A Winter in India

These three images were taken looking due north from the front lawn of our guest house, aptly named Snowview Resort, in Almora, Uttaranchal. In the upper two images taken at slightly different times near sunrise it is easy to see Trishul on the left and Maiktoli on the right. Now Trishul is about 23,140 feet above sea level, which is about one and one half miles higher than Mt. Whitney in California. The tippy-top point of Maiktoli is 22,110 feet in elevation. In the bottom image one can just see on the right edge a mountain named Nanda Devi, which is the tallest mountain in India at 25,400 feet or 4.8 miles above sea level!!!!! These mountains are pushed upwards about 1 inch per year. Think of them as the crinkle in the earth’s covering fabric caused by the entire subcontinent of India moving north against the continent of Asia.

As we are looking back on our months here, there was one day that sort of epitomized the way things go. This was actually back in January. The Health Attaché at the American Embassy had set up some appointments for us to meet with various people in Delhi. They scheduled two appointments in one day, the first at 10 in the morning, the second at 2 in the afternoon. Figuring that each appointment would be no more than an hour, this in the U.S. would seem like more than enough time to do both. Even though they were at two different institutions, both places were in the southern end of Delhi. But as the day transpired, it felt more and more like one of those children’s books, where you turn the page and a folded cutout pops up with a new picture.

Today we visited a community-run enterprise called Panchachuli: Women Weavers of Kumaon, which employs 700 women from the Kumaon area of Uttaranchal as spinners and weavers. It also employs a large number of men doing the dying of the fibers, and the packing of the finished products. The whole operation seems very well run. The women are working in clean, well-lighted spaces. Although there are many women in each room, that appears to add to the social aspect of the work. They have buses that transport the women to and from their villages. They are making woven items of lamb’s wool, pashmina, silk, tree fibers, or nettles, and combinations of the above. I’m not sure I would want to be spinning nettles, but I assume they must boil it or somehow de-nettle it before it gets to that stage. Much of the fiber is vegetable-dyed, but some is chemical dyed. The vegetable-dyed items are much softer.

Today we drove through beautiful pine forest to Jageshwar, where there is a large group of Hindu temples that range in size from 2 to 60 feet high and were built over a span of 1000 years. The “new” ones are from 1560. It is a staggering collection, made even more so by the gigantic size of the trees around it. Some of these deodar trees were 12 feet in diameter! They look something like larch trees on steroids. It is rare to see forest in India, and this was just beautiful.

The Archaeological Survey of India is doing a fantastic job of conserving and restoring these sites, and in the process, employing and training hundreds of people. We wandered around the temples for a while, and took the first picture of the preparations for a puja ceremony, though we didn’t know what the ceremony was to be. We went off for a hike across a little river and up the mountain. On the way down we ran into a group of Italian women who told us that the preparations were for a cremation. So we sat on the side of the mountain and watched from a discrete (?) distance. The second photo is the family seated around a large fire at the place we saw being readied in the first photo. The ceremony involved lots of chanting by the priest, repeated by the people, and tossing of flower petals, and pouring of water. While the ceremony was happening, a large truck delivered tree trunks ton the street outside the temple complex. Workmen carried one tree at a time, past the temples and over to the river bed, where they built the cremation pyre, as you see in the third photo. We decided not to stay to watch the actual cremation.

This is the picture of my new office that I am going to put on my website to advertise my new practice location.
David L. Baker, DDS
Dentist trained in America
Easy to find, walk-ins welcome. Payment for services is negotiable.
Every seat in reception area has a view of Himalayas. Sit-down, flush toilets.
Electrically operated equipment when power is available. Closed during monsoon.

