Uttarkashi

The next installment of my India adventure:

So happy to be able to sit here and write to you – I can feel my fingers again for the first time after having returned from trekking Rupin Supin and Braadsar Lake. We ventured into the Himalayas of Uttarkashi in Garwhal, and I feel like a slightly different person after having returned.

This was my first trek and for the first half I was considering maybe having it be my last. There were thirteen of us plus two guides and a handful of porters on the trip. Our first campsite was next to the river, and when we arrived there was a welcome message written in marigold petals. We were welcomed by receiving a red mark painted on our forehead and having flower petals placed on our heads. I remember being taken aback by the difference and power of the white noise of this campsite compared to the noise of the urban world. The incredibly blue river was pounding in my ears – it’s power demanding to be heard, and cicadas were screaming in the trees… It was all completely natural, and yet I was set on edge by this unexpected cacophony. People go to the hills for the peace and quiet right? It was not until later where I found this simplicity. The next two days we ascended the mountain. I held my own the first day and was able to enjoy the vermillion fields of amaranth and appreciate how adorable the lambs were. But that night, I had quite the opportunity to build by character.

We were camped in a beautiful clearing, and the sunset was stunning – life was quite surreal. And then we went to bed, and I spent most of the night nauseous and extremely uncomfortable. When it came down to it, I couldn’t get the zipper on my tent undone before I had to vomit. When I added a bandana to my pack in Mussoorie, I never imagined I would be using it to clean up my puke from the inside of my tent at five in the morning. My leader was frustratingly unconcerned about my predicament and I felt very, very alone for a while. After the sun came up, three friends came over and helped me finish cleaning everything up. Thankfully, I had kept my journal and phone in a sealed Ziploc bag, and so they escaped this fiasco unscathed. My powder coat and other warm layers weren’t so lucky. I spent the rest of the week with the suggestion of vomit on my sleeves… The hardest part of the trek for me was the rest of this morning. I was running on empty, and I cannot remember another time in my life where I had to dig so deep just to keep walking. I’ve been thinking about how you remember pain. For me looking back I have specific moments that stick out. I remember melting onto my pack sitting on the ground when we made it to our snack break. I remember three specific stone steps where I asked, “How am I going to finish this hike?” I remember my roommate singing Hakuna Matata to me to try and help me. The rest is a cloud. I was so dissociated; my brain went to many new and previously unknown places.

I made it to camp, and was feeling a little better, but I didn’t completely recover until the next afternoon when the diarrhea stopped. I kept my head down. I kept putting one foot in front of the other. I kept on keeping on – and I did it. We made it to our third and highest camp site the next day, and I could feel the change. Something shifted, something clicked inside of me, and I was alive. I felt so alive and the stunning silence of the Himalayas made its way into my reality. I could appreciate the details on the mountains surrounding me. But I could also more acutely feel the cold. Night time was rough – I was wearing everything I owned and shivering my butt off, but I feel like now I can also better appreciate the spaces within my own body. The soreness from the hike highlighted my awareness of the muscles in my stomach and legs. The rocks and the ground allowed me to feel my hips, the cold showed me the space below my eyes and the tips of my fingers and toes.

We woke up at five am to begin our trip to the lake that grants prayers – Braadsar Lake. I would tell you the intention I carried in my soul and bones as we climbed to 14,600 feet and then descended into the valley of the lake, but then it won’t come true. I volunteered to be our group leader on this day, and I proved something wonderful to myself. This was the first day where I truly found my second wind, where my body found new strength, and I discovered headspace I did not know I had. This whole trip was one of the hardest physical difficulties I’ve ever endured, but it was this trip to the lake that pushed me, the day where I realized some inner strength I did not know I had. I stood at the top of the pass, I climbed, and I climbed, I washed my face in a glacial lake, I descended back to camp – I did it, and I am incredibly proud of myself for it. This trip was solitary in a way my other adventures in India have not been, and I discovered some things I did not have the time or space to contemplate before.

