Captain Crip

Christopher Reeve Photo Contest Finalist

2011-04-15T01:42:00.002+05:30

So all that time in India has not gone for naught! This pic has been selected as a finalist in the Christopher Reeve Foundation Travel Photo Contest. Taken on a 118 degree day in Agra. I rolled 14 km. to get to that spot, not to mention a four-hour train ride in a sweltering vestibule (aisle was too narrow to get to my seat). Oh yeah - my right castor wheel had ripped off earlier on the trip so I did this all on three wheels!!

Please vote here: http://www.christopherreeve.org/site/c.ddJFKRNoFiG/b.6724011/k.A946/2011_Faces__Places_Photo_Contest_Places.htm

Thanks!

Remembering Fignon

2010-08-31T22:48:00.002+05:30

(Written in 2000 from 'The Bridge to Venice'.)

By the time I got back from Colorado my bank account was dry, and all I had left was a plane ticket to France. I packed my bag, caught a ride to O’Hare and the next thing I knew Jean Marie was picking me up in Lyon. Back in Buvin my bike was there, my guitar was there and my bed was still made from leaving it the season before.

While I was in Milwaukee I felt like a stranger in my own home. My friends all had jobs and were settling into the post-college life that would take them into their sixties. Once back in Les Avenières I could step back into my shoes and be a circus clown. Nobody knew any different of me nor expected anything else. It was like slipping into a cool lake after a long bike ride.

Sitting at the table when I got there was the world high diving record holder, Randy Dickeson of Minneapolis. At 6'3" and nearly 240 lbs., Randy was the biggest diver I'd ever seen. Normally divers look more like second basemen than Mike Schmidt. Randy, only 30 years old, was already a 15-year show veteran. I was wondering what he was doing at our little park, but he told me right off the bat that he was looking for a low-key environment to save money. He was engaged to a Belgian girl, Renee, and he needed to sock away money for the wedding and the honeymoon. I told him Les Avenières was the place.

I filled my Peugeot's tires and booked into town on my first ride of the young season. I arrived at the Platanes to find a brisk lunch crowd of old friends. The park was opening in a couple of days, and the seasonal workers were just making their way into town. Our thespian announcer Jean Pierre was there, and I told him of the new sketch we'd be doing - the carpenter's act that we'd done in Harderwijk.
He looked over the script and said he'd get it translated. Monique asked me if I'd brought the second edition of my French book so that I could finally learn how to speak French. I told her I had a new advanced book and that I'd be squawking frog speak in no time. I walked out of the bar, and it hit me that I'd just gotten the low down from everybody and I hadn't spoken a stitch of English. The year before it would have been impossible. Throughout the winter I'd kept my internal dialog in French and continued making vocabulary lists. When the words hit me this time, I was ready for them. I wasn't translating Shakespeare, but I was definitely getting business done.

I rode over to the park and found Jeanine Couty, the woman who teased me about tasting French girls at the season opener the previous year. She was getting her haunted house ready with her husband, Jackie.

"Big changes this year," Jeanine said, "We're not Avenir Land anymore."

"What?" I said.

"Nope," Jackie said, "Avenir Land was bought out by a Belgian company. We're now 'Walibi Rhone Alps' - it's not our park any more."

Avenir Land was created in 1978 by a group of carnival workers who were sick of moving around. Jackie and Jeanine Couty moved so often that they were forced to put their two daughters in boarding schools and drive hundreds of miles every Friday and Sunday to pick them up and drop them off. The Avenir Land Cooperative bought out Le Grand Maree, a swamp in the valley just below the Les Avenières ridge. In the early 17th Century Napoleon trained his troops there, but when the carnies bought it out, it was a mosquito-ridden hell. They drained the swamp and put up the park, but all the rides and attractions were privately owned, and they charged a separate fee. A few years later they enclosed the park and started charging a small entrance fee.

Now that the Walibi Corporation had taken over, the fee would skyrocket, as would the size of the park. Over the winter Walibi had already built a huge new roller coaster and a gigantic water ride. My quaint little park was hitting the big time.
The improvements had started, but there were still years of development before it became a major theme park. Serge and Françoise were kept on as directors, and Jean Marie was still chief of security. All the park workers sported brand new orange, yellow and blue uniforms whereas the year before they wore whatever they wanted. Jackie, Jeanine and a few of the original Avenir Land owners were allowed to keep their shops and attractions, but it wouldn't be long before they would be bought out by the new Belgian conglomerate.

