by Bruce Kirkby
But instead of taking us to the guest house, the tuk-tuk driver entered a maze of narrow streets, spluttered to a stop and demanded more money. Exhausted, soaked in sweat and desperate to get the boys into a cool room, I blew a gasket—which is inevitably going to happen sooner or later on a long trip, but never a proud moment in front of one’s kids. Ripping the duffels from the back of the tuk-tuk, I set off by foot, ploughing down crowded streets, scattering strangers as I went.
Christine raced after me, tearful boys in hand. “Kirkby! I know this sucks, but you’ve got to pull yourself together. Please, this isn’t the example we want to set.”
She was right, and her patience disarmed me. We both wanted to teach our boys that travel, just like life, delivers an unending series of challenges—and how we respond is what makes us who we are.
But when she discovered the air conditioning in our guest house was kaput, Christine herself nearly collapsed. Desperate to cool off, all four of us piled into the small shower at once, shoulders and buttocks pressing against mildew-stained tiles. A group of monkeys watched curiously from outside a window, perched in a strangler fig. Later, generous bowls of mango ice cream, served on a breezy rooftop patio, restored our disposition. Then we set out to explore.
Varanasi stands among the most auspicious locations on the planet for a Hindu cremation, and in those crowded streets, sobbing men bore corpses atop homemade litters. A taxi inched past, a cadaver lashed to its roof. The tang of charred flesh was inescapable.
At a cremation pyre, we paused to watch as a linen-shrouded corpse was consumed by flames. Eventually the skull fractured, spilling steaming pink brains on the ground, and I instinctively pushed the boys onward. But they would not be rushed.
“What’s the matter?” Bodi asked. “Everyone dies. Afterward you go to heaven. Then you come back.”
I glanced at Christine and she grinned. Clearly she’d been exposing the pair to ideas different from mine.
“I’m coming back as a honey badger,” Taj declared.
“Oh Taj, you can’t know that for sure,” Bodi retorted with annoyance. “It’s not your choice.”
“Yes, it is my choice,” Taj insisted.
Surrounded by scorching heat and pungent smoke, jostled by loincloth-clad men who unloaded firewood barges, the boys argued about reincarnation until they grew red in the face and tears streaked their cheeks.
Eventually Bodi relented, just a bit.
“Well, if I can choose, which I don’t think I can, I’d like to come back as a human. Or a hummingbird.”
* * *
Two and a half thousand years earlier—just nine kilometers from the riverbank where our boys stood engaged in esoteric discourse—a gaunt man gathered five disciples and gave a sermon that would change the world.
Siddhartha Gautama was born the son of a chieftain around the fifth century BCE, a time when iron was spreading across the subcontinent and elephants were still employed for transport. After spending his youth in the opulence of his father’s court, Siddhartha renounced his privileged existence, and at the age of twenty-nine, set out to wander the plains as a mendicant, seeking spiritual guidance from mystics and yogis.
Six years of rigorous asceticism failed to deliver the decisive understanding he sought, and eventually Siddhartha abandoned his austere path, his body in collapse.III After bathing in a river, he drank a bowl of milk offered by a villager and then settled beneath a Bodhi Tree with an ascendant moon in the east, vowing to remain motionless—even if it meant death—until he attained Supreme Enlightenment.
How long Siddhartha sat in a meditative state is the stuff of legend. Some accounts suggest hours. Others claim forty-nine days. But after a long and probing search, he glimpsed what he described as “the true nature of reality.”
Immediately seeking former ascetic companions near Varanasi, he shared his vision: if we can change the habits of our mind, we can change how life is experienced. Siddhartha proposed a doctrine of compassion, non-attachment and impermanence, which was meant to end human suffering in this lifetime.IV He placed no faith in an unseen god, instead suggesting all that mattered was the here and now. Finally, he urged his disciples not to blindly accept his teachings, but rather test everything themselves.
For the next forty-five years, the man who would come to be known as Shakyamuni (Sage of the Sakya), or more simply Buddha (the Awakened One), wandered the plains of India, teaching all who came to him, no matter their status, rich or poor, noble or thief.
