Reality dawns

Still unaware of what had happened in Ladakh, we set out early next morning for Leh following the misty valley of the Bhaga river.

Soon we arrived to the confluence of the Bhaga with two smaller rivers. This is a safe place to cross but in this season, water was extremely high and the bridge declared unsafe for crossing; traffic usually goes through the river and this being impossible, we took the risk and crossed the bridge nonetheless. I promised Soni to take some nice, action-packed photos if the bridge collapses under his Scorpio, and he (obviously very relaxed by my promise) made his way across safely. The funny thing was that dozens of other cars were standing, none of whom had the courage to at least give the bridge a try.

So far so good we thought, and made breakfast.

Now I also had the opportunity to admire one of infamous OK TATA BLOW HORN trucks from close and insde. They are dangerous, slow and polluting but without them, India couldn't exist.

This is how they look from the inside:

And this is me, playing TATA-wallah.

We continued on a deteriorating road, and other drivers told us too that the road is getting worse. But then the Manali-Leh highway is supposed to be bad.

It still had its beauty, despite the foggy weather.

It was here that we met a group of Czech bicyclists, the first and last friendly bicyclists on the road. When there was trouble ahead we usually stopped, or even turned back, to warn them - landslides and so on - but bicyclists ignored us, some of them not even muttering a "thank you". Maybe they think they are the toughest sort of travellers who have the right to be arrogant, or maybe they believed that they can always get through where people on 4 wheels cannot. Maybe that's true but not in this season, not on this highway... Anyway, Soni told me all drivers hate them because they are so slow and fragile and always in their way (probably the feeling is mutual - imagine you're toiling up to a pass at around 4-5000 meters and a TATA truck covers you with dust and noxious exhaust fumes AND horns at you till you get deaf). Besides, hitting a cow brings bad karma but if a bicylist gets hit it only means HE had bad karma, not the trucker... Anyway, the Czechs were a friendly bunch and I hope they made it through safely.

We passed Darcha, Patseo, Zingzingbar (if I'll ever open my own place it will be called "Zing Zing Bar"), made it up to the Suraj lake...

...Baralacha Pass, which was looking less Arctic than last year...

...and had a safe, if bumpy ride. The clouds were still up in the sky, although I hoped to get rid of them beyond Baralacha.

Here we had to stop and wait until a bulldozer cleaned the road from a mudslide. One of the road workers came up to us, turned out orignally he's from Gujarat; he was a nice fellow and very happy (of course) when I gave him a polaroid in exchange for taking his photographs.

Oh yeah, that's the hands who build these roads.

We didn't like his news, though. He told us something about very heavy rain and disrupted roads beyond Sarchu; we heared it before but the closer you get, the more accurate the news is, and now we were maybe 10-12 kms from Sarchu. We wanted to see it with our own eyes.

In the end, this was not necessary. A Mitsubishi Pajero from Mumbai stopped us further up the road, and although I didn't understand the drivers' conversation I could sense in Soni's voice that we're in trouble.

"So what's the news, Soni?"

"Mitsubishi Pajero, sir. Real four-wheel drive. I wish I have one."

"So do I. And what about the road?"

"No road after Sarchu. Bridges are destroyed. Ladakh is destroyed. Leh also destroyed. Too much rain."

"That's not nice at all."

At this point we realized we're beaten. Obviously we used up all our good luck last year, when weather and road conditions were (mostly) perfect. All we could do was returning to Keylong; a bitter thing to do after the hard drive up, not to mention the itinerary. It was still unclear what exactly happened in Leh (we even tried to find news on radio but in vain), and it came to my mind to spend 1-2 nights in Sarchu to wait and see if the road gets cleared. But then, after consdering all options, we decided to turn back to Keylong.

I think it was in Darcha where we stopped for lunch, or maybe just to buy cigarettes, can't remember anymore, but at least I could photograph something other than cloudy landscapes.