Our job, on the other hand, hadn't changed a bit. Except for Randy, our team remained basically in tact. Robert, the acrobatic skier, had taken a job in Germany, but the other two Canadians, Denny and Richard, were back. Jen had to finish her finals at U of I, and then she'd be joining us. Everyone in town had thought that Ted was one of us but he wouldn't be making it back. He'd stayed on in Les Avenières until the end of the summer, but his headaches and double vision didn't go away. He returned to the States, had a couple of operations on his eyes, and started working as an instructor for Outward Bound. The further away from the city the better it was for Ted. I was really hoping John McGhee would reconsider and come back for a full season, but he had to pay off his MBA and had taken a job with a software developer in Houston.

With the ladder moorings already in place and the pool already built, the show went up in two short days. We were ready to rehearse, when from out of the blue, our gregarious announcer, Jean Pierre, quit to work with a theater group in neighboring La Tour du Pin. I begged him to come back, but it was pretty difficult for a man with his background to do amusement park shtick. My next choice was Chanal, the Yul Brenner look-alike who had gotten- his thumb blown off the year before we came to Les Avenières. But Chanal had even more theater credentials than Jean Pierre and was in demand all around the region. Theater in France is like Little League in America. Almost everyone's been in a play. The park put an ad in the paper and Philippe, a carnival hawker from Dijon, joined us.

I spent one afternoon with Philippe and immediately knew he would fit. He was a smart, good-looking guy with a mischievous attitude and a great microphone voice. We took Philippe and his girlfriend, Natalie, to the Platanes the first night in town and got the two of them wrecked on pastis. They were part of the team, and we never had a problem with them all summer long.

Chip, representing the WWP owners, flew in from Hong Kong for the opener, which was a little rough considering we only had one day to rehearse a comedy with a lot of timing and dozens of pratfalls and gags. We were only working weekends and Wednesdays during the opening month so we had plenty of time to smooth things out.
During the first season I had to train all the divers and do most of the stunts myself. But the second season started with five solid veterans who had no ambition to do anything but get in the groove and make money. The four of us who had been there the year before were already established in town, and Randy was just happy if he could finish the day and drop a few Heinekens down his gut.

The scene at the Platanes was as crazy as ever with the old faces still there and the new crop of lifeguards and park workers in town taking the place of those who had moved on. There was no Ted to hang around and do stuff with at home, so I started spending a lot of time in Buvin at Vincent the drummer's house. It was a completely French environment with four really interesting people. Vincent's mother, Rosette, was a French teacher, who at the age of 30 took off with a 17-year-old student, Pascal. Seven years later they were still together. Vincent's 19-year-old sister Cecile, although quite quirky, was probably the best looking girl in Les Avenières.

When I wasn't working or catching up on journal writing, I spent a lot of time with Jackie and Jeanine. Whenever I was too tired to write or too hung over from a big night at the Platanes, I would take a seat next to Jeanine at her ticket booth for the haunted house. They also owned the house of mirrors in the same building. I would man the gate for the house of mirrors, and Jeanine would take the haunted house. Jackie built both of them from scratch and always had plenty of upkeep to do on them. He was also putting the finishing touches on the house he'd built on the highest ridge above Les Avenières. Their two grown daughters, Krystel and Nadege, worked for Jackie's other business, portable food carts that he operated at the market in Annemasse, the French suburb of Geneva.

Jackie and Jeanine took in Jen and me as their long lost American children. Jeanine would do our laundry and have us up to dinner once a week. Every so often she would invite the entire team and cook up six and seven course Savoyarde feasts that lasted long into the night. We would offer to bring something but she always refused. "You wouldn't know what to bring!" she insisted.

It would start with a dry sausage appetizer, then move on to fresh vegetables followed by potatoes au gratin, then steak, then salad, then cheese, then two or three desserts. We started drinking pastis before dinner, then went through bottle after bottle of red wine topping it off with a stiff shot of digestive liquer before rolling home. Jeanine tried to get us drunk, but with that much food to consume, it was impossible. She just got us fat.

The first summer in Les Avenières the team spoke English at the house and backstage, but this year, Randy was the only one not speaking French. His Belgian girlfriend Renee also spoke French, so often we would be laughing hard, and he would get pissed and demand that someone translate. It never came off funny after being translated so he assumed we were making fun of him. Before long we just started making fun of him.

Sometime around the beginning of June, Randy went away for a weekend, and when he returned I realized I hadn't spoken any English in 48 hours. I had a long way to go, but I no longer got stress headaches from conversations at the Platanes. With certain people like Jeanine and Rosette, I could go for hours without any troubles. The temptation to slack off was there, but when I watched TV or read the paper there were always dozens of words I didn't know. The base was set, but my dictionary was still one of my best friends.