Upon reaching the age of eighty, Buddha gathered his followers and implored them to recognize their own impermanence while continuing to strive for liberation. Then he lay down on his side and entered a meditative state, never to rise again.
In the centuries that followed, his teachings would sweep across India and Southeast Asia, flowing north over the Himalaya (where they blossomed into Tibetan Buddhism) and continue onward into China and Mongolia, then across the sea to Japan.
Today, more than half a billion people worldwide follow the simple principles set forth in those shady groves outside Varanasi, just a few kilometers downstream from where our boys stood arguing about reincarnation.
* * *
Thundering trains carried us onward. The hot season had settled on the plains, and in crowded carriages we crammed onto hard benches, reading tattered storybooks to the boys over and over, perspiration dripping from our noses while curious throngs peered over our shoulders.
For their part, our boys dealt with the jostling, heat and pungent odors heroically. And they derived great amusement from the local form of air conditioning: men’s T-shirts hiked up, exposing globular bellies.
“Dad! It’s really good,” Taj gushed, when he and Bodi pushed their bare bellies against the barred window. “My stomach feels icy.” So I joined my two beet-faced boys, shirts jacked up and bellies stuck out, as the entire carriage watched in disbelief.
Every few hours, passing stations brought a small measure of relief. Slender hands passed paper cups of chai through open doors in exchange for a wad of rupees, and our boys devoured this sweet, creamy drink. But finding food they could tolerate proved more difficult. Men in singlets raced through the aisles, selling greasy curry on paper, but Bodi gasped in horror after just one bite. “Way too spicy!” The local version of potato chips—cellophane-wrapped packs of fiery lentils and split peas—left their eyes watering. So we resorted to tiny bananas, which Christine caked with peanut butter from a precious jar in her backpack.
We paused to visit Taj’s namesake, the Taj Mahal, in Agra.V Of course we’d seen pictures of the marble mausoleum beforehand, but Christine and I were unprepared for its magnificent presence. Regretfully, our boys were unimpressed, and their indifference, coupled with crippling heat, made our stay fleeting. That evening an argument erupted between Christine and me, and after slamming the door to a room she shared with Taj, I spent a restless, lonely and regret-filled night lying beside Bodi in an adjacent chamber, listening to the tap drip.
The next morning, at the breakfast buffet, we hugged and all was forgiven. Soon we were laughing, for neither of us could remember what we’d actually been arguing about in the first place. India is famous for wearing travellers thin, but the pre-monsoon heat coupled with two months of unceasing television production had left us both in tatters.
We were granted an unanticipated reprieve that evening, when Wes’s permits for filming along India’s strategic northern frontier were denied. A week in a posh Delhi hotel followed, while he frantically chased bureaucratic approval. While we waited, producers—the whole crew had joined us again—arranged for an unending stream of activities: Christine took cooking lessons in a private home, the boys joined a Bollywood dance class and at a busy spice market, we all received temporary henna tattoos. Despite the challenges of being constantly filmed, I was also aware the crew afforded our family experiences we would have never contemplated (or afforded) alone.
Then it was on toward the perfectly strai
ght streets and leafy boulevards of Chandigarh, a planned city built following Indian Partition in 1947. From there, a narrow-gauge railway carried us into misty Himalayan foothills. Two days in a bumpy bus brought us to Manali, just as the monsoon skies opened.
A knock on the door of our stone cottage interrupted our duffel packing. A short man with coppery skin and chapped cheeks stood in the downpour, T-shirt sodden, baseball cap backward. It was Sonam Dawa.
This Zanskari native had guided many groups of friends on treks in the region, and months earlier, I’d arranged for Sonam to lead us over the Great Himalaya Range, on a 150-kilometer hike into Zanskar. Gentle and quiet, like most of Tibetan lineage, the reserved man gave me an immediate feeling of kinship.
We’d postponed the start of our trek by almost two weeks, due to delays in Delhi. And during this time, Sonam’s team of porters and horse wranglers had been waiting at the remote trailhead. Anxiously, in broken English, he asked if we would pay for these extra days. Instead of agreeing, Wes’s production team bartered over the porter’s already meager daily wages while Christine and I listened in embarrassment. Later, we privately counselled Sonam to stand his ground.