Close to Jispa we run into another mudslide. We had entertainment though, because a brave city car tried to play 4wheeldrive and got hopelessly stuck. Meanwhile a little mule caravan passed through the mud, perhaps to show us how vain we car- and road-depending people are.

We had company, too. I took a few shots of a lama, more accurately: Lama Palden from Zanskar (one of our original destinations); in exchange, and because he was a nice fellow, we offered him a ride to Keylong. He was more than happy to accept and while waiting for the road being cleared, we invited him for tea as well which makes him probably the only lama from Zanskar who ever tasted rooibush.

We had to wait long and to bid our time, I picked up a stone and asked him to bless it, so that I have a lucky stone; he did and did it seriously, praying for twenty minutes, sometimes with an expression on his face as if he would be fighting demons. He also gave me a necklace with a Buddha pendant and assured me of the magical power of the blessed stone; as a matter of fact I did try it once and it worked. Now, I'm not a very gullible man, especially not in India where religion is less spirituality than a way to keep people content and calm (imagine if all the 800.000.000 people living off less than 20 rupees a day would march to Delhi and demand rights instead going to their temples), but after Lama Palden got out of the car at his destination, we could still literally feel his presence in the car; usually we made dirty jokes, talked about women and like that, but not this time. For half an hour we drove without him, but still in his presence. A very strange feeling whch I can't attribute only to India, all the more because we carries other holymen later and - with all due respect to them - they didn't left behind their presence like as the lama did.

Anyway, on the other end of the mudslide at last a nice suprise was watng for us: another car from Rajasthan 4W Drive, carrying a Belgian family with a father of Hungarian origin - what a coincidence. It turned out that the company manager, Mr Sinha, tried to call and warn us but we were beyond reach, so he sent the other car after us (or something like that - probably they also wanted to try their luck at Sarchu). Now we learned the full extent of the disaster.

Pedal to the metal, we drove to Tashi Delek Hotel in Keylong, hoping to get there in time before all the returning tourists book all the rooms. We were lucky. Seeing the images from Leh on TV made us realize how lucky we were indeed. If we don't return after our first attempt at Rohtang Pass... if I don't stay in Keylong to treat my allergy...

We all watched the breaking news in shock and sorrow. Funnily, when I wanted to take a photograph of the sad faces and people realized they're being photographed, suddenly everyone started to smile. Almost everyone, that is. And then looking back to the TV screen and sad again.

My feelings were mixed... There was that very human feeling of selfishness, the feeling of relief over having avoided a calamity. I remembered a few genuinely friendly people I met last year in and around Leh, like the lady from the netcafé, the schoolgirls outside her shop, the girl in a yellow dress with whom I bargained so hard - and with so much fun - for some jewellery, the smiley old monk who reminded me of my grandfather and who was the only person I ever met there knowing the difference between hungry and Hungary. I was deeply concerned for them. But there were also the suckers - the Muslim shopkeepers trying to act like Ladakhis selling Buddhist stuff, the greedy people in the hotels, the whole taxi maffia with their stinking old jeeps and exorbitant prices, their threats to punch our tires if we dare to drive with our own car to Pangong Lake and Nubra. For their fate I couldn't care less, I even hoped it hit them hard.

And then, of course, the regret of not being there to document all this with photographs, not being able to help despite being a strong and brave man carrying enough medical supplies to stock up a small pharmacy. I heard the news about many foreigners desperate to leave Leh and felt miserable. Why couldn't I be there and join the few who stayed and helped, whatever way they could? That night took a serious toll on my whiskey reserve.

Luckily, later Dominique showed up and at least I could share one of my two bottles of wine with him. We listened to Burnng Spear and George Harrison, feeling like two old hippies out of place and time, and I took care to keep my depressed thoughts to myself.