From the beginning of June I stopped buying the English-language Herald Tribune and only bought L'Equipe, the French sports daily. The Tour of France was just around the corner, and I wanted to be up on it. Andy Hampsten had held on to the fourth place he captured in Grenoble, and I hoped he would make a run at the title. I'd hate to not know what was going on if an American had a shot at winning it.
The week before the race started, newspaper racks began filling up with Tour de France previews. I bought a few of them and was surprised to learn that Hampsten wasn't even considered a favorite. Even though he'd had a brilliant tour the year before, he was considered a pure climber and not someone who competed in the contra la montre or "race against the clock" stages where the riders do a shorter course one at a time.

The big favorites remained the reigning champion Pedro Delgado of Spain and two-time winner Laurent Fignon of France. Fignon had had a series of setbacks since winning back-to-back titles at the ages of 23 and 24. He'd won the Tour of Italy, however, and appeared to be in great form. Also listed were the great Dutch climbing duo of Stephen Rooks and the needle-thin Gert Jan Theunisse. Each magazine would list their potential top twenty as well as their favorites to take the sprint title and the King of the Mountains title.

The one name that was left out of every publication was that of the 1986 Champion, the American Greg Lemond. Lemond had been shot by his brother-in-law in a hunting accident the year after he'd won the race. Since then he'd bounced from team to team, never getting a result with any of them. Two days before the race, Samuel Abt, the only American reporter who ever got a cycling column printed in the Herald Tribune, wrote a small piece on the trials and tribulations of Lemond. Three years after becoming the world's greatest cyclist, Lemond was struggling with a second tier Belgian Team, ADR.

The only name rider on the team was the great Belgian sprinter, Eddy Plankaert - not someone who could help him climb the monstrous passes of the Pyrenees and the Alps.

Jackie had been a competitive cyclist in his younger days and was a Tour de France fanatic. From the day the race started until the finish in Paris, Jackie sat in the ticket booth of the haunted house and watched every second on a small color TV. The day before the tour started, I slid in behind Jeanine and watched one of the big pre-tour hype shows. Jeanine rigged up the booth so that all three of us could watch. She might as well have loaded up a syringe and shot me full of heroin. I was hooked after the first ten minutes.

I always had difficulty understanding French television, but after reading all the cycling articles I knew enough vocabulary to understand the bike commentators. Dutchman Erik Breukink won the opening stage, but the big surprise was that Delgado was nowhere to be seen when the starter called his number. His trainer had gotten the start times mixed up, and the great Pedro was still warming up on a stationary bike when his time started ticking off. Finally a fan screamed at him to get on the course but by that time he was almost three minutes late. The yellow jersey from '88 was starting the '89 Tour in dead last place.

Hampsten was way back in the pack, but Jackie assured me that he would make up all that time in the mountains. I didn't even think to look for Lemond. The next day two stages took place, a 150 km circuit as well as a 50 km team time trial. In the team time trials, each team takes off three minutes apart and rides over the course at breakneck speed with each teammate taking a turn at the front of the line. They pull for all their worth until the pace slows and another teammate comes to the front and pulls the train. Even a good rider can lose a ton of time if his team rides poorly.

Hampsten's 7-11 team finished in the middle of the pack, but Fignon's Super U Team won the stage, and Delgado's Reynolds team was right behind. I'd been reading all the cycling articles since April, but at that point I couldn't even remember which team Greg Lemond rode for.

The first couple of days went by with virtually no change in the standings. The opening stages are long flat races in which the pack, or peloton, stays grouped together. There are usually some breakaways, but the peloton travels much faster than individual or small groups and tend to pick up the breakaways, leading to dramatic mass sprints. If a rider finishes in the group he is credited with the same overall time as the winner. That insures the safe arrival of most of the peloton - except for the fierce sprint battle for the prestigious stage wins. The riders in contention for the overall lead are happy just to make it through the first week without ending up in one of the Tour's infamous pileups.
On the fifth day of the Tour came the first contra la montre, a 78-kilometer (48 mile) individual time trial from Dinard to Rennes. The riders take off individually in reverse order of their overall time. The papers expected Delgado to rise up the standings but were mostly looking for Fignon to regain the Yellow Jersey for the first time since his '84 victory. But by the end of the day the cycling world was turned upside down and the sport had changed forever. A former champion was wearing the Yellow Jersey but it wasn't Laurent Fignon. It was the American Greg Lemond.

