Little did we know it then,

but we were about to enter a temporary insanity zone. It was 8.25am at the Dharamshala local bus station and the Manali-destined bus driver was saying his prayers to an electric blue Shiva.

We left at 8.30am and drove into the mayhem of the morning.

We hung on,

and our bones rattled to every thrust and jerk, pothole and near miss. Elbows were uncontrolled and often connected with heads,

We had had such a charmed and magical fortnight in Dal Lake. It was time we fucked things up. The bus only slowed up a tad when things got really close,

otherwise it was an 11 hour near-death adventure, the driver maximising the g-forces of the black-cloud-generating-metal-box we were travelling in, racing at gaps in the traffic, breaking hard to avoid road craters or cows or people or trucks, and often driving on the oncoming traffic’s side of the road.

We copped dust and petroleum fumes as they streamed in the open windows.

This rites of passage into the belly of daily experience on a local bus in India gave us further insight into just how mortality-fearing society is in Australia. We felt this in ourselves. It was for us another process of giving up on what we thought was common and logical, and accepting what is.

We arrived late to a hotel that boasted online rooms in the centre of town. It’s true, it was in the centre of town, but not the town we had searched for and thought we’d booked. The room was filthy and didn’t in the slightest way fit the online description, but we didn’t care. We crashed and awoke to a bright new day.

We auto’d several kilometres to Manali and then onto Old Manali,

where we found this lovely, sunlit room.

While in India and other countries in Asia, we have combated the all night dog barking parties by turning the ceiling fan on a low settling and drowning them out with this white noise. While this room didn’t have a fan, it was situated beside the Beas River, which offered a more perfect muffling from a quite different electrical source.

In cooler Old Manali we came across old friends and didn’t realise how much we’d missed them. Old friends like dandelion and clover,

mallow

and apples,

and nasturtium, which we found growing beside cannabis, which doesn’t grow wild back home.

As we walked the streets and hills, we adults foraged a small amount of seeds and took a micro-dose for three consecutive mornings, once again confirming this medicinal flora isn’t for us. But this plant is for some, and Patrick wrote a poem about a notable cultural group who have made Old Manali a transitory home, and who like to partake.

Beside writing poems, Patrick likes to make things with his hands. We came across Tisha in her shop and we enquired about local Manali wool. She told us to come back in two days, and when we did she had just finished the spinning of a 1kg ball, which we bought from her.

Patrick cut some local willow,

stripped the bark and dried the branches in the window,

cut them to size,

put a rounded point on each one, and got knitting.

He was shown how to knit as a kid by his mum, and has passed this skill onto his boys. Throughout our time in Manali, the ball of wool and the willow needles accompanied us everywhere.

Like Woody’s cricket bat being a calling card for a game or a yarn, Patrick’s fibres of both wool and beard have introduced us to many, including Jimmy,

We were never too far from the source here, of everything. Of water,

of the valley of the gods,

of the givers of apples (thanks Raj!),

of Deodara cricket forests,

of pack anarchy,

and pack horses,

of snake charmers

(who turn trickster at the point of the money shot),

and of Gaddi people and their flerds (flock of sheep and herd of goats combined).

The source of our greatest love in Manali where for these humble, present people and their mythological animals.

We watched the Gaddi herd their sheep and goats through the towns,

and set up camp for the night.

We feel such kinship with Gaddi folk and the oldtimer orchardists in Manali.

When we tell people here we grow apples and tend sheep and goats their eyes light up, as did the lady gardening outside her house when we stopped to admire her magnificent creativity.

While much of India is going down to development dogs like Adani and his corrupted political mates, the soul of India remains in the land and the people who tend it. And while trickster energy is present again in Manali, in people and other mammals,

we met many who have not covered their eyes, blocked their ears or masked their mouths to what is going on. Road development, according to Sohan, who ran Dream River guesthouse we stayed at, is the main cause for the increase of flooding and landslides in the north of India, yet it is always reported climate change is the sole culprit in the news. He said, “the road workers are told to dump tonnes of boulders and rock from the cuttings into the rivers, raising the water levels, and the cuttings themselves into the sides of mountains bring about more landslides. The combination of the two in monsoonal rain times are wreaking havoc.”

Tourism and mining are big business here, and better roads mean more money for ‘development’. The social and ecological impacts of such capitalist enterprise in India are palpable. A local Manali man told us that since the 1960s the forest tribal people, the Baiga, have been victims of forced evictions by Indian authorities, often in the name of conservation. The Baiga also live where Adani and co want to mine for coal. With similar intransigence, concrete in India is the answer to all construction today, yet the intensity of rain, the steepness of mountains, and the cost-cutting by business means that concrete structures are forever falling apart. Great chunks of new road or retaining walls are regularly washed away or collapse. The more cuttings into a mountain, the more problems it causes.

It is the old ways being lived in the contemporary moment that charmed us most about Old Manali and this region. Not because we are romantics, but because we are also pragmatic performers of ancestral lifeways in the contemporary moment. Our methods are different back home, and our tools sometimes too, but we also make compost to grow more life,

store and dry wood for the winter,

ferment things,

carry fodder to our animals,

collect apples,

and store them,

and build in ways that don’t cost the earth.

For in our ancestral bodies and minds we are the us in them. There is no and. There are only lives embedded in the processes of lifemaking, in the continuum of living and dying. All the craft beer joints, wifi accessibility, bourgeois coffee houses, demanding tourists and major roads leading to lithium or coal mines will not improve India, as with everywhere else, these things will only impoverish it.

Life in Old Manali and its region is rich because of the attributes of mother country here,

and dangerous, offering a tender closeness with death.

Life here has stung us,

and soothed our bodies in hot healing spring water direct from the source.

We didn’t get to play much cricket with others, although a spontaneous game popped up in the town square on one occasion,

however, we did get to spend most days among giants.

Hoping you too have spent time this week among giants, dear reader. And among friends. Thank you for joining us on this leg.