One of my greatest hesitations about coming back to the states is that I will lose whatever it is that has made me feel so alive these last months – I am afraid of falling back into a routine that was slowly but surely lulling me to sleep. I feel so awake here and now, and I absolutely need to bring some of the light back with me. I need to become some of that light, or more accurately just recognize that light within myself. I want to come back and simplify. I watched this documentary on Netflix about minimalism before the trek, and it came at a perfect time. I want to be a true materialist – to surround myself with only the items that I really love and truly enjoy. I want to par down my closest. I want to make my life more travel friendly. It was these thoughts that gave me new life as we trekked down the mountain, these thoughts that gave me some sort of agency, some sort of method, by which to change my reality back home in a way that will allow for the growth I’ve experienced here to take hold. Within the last couple weeks, I have been getting more and more excited about the idea of taking a gap year between undergrad and grad school. More and more I feel like I need to get out and experience the world. I don’t believe I am going to be able to engage with or meaningfully help any of the world’s problems without some more experience under my belt. I am so enlivened by the idea that I can keep experiencing this beautiful opening of the world to me – it is a feeling I crave and need to make happen. I want to work around the world and meet beautiful people and continue to grow. This idea is so wide open now, and I am so in love with it. I have people to talk to make it happen, but I am energized by this dream in a way I wasn’t when planning my succession directly to grad school with a house and everything that comes with that. There will be time, and I am so looking forward to living it all.

This trek wasn’t an education on the Himalayas for me. Yes, I saw the dwarf rhododendrons and the herds of sheep and the village children, but even more so, I learned about myself. I learned I am much stronger and more capable than I knew. I learned more about the power of the mind, that I had access to tools that were completely in my head and completely valuable. I learned how far my mind can dissociate from my body, and I was able to observe this space, and then come back. I learned to keep putting one foot in front of the other. I learned if I monitored my heart rate and kept it down, that I could better scale the uphill climbs. I found a different type of growth on this adventure. And I am really benefitting from being able to recognize this difference and hold it in the same space as the other ways in which I am growing and changing.

We got back to Mussoorie on the 22nd, and then eight of us took a weekend trip down to Jaipur and Agra and Delhi from the 25th to the 28th outside of the study abroad program. It was so great to go travel on our own and it was a ton of fun! In Jaipur we went to the Amber Fort, Hawa Mahal, the observatory, and the Jal Mahal. Jaipur is called the pink city, and everything is made of out red sandstone. I really loved it here, and I ended up buying a lot of presents for people here. My highlight was stumbling upon a yoga room in the Amber palace – there was some wonderful energy there. We stayed in Jaipur one night, and then rolled out early the next morning to drive to Agra and go to the Taj Mahal. The Taj really was magnificent, and it was surreal to be there. I loved the white marble with the floral designs, and my absolute favorite part was the way sound would amplify inside. Thousands of people were making their way around the tombs of Shaw Jahan and Mumtaz, and though silence was requested, the atmosphere that was created by everyone making a stray comment here and there turned into an eerie and beautiful echo. It was a place where you could feel some of the vibration in your chest, and so adding your voice to the room was beautiful – you couldn’t hear yourself as distinct if you were singing/humming, and so I circumambulated with the song Hallelujah on my lips (it was the only song I could think of in the moment to get at the beauty of the place, and I felt it was beautiful). After the Taj, we went to a restaurant called “Sheroes” which is staffed by acid attack survivors and advocates for legal change with the laws regarding acid attacks. It was an extremely humbling and powerful experience, and if you find yourself in Agra I highly recommend spending your time, money, and thoughts here. This weekend time ran together, and it was so wonderful. I did not contribute much to planning the experience, but I was super appreciative of those who did and everything went very smoothly. I am happy to have gone on this little excursion, happy to have been exposed to even another version of India.

I have a week at the end of the program before I fly back to Pittsburgh, and I have been offered a place to stay in Bangalore. I haven’t bought my tickets yet, but after this last weekend I am even more excited to keep experiencing all the different realities of India, and also excited to head south when it won’t be ridiculously hot!

Growing and learning so eagerly.

Love,

Regina