Lemond had mounted a set of Scott triathlon handlebars on his high-tech Bottecchia frame and the tight aerodynamic body position allowed him to cut through the air and knock seconds off each kilometer. Lemond hadn't even given an interview before that stage, but now the press mobbed him. He took the bouquet on the podium then stepped up again to put on the Yellow Jersey that had been stolen from him by 38 pieces of buckshot. It was an incredible story, but the journalists of L'Equipe called it a fluke. Fignon had been hit by a horrible rainstorm in the middle of his ride, and Delgado, who started at the beginning of the day, didn't have any competitive times to pace himself by. Lemond had lucked out, L'Equipe wrote, and would surely be dropped in the first climbs of the Pyrenees.

Jackie had to agree with the journalists, but he assured me that winning a contra la montre was no small feat. The CLM's are the show of who is the strongest rider, and rarely does a Tour winner go through the race without winning one of them.
"This is a great sign for Fignon," he said. "With Delgado so far behind, the race is his."

That was also the overwhelming response of the crowd at the Platanes. A group of Portuguese men always sat in the back of the bar playing cards, but when someone talked football or Formula One, heated debates arose. I'd never heard them talk about cycling before, but with the Tour in full swing the talk of the Cafe des Platanes turned to the Tour de France.

"The Tour is a long race," my friend Joao told me, "but this year it's Fignon's. And that's good for the sport too. It's good to have a French guy win the Tour de France." I didn't know enough about the sport to challenge them. Apparently they didn't know enough about Greg Lemond. Nobody did.

Sure enough when the race got to the Pyrenees, Lemond had very little team support, and Fignon's Super U team lead the charge up the prickly hot climbs. Lemond was able to hang with Fignon for most of the climbs but on the final ascents, he gave ground. With two weeks gone and the race heading into the Alps, Laurent Fignon was in Yellow.

The first stage in the Alps was a contra la montre heading straight up to the ski lifts in the town of Gap, just a hundred kilometers from Les Avenières. So far Fignon had proved the superior climber, and Lemond, still in second place, was dismissed as burned out and hoping to stay in the top ten. We had to do three shows that day, and I was sprinting back and forth between the ticket booth and the show site to see what was going on. I did the high dive for the second show, but instead of running backstage with the team I jumped the show fence in my Speedo and ran back to the ticket booth to see who was setting the pace. Lemond and Fignon were the last two riders out of the gate and by the end of the day Lemond had again turned the cycling world on its saddle by pulling ahead of Fignon and taking over the Yellow Jersey.

"That's very interesting," Jackie said, "If he's still this strong this late in the race, he's no pretender. These last couple of days are going to be a dog fight." We looked at the remaining stages of the Tour and just ahead was the legendary climb to Alpe D'Huez. Devin from the Casa was coming into town, and I'd already called my day off. We were going to drive up to the top of Alpe D'Huez to catch cycling's equivalent of the Super Bowl. And we had an American in the Yellow Jersey.
After the last show, I picked up Devin and met his girlfriend and future wife, Sharon, in La Tour du Pin. It was great to see Devin on the road again (he had showed up to take pictures in Berlin), and Sharon seemed like she was in the mood to do anything. Sharon had never seen the Alps before, and she was content to gaze at the cliffs and peaks while Devin and I caught up on what was going on back in Cheeseland. They didn't care about the race, but they could tell that I was consumed by it. A friend of mine from Champaign, Don Hannigan, was also passing through and was pretty psyched for the trip.

The next day the three of them watched a day's worth of diving shows, then we piled into the Polski and headed for Bourg d'Oisans just a few kilometers past Grenoble. The sun set while we had dinner at a small café, then we loaded back into the Polski and began the 23-switchback climb to the top of Alpe D'Huez. Alpe D'Huez isn't the longest or the highest climb in the Tour, but it is the steepest and most difficult. Ten-minute leads have been cut to shreds in a matter of a few kilometers. Some of the Tour's climbs flatten out at least a little along the route, but Alpe D'Huez is 18 kilometers (11 miles) of pure hell. We were getting dizzy looking over the side of the mountain along the drive. Climbing it on a bike with the world's fittest athletes on your tail would be insane.

The sides of the road were packed with Dutch cycling fans wanting a stage win from Gert Jan Theunisse, the current holder of the red and white polka dot King of the Mountain jersey. There were so many Dutch cars along the road that the French Gendarmes actually hired a platoon of Dutch police. L'Equipe had estimated that more than 400,000 spectators would line the course with most of them saturating the final few kilometers of Alpe D'Huez. The fans that made it up early had spray-painted the names of their favorites in big white letters across the road. For every 'Lemond' sign we drove over there were 50 'Fignons'. We were on their turf, and the Frenchies were letting it be known. When we got to the top we found a grass parking lot and set up our tents. The city of Alpe D'Huez was packed to the brim but surprisingly quiet. That wouldn't last long.