Whether such frictions wore on Sonam, or he was preoccupied by other worries, the forty-two-year-old appeared beset by some distant heaviness.
* * *
A computer in the lobby of our “hillside resort cottages” allowed me to check email for the first time in months. What a mistake. Amidst the piles of spam I learned a Calgary-based developer had recently purchased the forest behind our Kimberley home and was already levelling it for a subdivision. Nameless, faceless lawyers for the Travel Channel delivered a contract so devoid of humanity that it read more like an eighty-page straitjacket.
Christine and the boys shopped for monastery school supplies on Manali’s historical Mall Road, and I joined them. On a visit twenty years earlier, I’d found the walking bazaar crammed with donkeys, street hawkers and boisterous merchants. While the carnival atmosphere still existed, the street was now lined with fast-food franchises, luxury hotels, nightclubs and high-end fashion shops. We had witnessed the same thing in every city and town we visited on the journey, across continents and oceans. Was it ridiculous to worry about such change? Was it really progress?
Traditional neighborhoods were being bulldozed, leisurely laneways paved over and ancient trees felled to make way for glassy towers. Self-sufficient villages rapidly gave way to cities of concrete, crammed with busy workers. And an unmistakable sense of loss swirled in the wake. A tidal wave was sweeping the land—we’d seen it everywhere—bringing the very things we had left home to escape. It made me wonder if our journey was in vain?
“In appearance everything is fine these days,” writes Tiziano Terzani, a long-time correspondent for Der Spiegel, who himself spent a year travelling overland across Asia and Europe. “Everywhere people speak of nothing but economic growth. And yet this great, ancient world of diversity is about to succumb. The Trojan horse is modernization.”
* * *
The following morning, we crammed our lightened duffels into the trunk of a dented minivan. The driver, a stern man with a red tilaka (“third eye”) daubed on his forehead, slammed the doors, revved the engine and raced north, following the Leh–Manali military highway toward the Rohtang La—which, translated from Tibetan, means “Field of Corpses Pass.”
The road ascended steep switchbacks, weaving through monsoon-drenched forests of pine, oak, chestnut and rhododendron. Roadside tea stalls displayed racks of sun-faded ski suits. These were rentals, awaiting the hordes of lowland Indians who ascend this pass each summer, seeking a first giddy glimpse of snow.
Mists parted as the minivan struggled higher, revealing sheer rock faces and jade-green alpine grasslands. At the windswept summit, two enterprising young men were using a blowtorch to heat a vat of sweet coffee, which they sold to exhausted long-distance truck drivers. Christine and I joined the lineup.
Beyond the Rohtang the land grew drier. Shrubby junipers dotted the rocky mountainsides and, far below, groves of green poplar traced the banks of the churning Chenab River. Icy summits floated to the north. The driver shut off the engine to save gas, and we coasted downward in silence. The boys drifted to sleep. Christine and I stared out the windows, grappling with the enormity of what lay ahead.
In the village of Keylong, at a colonial guest house, we took what might be our final showers for six months, later drinking Kingfisher beers on a patio trimmed with strings of colored lights.
The next day, our minivan entered a parched landscape devoid of trees. It was late afternoon when the military checkpoint of Darcha appeared amid the wastes, a cluster of stone huts, olive tents and sandbags. A balaclava-clad soldier thumbed through our passports, then waved us on.
Following a rudimentary track, we ascended a barren valley bounded by dark, snow-streaked peaks. Eventually the minivan bounced to a halt beside a lone splash of green—a small spring. Two wall tents stood in the surrounding meadows, and at the sound of our motor, a dozen or more men burst out, wearing threadbare sweaters and khaki pants. Despite waiting for two weeks, these porters, with calloused hands and twinkling eyes, greeted us as warmly as long-lost relatives.
Christine and I set up our tent, while Bodi and Taj floated an armada of sticks in the shallow spring waters. A midstream boulder bore an odd hand-painted message: BATH 5 RUPEES PLESE. But who collected such a fee, amid this desolation, remained unclear.
