the bus. At the local bus station (in INDIA, need I remind you). In 38 degree heat. Encircled by locals (yes, we had an in-the-round audience to witness the Western Misery show). No seats. For an HOUR, where we, as Clo so eloquently expressed, ‘slowly descended into the depths of our inner hell’. Mother Jen, English Adam and Porcelain Joelle stood there stone-faced; Traveller Karin sat on her backpack with her head between her knees- given up; Tom kept moving Clo out of the way of oncoming buses; and Chetan and Sahil were fending off all the locals with camera phones, trying to take snaps of us. Me? I was there. Laughing.

Then finally our bus came. Chetan called us all to follow him to the entrance to get on the bus that had just arrived at the station. We all whooped and cheered and elbowed our way through the sea of Indians to get a seat on the bus. Naively optimistic, we thought we would just take off once we were all on, but the bus started reversing further and further back into the station and stopped- right where we were standing. And there we waited for another 30 minutes. Without aircon. *sigh. At least we were sitting? The latter wait wasn’t that bad. Tom lightened the mood by telling lame dad-jokes, which led me to give my mean impression of a leprechaun. Clo said I had the best Irish accent she’d ever heard in a joke. Coming from an Irish girl- BOOM! That’s a compliment! Then the engine started up and we were off on the most terrifying bus ride any of us had experienced. The bus driver was a Jedi using nothing but the force to careen his way around blind corners with only centimeters between the wheels and the vertical drop of the mountainside. We all held on, white-knuckled, for our dear lives. I was still laughing- but not really.

Mother Jen and I on the bus, putting on a brave face. Except Adam in the background. He had that face and variations of it the whole way.

Once the bus stopped, we all shakily disembarked, relieved to have survived the ordeal. But then were hit with a fresh wave of dread when we realized we had another hour of ascent up to Orchard Hut.

‘There has to be another way. I’ll pay. I don’t care. I’m out of water. There must be another way.’ Poor Karin. She looked like she was ready to cry. Chetan just ignored her pleas and said that we were at the ‘elephant’s tail’ of the journey. Just a teeny-tiny bit left. Once we started, I was really surprised by how easy it was. I guess because we’d been moving downhill for so much of the day, it was actually a relief on the muscles to be going back up. Kind of like turning around in circles for ages one way, and then turning the other way to feel right again.

‘There’s the Hut.’ Sahil announced. And there it was, emerging from the plantation of fruit trees, a gorgeous wooden structure, carefully built into the green of the mountain. It was absolutely gorgeous. It was like someone had planted a huge seed and from it bloomed a HOUSE. Waiting past the tree hammocks and more fruit trees, was Mr. Prakash. The owner and founder of Orchard Hut- his passion and dream. He was a friendly faced, old man with big, bouncy belly and fuzzy ears that made him look like he had steam coming of out them. He welcomed us with a huge smile and open arms:

‘Welcome Back to Nature.

’

Welcomed with a traditional Himachal cap and bindi at Orchard Hut