We woke up to a glorious blue sky supported by dozens of sharp-ridged, snow-covered Alpine peaks. Below the summits were layers of Alpine meadow in full bloom that lined the mountain streams all the way down to our tents. The day's course was 100 miles covering two 2,000-meter (more than 6000 ft.) passes before finishing with the climb to Alpe D'Huez, the most grueling leg in the sport of cycling. As the loudspeakers in town announced the start of the race the temperature was just hitting 70 degrees. In less than an hour the thermometer was pushing 85. That meant that in the valleys between the climbs the riders would be looking at temperatures in the mid 90's.

I'd been riding every day and thought I was in decent shape, but after watching a dozen or so gray-haired tourists climb to the summit of Alpe D'Huez I realized I wasn't even in the game. I'd done a couple of smaller climbs around Les Avenières, but I hadn't even thought of the major climbs I could see from the high dive ladder. I considered myself a fairly avid cyclist, but now I could see I hadn't even started. I was feeling light-headed from the altitude, and people twice my age were topping off a 2,000- meter climb. I never felt so inadequate in all my life.
The four of us ate lunch, then found a stream and doused ourselves with freezing cold water before walking back to town and finding our spot along the road. The finish line was completely packed, so we took a spot at the very top of the hill where the riders would crest before making their final sprint. The overhead speakers were loud and tinny and difficult to understand, but I could make out that Theunisse had broken away and had a three-minute lead entering Bourg d'Oaisan. The pack had completely broken up, and the lead group consisted of Fignon, Delgado, Lemond and the Columbian climber, Alberto Rincon. The superstars had left even the great climbers Hampsten and Rooks far down the mountain.

Before the riders passed through town, the Tour's publicity caravan arrived throwing out water bottles, cassette tapes, hats and anything else a sponsor might be selling. After the caravan came an army of support vehicles carrying hundreds of extra wheels and bikes. Finally the television helicopters rose out of the valley, and we knew the riders were only minutes away. There was so much noise that nobody could understand the loudspeakers.

The Dutch fans, all dressed in red and white polka dot shirts, were tensely awaiting their hero, Theunisse, while the French were dying to see Fignon take some time off Lemond's lead. There was also a cadre of Spaniards hoping for Delgado to avenge his opening error with a great stage win. The American contingent consisted of ... well... the four of us. Not only did Lemond not have a team, he didn't even have a fan base to back him up. We didn't meet any other Americans all day. Our countryman was winning the world's toughest endurance challenge and nobody in America even knew.

As leaders approached, the roar was deafening. The crowd squeezed so tightly into the road that there was barely enough room for the TV motorcycles to pass through. We saw the army of Dutch fans go wild on the switch back just below us, so we knew that Theunisse had kept his lead. A few seconds later he blew by us looking like he was on a morning stroll.

Now it was time for Lemond to pull over the top. We were screaming our lungs out as we saw the crowd make way for the second group. But when they came up to us we saw only the pony-tailed Fignon and the handsome Spaniard Pedro Delgado. No Lemond in sight.

A minute passed and the crowd began to cheer another rider. This time it was Delgado's teammate, the tiny Columbian Rincon. A minute after that an exhausted Greg Lemond powered up the hill and dug for all he was worth. He looked tired and dehydrated, but he was digging up the switchback trying to recapture all the precious seconds he'd lost. We found out later that he'd missed his food bag at the feeding station and had been running on empty ever since the bottom of the climb. He was driving hard for the finish, but on this day it wasn't enough. At the end of the day, with only one day of climbing and a short contra la montre in Paris, Greg Lemond was 33 seconds behind Laurent Fignon.

We'd had a brilliant day on the mountain, but as we sat in the three-hour traffic jam on the way back to Grenoble we all had the look of defeat on us. We were tired and sunburned, but seeing a Yellow Jersey on Lemond at the end of the day would have soothed everything. I wasn't looking forward to the trash talking at the Platanes the next day.

