malaria, monkeys, and mountains

Yeah so by the way, I had malaria for a little bit.. but don't worry no big deal it's gone now. Basically I had a nasty fever last Saturday but conveniently there was a pathology lab below my bedroom, so I got a blood test right away and after it came back positive for the lovely P. vivax I got the necessary pills right away. It's funny, because we in the northern hemisphere think of malaria as this big scary thing, but at the clinic everyone was like, "oh yeah everyone gets it, lots of the volunteers who have been on doxycycline before got it anyway, just take the pills and it'll go away". Which was mostly true, the only drawback being that the chloroquine can have some nasty side effects so I was fighting nausea/dizziness/fatigue for the first leg of the post-Sambhavna journey (the whole waiting-in-Delhi-for-nine-hours thing); but I finished the chloroquine a couple days ago and am now eating lots and all seems to be well. Although I still haven't gotten my appetite back for Indian food.. the Chinese on offer has been good though.

Anyway let's see, on Wednesday night we arrived in Chandigarh, the magical city of tree-lined boulevards and controlled traffic and dramatically reduced amounts of garbage in the streets! It was basically created from scratch after partition when they needed a new capitol for Punjab, so this French city planner/architect/artist Le Corbusier planned it as a "garden city" with the streets as "vectors" with roundabouts for better traffic flow, "sectors" with residential areas, commercial, and schools, etc, as well as the capitol complex and some kind of wack monumental-type buildings. It felt like a world away from the dust and noise and hassle of Bhopal.. we actually walked along tree-lined paths! And there were flowers everywhere! And we could find our way around because the layout made sense!
So that was all very exciting, and wasn't even the real reason we came to Chandigarh.. that was the Nek Chand Fantasy Rock Garden, aka one of my second favorite place in India (after Taj of course.. but much more economical if you have to choose one to visit). This random refugee guy Nek Chand started building sculptures and things out of all sorts of industrial waste in the '50s I think, then the government "discovered" his whole little land and decided to pay people to work for him and make the whole thing into a park/tourist attraction. It was all sort of maze-like passageways of rock with tiny doors leading to more passages and open spaces with waterfalls, bizzarely shaped rocks, more walls decorated with everything from old light sockets to broken plates.. and then there was this whole huge section with all sorts of people and creatures made from basically everything.. my favorites were the people decorated with bits of bangles, or maybe the smiley three-headed giants. I'll put up pictures when I can as it's a little hard to describe, but I'm sure you'll get some good stuff if you google it.. anyway, that was awesome. We also went to the High Court and City Museum in Chandigarh, and wandered around the central shopping plaza with lots of posh international shops and some lit-up fountains.

THEN we took the train to Kalk, sat around for six hours, and got the toy train up into the hills to Shimla! The toy train runs on this little narrow-gauge track with something like 102 tunnels and lots of bridges and amazing views the whole way. Although the Indian tourist kids who felt the need to scream every time we went through a tunnel were pretty annoying, it was all in all probably the best train ride I've been on yet. Oh and the highlight was when this old lady was trying to cross a bridge with her cow, and the cow went on the tracks so they had to stop the train while the conductor got out and chased it off the tracks! The higher we got, the clearer the air got, the greener the vegetation was, and the more it felt vaguely Pacific Northwest-y. it even started to rain as we reached Shimla!

So now not only are we in the foothills of the Himalayas, with snow-capped mountains barely visible through the clouds, but it's cool out, it rained, and there are pine trees everywhere. But it is still India; for one thing, all the pine trees are full of monkeys, which LP warned us were a "menace" and therefore we've been paranoidly avaoiding them all day. On a hike up to the Hanuman (monkey god) temple this morning, we rented sticks which we tried to thump threateningly, and it was probably a good thing we were armed because we saw a monkey jump onto some German tourist lady and try to grab her glasses! Also they were coming for my popcorn and chai this afternoon, I just know it. In addition to fraking about the mountains and making lots of comparisons to Pac NW/Canada, we walked at least 15k today, up to the monkey temple and back, then out to the Viceregal Lodge (aka the castle from Beauty and the Beast) and a bit further for more views and back. And lots of wandering the markets and hiking to and from the YMCA where we are staying (yes it is fun, but we are hanging out with no boys, much less all of them).

Tomorrow we have a 9 hour bus ride to Dharamsala, which is the transport hub for McLeod Ganj where the Tibetan government actually is and all the tourists stay. So that should be fun.. I guess we've sort of been on a one day travelling, one day in one place shcedule but it's been good so far, I think we've done what there was to do in Chandigarh and Shimla and although it was sad leaving Sambhavna and our friends there, it feels great to be moving. And north! Supposedly it rains more in McLeod Ganj..