As shadows engulfed the valley, Christine dozed off. With the boys playing merrily together, I wandered up the valley alone. Nothing moved amid those desiccated plains, not even a bird, and a sense of vast isolation descended.
A deep chasm appeared, blocking my way. Whitewater thundered from hidden depths. A small Hindu shrine stood beside me; on the altar a bronze statue of Ganesh, the elephant-headed remover of obstacles, was buried beneath nubs of incense and melted candle.
A chorten (or stupa in India) is the universal dome-like monument of Tibet, symbolizing the universe held in Buddha’s enlightened mind.
A rudimentary bridge of rusting girders led to the opposite bank, where a whitewashed chorten rose: the dome-like monument of the Himalaya, symbolizing the entire universe held in Buddha’s enlightened mind. Quartz pebbles and ibex horns littered its base, and sun-bleached prayer flags fluttered overhead.
After eighty-seven days, we stood at last on the doorstep of Zanskar’s Himalayan Buddhists.
I. Tashi delek conveys blessings, along with wishes for good health and good luck. It is often translated directly as, “May all auspicious signs come to this environment.”
II. Dust, soot and intense UV radiation have led to elevated cataract levels on the Tibetan Plateau, and these massage programs help support the region’s visually impaired.
III. These struggles proved to be the foundation for what would later become a key Buddhist precept, that of the Middle Way, the concept that neither extreme self-denial nor self-indulgence lead to realization.
IV. More specifically, Buddha preached the Four Noble Truths: life is suffering; suffering arises from desire; suffering stops when desire stops; and cessation of suffering comes from adhering to the Eightfold Path (right view; right intention; right action; right speech; right livelihood; right effort; right mindfulness; right concentration).
V. The Sanskrit name Taj loosely translates to “the jewel in the crown,” and once again weds Christine’s affinity for Indian culture with my love for surfing; Taj Burrow was an ascendant surf champion at the time of our second son’s birth.
2 AMONG THE ANCIENTS
Centuries ago, texts were discovered in Tibet describing beyul, hidden-lands where the essence of the Buddhist Tantras is said to be preserved for future generations. They describe valleys reminiscent of paradise that can only be reached with enormous hardship… Pilgrims who travel to these wild and distant places often recount extraordinary experiences similar to those encountered by spiritual practitioner
s on the Buddhist path to Liberation.
—His Holiness Tenzin Gyatso, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama
4 ACROSS THE DIVIDE
Breath billowed in frigid air when we awoke. Wooden fingers crammed sleeping bags into stuff sacks. Bodi poked his head out of the tent door and discovered boots and duffels coated with thick frost.
“Who spilled baby powder over everything?” he asked with sincere concern.
The television crew emerged from their tents looking exhausted. Their numbers had been pared to seven for the trek, but they still required a dizzying amount of gear, including twenty-three waterproof briefcases, six tripods and two diesel generators.
Pulling on puffy jackets and woollen hats, we sat together atop cold boulders, wolfing down curried eggs and chapatti delivered by smiling cook boys, while nearby, the Pony Men separated a mountain of gear into carefully balanced loads, whistling as they worked.
“Pony Men” is the historical name given to wranglers of the western Himalaya, but it is inaccurate, for the animals they drive are actually lithe horses. Sonam had hired six men from Manali and a pack train of twenty-two animals. Rake-thin Tsewang Yetok was the oldest wrangler at sixty-four, bearing a lone golden tooth, which he exposed with every smile. The youngest, eighteen-year-old Ramesh Singh, wore mismatched tennis shoes and a soiled rag around his head. His nose was daubed with zinc.
When the sun hit camp, temperatures soared. Woollen toques were quickly replaced with wide-brimmed sun hats. After smearing sunscreen across the boys’ cheeks, we gave them each a pedometer to measure footsteps in the days ahead. The pair were thrilled, dashing back and forth across the meadow, watching their step count grow. Christine and I didn’t expect them to trek the entirety of the 150-kilometer trail ahead, but we hoped the pedometers might encourage them to walk just a bit more often.