The four of us spent the night at Jean Pierre's new house in Virieu high above the Bourbe River valley, just a few kilometers from Grenoble. In the morning I dropped Don, Devin and Sharon off at La Tour du Pin and drove the Polski back to Buvin to pick up the divers. When I saw Jackie at the ticket booth he was happy with the result, but he said it was far from over. "Thirty-three seconds isn't much," he said. "The way Lemond's been racing against the clock he could still do it."
That day we watched the last mountain stage that ended at Villard de Lans - the same place where Ted and I had watched Delgado take the tour lead the year before. Theunisse was cooked from his incredible climb to Alpe D'Huez, leaving Lemond, Fignon, and Delgado once again on the final climb. A few kilometers from the top, Fignon, now in Yellow, took off from the front of the pack catching Delgado and Lemond by surprise. Lemond urged Delgado to join him on the counter attack but Delgado was cooked. Pedro had raced himself from last place back to a spot on the podium in Paris, but the Yellow Jersey was out of his reach. Lemond had to get Fignon himself. He made an impressive charge but Fignon held off. The 33 seconds that would be difficult to make up in Paris had now turned into an all-but impossible 50 seconds. The Tour was over. Lemond's valiant comeback from the hunting accident was falling one step short. Laurent Fignon had sewn up his third Tour de France title.

"C'est fini!" Jackie said. "Lemond was incredible, but you can't be gone from racing for two years and hope to win the Tour de France. Other races, maybe, but not this one. It's just too damn demanding."

I did my last show then rode disconsolately back to the Platanes. The Portuguese were trash talking and reassuring me that I didn't know shit about the sport. The kinder of the bunch told me that nobody had ever ridden from out of nowhere like Lemond. He had no reason to hang his head. Second place in the Tour de France isn't a bad feat by anyone's standard.

Stage 19 finished in Aix Les Baines, just past the first Alpine ridge from Les Avenières. Right before I had to leave the ticket booth for the last show, I saw Lemond break away from a pack of favorites and outsprint Fignon for his second stage win of the Tour. He was happy with the win, but when a French reporter asked him if it made up for losing the Tour he got pissed. "I've still got two days to race!" he said.

The riders started Stage 20, the last mass start of the Tour, in Aix Les Baines, and then followed the Rhone toward Lyon. We pushed our 1:00 show back so we could drive out to the river and watch the riders go by. They passed along a tiny road just below the Ranch Marin in Buvin, but they were riding very slowly and maintaining the peloton. It was a day for the sprinters as the race stayed grouped up all the way to the finish in L'isle d'Abeau. Only the final day in Paris remained.

It was a Saturday night in Les Avenières, and I went into the Platanes with a bit more attitude than usual. After a pile of drinks the trash talking started up again, and I was talking with my beer voice. "Fifty seconds isn't shit," I said. "It's a 26-click (16 mile) race - I'll take on anyone in this bar right now. We'll go 26 clicks and I guarantee I'll beat you by more than fifty seconds!"
Gerard told me that if I tried to ride 26 kilometers after what I drank I'd end up fifty seconds from death. "Look," I said. "If Fignon wins tomorrow I'll buy you all a drink. If Lemond wins tomorrow, I drink next week for free." There were about ten people around and they all eagerly took the bet. I got on my bike and stubbornly swerved the three clicks back to Buvin.

I woke up with a cement block for a forehead and barely made it to the park in time for show call. I launched off a half-loopy gainer double high dive at the end of the first show so I could get it out of the way. I didn't want to think of anything else the rest of the day but the damn race. Normally the finale of the Tour de France is a mass start race ending in ten laps around the Champs Elysees, the most prestigious sprint in the sport of cycling.

This final stage, however, was a rarity. The Tour de France changes its route every year, and in 1989, for the first time in over 20 years, the finish of the Tour would be a contra la montre finishing at the base of the Arc de Triumph. The watch races are usually 50 to 75 kilometers long, but this one, at 26 kilometers, would be one of the shortest in Tour history. Luckily Jackie had picked up L'Equipe because I was running too late to stop off at the Maison de la Press to buy my copy. The headline read "Fignon, King of the Sun," the title the paper traditionally throws on the champ. According to the journalists this thing was over.

The first few riders had already finished and Thierry Marie, a Frenchman known for short time trials, held the day's fastest time. But being more than two hours behind Lemond and Fignon in the standings, he was no threat for the overall title. The announcers were going over the perfectly flat course and explaining how it would be impossible for Fignon, an excellent time trialer in his own right, to lose such a huge gap in such a short time. Based on Marie's time, Lemond would have to ride the fastest time-trial in the history of cycling to make up the 50-second gap. Either that or Fignon, an ice cold competitor who looked so strong the last few days of the tour, would have to collapse on the most important day of his life. It would probably take a combination of the two and neither was remotely likely to happen.