50 percent allergy, 50 percent luck

I asked Soni what decent people like him think about all such misery, like the people in Ambala or the tailor and his consort; he replied, "50 percent karma, 30 percent government corruption, 20 percent no education". A very fitting defintion if you ask me, which could be further fine-tuned to include a healthy ratio of arrogance, ignorance, inertia, stupidity and superstition too, depending on whom we meet in incredible India.

When I saw it first in 1994 I very much loved Manali but now it was just another tourist trap, and staying in the backpacker's haven of Old Manali I realised I'm too old for this stuff, or it was simply the rain that made me hate the place. I was qiute happy to leave the place next morning (4 August, Wednesday) but a tyre had to be fixed and when we arrived to the first slopes of Rohtang Pass it was already 12.15 with the unavoidable traffic jam - trucks, jeeps, buses waiting bumper-to-bumper for a miracle to happen. The scenery was gorgeous, though.

Photography was challenging - the clouds were bright, the valley dark, making landscape shots very challenging for the 5D's dynamic range. As usually, it was a choice between blown highlights above and seriously underexposed areas below. I didn't had a tripod so HDR was no option. I therefore used a Cokin Z-Pro series ND4 neutral grad filter to slightly tame the highlights, measured the exposure on the darker areas and underexposed them by -2/3 or 1; this was enough to avoid blown areas in the sky and the underexposed areas are easy to light up in post-editing, either by shadow contrast in RAW Shooter or the soft light brush in PS.

We still could have made it in a long day to Jispa or at least Keylong but I decided to turn back to Manali; after all, we were not in a hurry. Back in town I used the afternoon for a stroll on the Mall and portrait-hunting; it was a pleasure to meet again a few people from last year like him:

When I met him, this friendly old laundry-man was ironing some shirts exactly like last year (hopefully not the same shirts) and still had this look, a mixture of enigmatic, annoyed and disapproving. Hard to believe that he put it on only when I photographed him. There was another man too who is a good example to show some of the challenges in Indian portrait photography: bright clothes and very dark skin.

Using a fill-in flash is tricky because it's hard for the camera to find the correct exposure, and besides, usng flash on dark skin like this can easily screw up the skin tones and result in blown areas on the nose and forehead. I had a Lightsphere flash diffuser on my 580EXII Speedlight but it's not really for outdoor shooting and didn't help me much in such situations. Again, taking a shot avoiding blown highlights in the bright areas and lighting up the face in post-editing was the solution (this one is not edited at all - the face tones could still be improved).

We spent the night at Hotel Mount View, a budget place where the atmosphere of bygone times made up for the not-so-classy bathroom facilities (meaning: when I flushed the toilet, the water came back from a hole in the plumbing - let's call it water recycling); in the evening I had a rush of loneliness and homesickness, as inevitable in the first days of travel as diarrhea, but painful nonetheless. I called someone who should know this feeling very well as he was on the road himself, and I wished he were here or me with him in Israel, but my call was bruised off with an "if you've nothing important to say don't call me, it's expensive for me". Actually there's a point to that... probably it's also time for me to save money on phone calls to Hungary.

Next morning, 5 August, we started out early, enough to avoid the worst of the traffic up Rohtang Pass. In vain. We got there early enough but the inavoidable traffic jam was already waiting for us, turning the misty Pass into a mud-wrestling between trucks and jeeps in the slow, depressing rain.



We slowly made up to Marhi, a little cluster of small dhabas and a temple, where we had breakfast for the body and Baba Ramdev on TV as food for the soul; I don't understand Hindi, and my soul remained rather hungry.

I had hoped that after the damned pass weather will improve like last year, but the mist prevailed, only occasionally fading away into pale sunlight.

But at least the rain stopped, and as we slowly approached Keylong the sun came out (later I wished it wouldn't have, for very inconvenient reasons). My left forearm was itching and when I pulled up my sleeve I saw to my horror that my skin is covered with ugly, disgusting rash - some already running pus. An allergy was all I could think about, even though I never ever developed an allergy to anything (probably it was not such a good idea to start the day with a Red Bull - paracetamol combo?). Even though we could have made it to Leh with a very long afternoon trip, we had to stop at Keylong and visit the hospital as I had the nightmarish vision of the rash getting over all my body by next morning. I took a few shots in Keylong though; then left our gear at a hotel and rushed to the hospital.