We liked walking around Almora, but we only had time to see the main street called the Mall and the big bazaar area. I am sure that there are other dental offices in more upscale areas, but all we saw was this one clinic with a dentist’s name on the sign and two dental establishments doing dentures. In fact, one denture clinic was a combination dental and optical shop. Like everything else here in India the denture clinics were open to the street and the patients waited on a bench while the technician worked on dentures. It looked like there was a curtain at the back of the small store-like space where the impressions were probably made and new dentures tried in. But maybe the technician just hands the dentures to the patient while other patients give their opinion of the looks and speech clarity. There is no such thing as patient confidentiality here that I have seen.

This sign outside the local hospital in Almora looked like the choices at a Starbucks. But wait! There are no Starbucks in India (or at least we haven’t seen any). And the list isn’t the different kinds of cappuccino, it’s the List of Medicines. The woman looks like she is trying to decide which to have in her latte.

When we were in Nainital one of the professors where we spoke at Kumaon University told us that Almora was full of old hippies. Sure enough, they are here, hanging out at the Internet Café. Old ones, young ones, English (one sure sounds like he’s from Manchester), American, Australian and a few French and German mixed in. We have heard more English being spoken in this tiny village than we did in Delhi!

Today we left our little village and traveled back about 10 km to Almora “City”. Well, it would have been 10 km, but when we got about 8 km towards town, the road was closed due to construction. So as an addendum to the blog on way-finding, we can now add that when there is a closed road there are no signs, no detour, and everyone just points randomly up and over the mountain and says go that way. So we had to backtrack about 6 of the 8 km and start over. So the 10 km (6 mile) trip that should have taken half an hour, took about an hour. The road on the back of the mountain was a newly paved road and very good, except in one part where they were still widening the road. That involved dozens of men standing on a nearly vertical rock face and chipping away at boulders with chisels and pick-axes. Luckily none came down as we drove by.

We left Nainital about 9:30 and drove north 67 kilometers (two and a half hours) to a small city called Almora, literally perched on the side of very steep mountains. When we say we “drove”, we actually mean “we were driven”; we have a driver who fortunately is from these mountains and so is pretty good at negotiating all of the blind hairpin turns. You see a bit of the town, and a couple of stretches of the road in this photo, taken from a lookout point above our hotel.

The driver, Makesh Joshie, has been told the names of the hotels to take us to, but has not been provided with any directions about where these places are, and neither have we. This also happened to us when we were down in Kerala in January, and other people tell us it is just the way things are done. For people like us who live by maps, this is very frustrating. We do actually have a pretty good road map this time, and the roads we were on had boulders every kilometer, painted with the route number (NH 87e for National Highway 87 Extension) and the km number. The trouble is the route numbers are not on the map, and the km numbers don’t say where it is 29 to or from.

This morning we were awakened by the latest in Himalayan alarm clocks. A large boom as a monkey hit the metal roof and then clatter-clatter-clatter as it ran across. Kind of like being inside a steel pan drum during Mardi Gras. The ceiling of our room was 1x6 boards covered in corrugated metal; a great sounding board. After we were up, we realized that the tree just outside our window was full of black-faced monkeys. There were two mothers, each with a baby that still looked pinkish and couldn’t have been more than a week old. There was also at least one big male, and a bunch of teen-aged thrill seeker monkeys. They would go out to the very end of a branch, bend over backwards and just let go, flipping over while dropping ten feet down to the next layer of branches below. They seemed to enjoy the landing, making the branches bounce up and down.

I’m not sure what Naini’s claim to fame is, but I really like her lake. This lake reminds me of a very large Speck Pond on the backside of Old Speck in Newry, Maine except this lake has had human lakeside cottages for several thousand years. Just like Speck Pond the surrounding hills come down low at the lake outlet to produce a disappearing horizon beyond, as you can see in the image above. Nainital is the name of the lake and the town. It is quite the vacation spot, and during the British Raj it was one of the hill station towns used to escape the heat on the Gangetic Plain. When we left Delhi the temperature was 91 degrees Fahrenheit, and here in Nainital it was around 40 degrees this morning. It is only the first week of March and Nainital is at an elevation of 6200 feet!!