Back at Walibi, we did our second show in front of a packed summer crowd of 2,500 people. Before drying off, Jen and I hurried back to the ticket booth to watch Lemond's ride. In college I would have died to have 2,500 people gasp over a couple of big dives, but after witnessing the challenges that the Tour riders face, I just wanted to be a sports fan.

When we got to the ticket booth and found our seats in front of the 10-inch screen, Lemond was already on the course, tucked away on his brand new aerodynamic triathlon handlebars. Even though he'd won the first time trial using them, none of the riders followed his lead because of the extra weight they added to the bike. Lemond's head was pressed against his outstretched arms, and he was breathing to the side as if he were swimming the crawl. The camera kept pointing to the massive 57-cog gear he was pulling with the ease of a finely tuned motorcycle engine. As he passed the intermediate time he was a good 30 seconds ahead of Marie's mark.
Fignon jumped on the course three minutes after Lemond without even wearing an aerodynamic helmet. His long blond hair was tightly tied leaving his thin ponytail dangling behind. As Lemond blew across the pavement his body was motionless, aside from his piston-like thighs. Fignon was restless, often standing in his cleats trying to crank up extra speed. At the last check point Lemond had obliterated Marie's time and was firing down the Rive Gauche, closing in on the Arc de Triumph with each powerful stroke. He took the last few turns through La Place de la Concorde without breaking stride leaning hard into the pavement. He righted his bike and took only a few more breaths before blasting past the finishing panels faster than anyone in the history of the sport. 200 meters, 150 meters, 100 meters, 50 meters, finally he flew past the Fiat finish sign painted across the Champs Elysees.

When Lemond’s final time stopped on the television Jen and I pounded our fists. He had done his half of the bargain. He had just ridden a stage of the Tour de France at over 54 kilometers an hour (33.5 mph), shattering the existing record. Thierry Marie, who up to that point was considered the best short time-trialist on the globe, was over a minute and a half behind. That in itself was a Ruthian achievement.

Now it was Fignon's turn to answer. He was well behind Lemond's time, but surely he couldn't lose his 50 second overall advantage. He'd won several time trial stages over the course of his first two Tour de France victories, and he had to be in better form than those years. All eyes were on him as he struggled to stay in his seat and maintain position. He stood again and again, trying to pick up the tempo, but all it did was push wind against his chest. His bike started to rock, and as he cruised around La Place de la Concorde he stopped his pedaling to maintain his balance. Now he was blasting down the Champs Elysees, with Lemond's time parked in the lower left corner of our small TV. By this time a crowd of thirty people had gathered around the haunted house, and Jackie and Jeanine had turned the TV out so everyone could see. Fignon had long since passed Lemond's time but he still carried that 50 second overall lead going into this final stage. As his clock continued to move against Lemond's frozen figure, I started screaming out the difference to the crowd. If the difference grew to more than 50 seconds, Lemond would have pulled off the impossible.

"Thirty seconds!" I yelled. The formerly confident French faces now turned quiet and stared at the TV. Fignon was visibly suffering, throwing every fiber of his thighs into each pedal stroke.

"Forty seconds!" Jackie stiffened up and pounded his fist on the counter.

"Forty-Five seconds," I yelled. "He's gonna do it!" The Frenchmen looked at the TV - Fignon had just passed the 150-meter marker.

"Forty-Six! Forty-Seven! It's Over!" I screamed, " Forty-Nine! FIFTY!! He DID IT!!! HE DID IT!! HE FUCKING DID IT!!!"

Jen and I hugged each other as the crowd of Frenchman threw their hands up in the air in disgust. Lemond was hugging his wife and son on the Champs while Fignon collapsed in a pile on the finish line. He'd won the 23-day 3,300-kilometer (2,050 mile) bike race by eight seconds - by far the closest margin in Tour de France history. Jackie, always calm, simply nodded his head and said, "Chapeau les Americans - C'est encore le votre." (Hats off, Americans - it's yours again.)
Jen and I jumped out from behind the ticket booth and danced around the park singing, "On a gagne!" (We won!) in our worst American accents. The Frenchies didn't get what we were going off about until they put two and two together. Either they'd seen our show and knew we were Americans or they heard the accent and had to figure out what we meant. Undoubtedly after we passed they would take a second to think about it then throw their hands up in the air and say, "C'est pas vrai!" (This can't be true!)