Keylong's state-run hospital is far better than one would expect. It was funny too, because a policeman brought in another officer who was allegedly drinking on duty and the young doctor had some difficulty trying to find out the truth:

"- What's your name, officer?

- I swear I didn't drink, doctor!"
Guilty as charged if you asked me... anyway, in the end I got two anti-allergic shots, medicine and a balm wth the advice to avoid sunshine. That was really cool - all I wanted was to escape the bad weather, and then I mustn't because going to the sunshine was verboten. Back in the hotel I spent the night trying not to scratch, applying the balm and watching boring Hindi news channels.

However... soon news were to turn exciting because that was the night when a cloudburst devastated half of Leh, several kilometers of the highway and two vital bridges beyond Sarchu. If we don't return the day before, it hits us in Leh; if we don't have to stop for treating my allergy at Keylong, it hits in the Indus Valley or more likely, in the wilderness beyond the Morey Plains. But for the time being we were safe and sound in Keylong.

Here's our refuge, as seen from the Buddhist monastery opposite the town.

Trespass, rape and kidnap at f=2,8

The first hills appeared on the horizon as we aproached Kalka, the gateway of the Himalayas.

Kalka is a typically chaotic and dirty town, renown for being the starting point of the toy train to Simla. Having our own roads, we were just passing through...

...until I saw something interesting in a roadside shop. A small girl was tending to her grandfather and I immediately felt drawn into this scene of intimate tenderness amidst all the filth, noise and chaos.

Skirting a cow I approached the shop and leant over a table loaded with underwear and socks for sale, all dirty from street filth and exhaust fumes, wishing my 24-70 were just a little longer.

While I was vacillating whether just peeking inside into their intimacy and keep them undisturbed or say "hello" for politeness' sake, the girl realized I was there and turned around. Oups - she was not a little girl as I thought but a midget.

It was her truly innocent charm that cast a spell on me, though, topped with the happy contentment on the old tailor's face. To me, that was pure love although I could only guess what their relation was. Photography-wise it was a tricky situation. I wanted to frame them with their environment, to include the old Singer and the word "TAILOR" to the right, but that would have made them less dominate the picture. Focusing closer, the corner of the tablet protruded into the frame. A flaw I had to live with I guess... any arrangement or instruction would have caused the tender moment to disappear.

The good news was that the neighboring shopkeepers seemed to genuinely respect and take care of them. One of them, a Sikh, literally ordered me to show them the pics on the LCD and when I told him "I'll give them a much better gift" he asked, "what? MONEY???" with an expression on his face that promised nothing good. However, it was my Fuji Instax I reached for and the polaroid did its magic once again, making them perfectly happy. In return I got a kiss as a good-bye present.

On we drew towards Manali, or better to Kasauli where we hoped to arrive before nightfall. We stopped occasionally for tee & cigarettes at a dhaba, a roadside shack selling basic food and chai, which was good opportunity to get more acquainted to my new 24-70/2,8L. I received this magnificent lens only a few daysbefore departure and soon realized how much better it was than the 24-105/4L I used last year. My piece of last year was obviously flawed since I could never get it to focus accurately but the new lens performed extremely well. I missed image stabilization though because my hands aren't as steady as they used to be and it's very easy to get a photo blurred at 2,8, especially with such a heavy lens. Popping up ISO to 400-800 and faster shutter speed helped to eliminate this risk, and shooting RAWs made it possible to reduce the noise to a decent level afterwards. Another trick was to raise my left arm to my chest and lay the camera on it instead of holding it by my hands.

On the road, I tried to do more of my favorite juxtaposition: wide-angle shots of people with their mountainous land in the background.

