Manali was my favorite part of my last trip to India. Likely it will go down as my favorite segment of this tour as well. It wasn’t all bliss, though. It seems as if there was actually more snow in the surrounding Himalayas when I was here last May than there is now at the height of winter. The effects of global warming are strikingly evident here.
“It’s your country’s fault,” my friend Himanshu Sharma hisses at me. During this trip I’ve now been blamed for George Bush and his administration, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Catholic Crusades, the high costs of American electronics, bad television and movies and, now, global warming.
It’s sad to see not one speck of snow at Solang Nullah, a sleepy ski knoll 11 kilometers above Manali. Since Himanshu is responsible for training ski instructors and ski patrol for the Himalayan Ski Village which is being built on another peak above Manali, he had to improvise. He found a little village at higher altitude, Sethun, and moved his cadre of 70-plus would-be ski professionals to a mud-hut camp over there.
I spent one night camping in Sethun, then moved down to a resort closer to the center of Manali. My resort had the best steam room I’ve ever experienced.
Besides adventure sports and visiting local temples, there’s not much to do in Manali. The draw is trekking, rafting, skiing, horse-riding, rock-climbing. The Nicholas Roerich Museum lies in nearby Naggar. That made for one lovely day of sight-seeing.
I interviewed John Sims, who is the developer responsible for turning Himalayan Ski Village into a reality. I popped by the home in which he was staying for a quick introduction after conducting a phone interview and ended up staying for dinner and a birthday party. A former briggadier general tried very hard to convince me to attend Vipassana, a 10-day silent meditation retreat in Dharamsala that begins in mid-March. 10 days of silence sounds worse than hell to me and, also, I’m scheduled to return home on 6 March, but I find myself mulling over the possibility of actually doing the Vipassana.
The driver who chauffered me from Manali to Anandpur Sahib (the same driver who shuttled me and my friend Judy from Manali to Delhi last May) asked when I will return to Manali.
“Soon,” I said.
“Will you live here?” he asked.
Hmmm.