But it was shortly before Manali where I found treasure. Another small dhaba, run by two girls. The dirty, smoke-stained wall was a perfect background for portraits in itself, and the younger girl with her big eyes, resembling dark diamonds, was just the perfect model for a close-up portrait.
My little model liked to pose but her older sister disapproved and despite trying to display my best maners, the situation got tense. We quickly finished our chai and left. Two lonely girls alone in a roadside dhaba - can't entirely blame them for being a little paranoid. I asked Soni why she was scared. He said, locals think I will sell their pictures for lots of money (I wish that was true!) or worse, show the pictures to bad people who then will come and kidnap the girls. What could I say? At this point I was already believing what Susan Sontag said about photography being a form of rape and violence, and kept pondering over this until we arrived in a foggy, rainy Manali.

A quest to kill the Buddha

You know the Zen saying: if you meet the Buddha, kill it.
I did never really get the meaning of this till now. It means: you can't meet something you're not supposed to meet. It can only be an illusion, and as such, you need to get rid of it. Translated into photographic language: if you capture the perfect motif on your travel, delete it. It's not the real stuff. Talking about India, it means that beautiful Rajasthani man with his turban, the big-eyed girls with their nose piercings, elephants in the sunset, the pink hue of the Taj at dawn, camels in the Thar desert. But subsequently a feeling of deja vu sets in: all these perfect motifs have been photographed and seen ten thousand times. We take a photographic inventory of all what's interesting and exotic, not realizing it's just a visual delusion that needs to be pierced. The challenge is to show something that tells a story beyond travel experience and exoticism. Taking photographs where the location is totally negligible, because they have something universally human to them.
Bottomline: if you meet him, kill the Buddha. If you go to India, don't take photographs about India.
I wanted to test this theory. By the way, why India? I love the Himalayas, the scent of pinewood and deodar; I love the history of the Raj, you know, Great Game and all; and last not least, Indian life saturates the heart both in a good and bad way, making it an experience that never fails to touch the soul.

Besides, I had some unfinished business there.

So, after arriving on 2 August at Delhi I hooked up with Soni and his trusty Scorpio and we headed immediately for Ambala. I had hoped to see Priyanka again. I took with me her photographs, some toys and a reasonable amount of money to make her life a little easier, and being an incurable dreamer I even asked my wife what she'd say if I returned with an adopted little girl in my luggage. (She liked the idea.) We made our way to their shanty opposite Ambala's Maronite church.


Disappointment waited, the first of many as it turned out later. Priyanka wasn't there - she traveled back to their village in Bihar with her family. What could I do? I asked the neighbors to give them the photographs when they return.

In turn, the neighbors came with their kids and asked to be photographed; however, they were all sick, some of them with a horrible skin disease all over their fly-covered faces. A proud father lifted up his son to the lens; he started to vomit. "Hey man, he's sick" I said but the man just kept him up laughing.

They showed me another woman and insisted I photograph her. She must have been la plus beau du quartier or something because they were really pushing me, and I reluctantly took a few shots because she didn't look too happy.

I asked to see her husband, because out of respect I thought I need to talk to him; the father of the vomiting baby disappeared in a shack and I saw him literally kicking awake a sleeping man. Judged by his eyes he was dosing off a healthy amount of alcohol or drugs, and probably didn't even get my meaning when Soni translated my words about "thanks for letting me taking photos of your wonderful wife etc. I wish well for your daughter may she be a mother of a thousand sons etc. please take this teddy bear and give it to her when she's bigger etc...". Disappointed, impotent in my wish to make a difference and sweating like a pig in the scorching heat, I told Soni: let's get the hell out of here and thanks to God for air conditioning. Climbing back into the car I realized: it's not about getting the hell out of this place, it's about getting out of hell.

Passage to India 2.0

What doesn't kill you makes you stronger.
Or sick. Or just breaks your heart.