At that point in the season we were in such a groove that every show seemed the same. But the show after Lemond's victory was a memorable one. I grabbed the mic before the show started and announced the race results to the groan of the overflow French crowd. Every time I had the chance I took the microphone out of Philippe's hand and again shouted, "On a gagne!" I'd always taken pride in not being the loud ugly American, but when your countryman wins the Tour de France it's time to stand up and be counted.

After the show I ran back to the ticket booth and asked Jackie if I could have his copy of L'Equipe. "It won't do me any good," he said. I tucked it into the belt holding my hip sack, mounted my Peugeot and sprinted up the hill towards Les Avenières. Just before I hit the Platanes I pulled the paper out and rode by the cafe with the giant proclamation of Fignon's victory right in their face. I wasn't alive for "Dewey Defeats Truman," but this was much sweeter.

I pulled up a seat at the bar and hoisted my first glass. "To Greg Lemond, the greatest athlete in the world!" I said. "Victory party in Buvin tonight!"
One of the Portuguese sports addicts at the bar filled my glass and raised his for another toast. "To the Tour de France!" he said, "The greatest sporting event in the world!"

Jackie and Jeanine took Jen and me out for a victory dinner, and Gerard brought a case of Champagne from the Platanes to the house in Buvin. We toasted Lemond deep into the night, and I passed out using the newspaper for a blanket. When I woke the next morning, I slowly lifted my head and the first thing I saw was the newspaper from the morning before. I reread the articles announcing the sure victory of the great French champion, Fignon. I felt like shit, but by afternoon my hangover was gone. Laurent Fignon's would last a lifetime.

How to Get Americans to Like Soccer

2010-06-30T23:58:00.001+05:30

Ok, we’ve got another World Cup in the books (yeah, I know it’s still going on, but since the U.S. lost, the screens in the sports bars have all gone back to baseball) and with the U.S. dying like a Brett Favre champion-wanna-be squad, it’s time to look at why Soccer is not working here.

Sure, the ratings for the US games were their highest ever, but how many of those eyeballs will be tuning into the MLS game of the week from now on? No more than before the Cup. Soccer still has few adherents in the U.S. aside from people who have strong ties to their ancestral home or those who have spent an obscene amount of time on trans-continental airplanes. The guy rocking the Cosimo Kramer shirt at the OTB in Tulsa is NOT following Soccer.

We’ve all known for a long time that the lack of scoring is a huge issue. Would we watch basketball if the hoop was 30 feet high and the thought of tweaking the twine was a twice a day dream? No. And that’s what Soccer is to your average American sports fan.

They’ve come up with some ideas in the past to increase scoring including widening or heightening the goal. The women’s game has caught on more here because of the fact that smaller keepers = more goals. You rarely see a 1-0 women’s game. But resizing all the Soccer goals in countries where most of the disposable income goes to buying off politicians is not practical.

The off-sides rule is confusing to Americans and most Americans just don’t get why it’s there. In this case, the Americans are 100% correct. It is the worst rule in all of organized sport. It rewards lazy defense and punishes aggressive offense. It allows for slower, less-skilled players to play on an even par with quicker, more agile athletes. The game would be much higher scoring and much more exciting if they did away with it. Eliminating the off-sides rule would also eliminate 80% of the goal controversies. There is simply no need for it.

And eliminating the off-sides rule will happen as soon as Rush endorses Obama. It’s just never going to happen. Having spent a good number of years in the sporting industry I can tell you that the most conservative/arrogant people you will ever meet are those people who work for the major sports leagues. The NCAA, the NFL, the IOC, MLB. Even people who work for state high school sports organizations feel like they run the world. FIFA is by far the biggest, richest and most arrogant of them all. They could care less about what a fan says. They wouldn't change a rule even if it would bring more asses to the stadium or eyeballs to the screen. They've already got enough. They think Soccer is just perfect.

But I propose this simple variation to increase scoring and get Americans to watch more Soccer. We don’t change the rules, we change the scoring system. One of the reasons Americans don’t understand Soccer is that a team can dominate a game and still lose on a silly error. It’s just not fair. Offense is rarely rewarded and defense is rarely punished. In order to even the playing field we do what every other field sport in the world does and give points to good offensive efforts, even if they don’t end up in a goal. Football, Rugby, Australian Rules, Gaelic Football and Hurling all allow for an offense to score points without actually getting in the end zone. They all have variations of a ‘Field Goal’ which is worth one-third to half the points of an actual goal. In Soccer it would be really easy: Five points for a goal, two points every time you force the goalie to use his hands.

Since the keeper is the only guy on the field who can use his hands, let’s make it cost him/her something if they use the privilege. If an offense makes a surge that ends up in a great save, they are rewarded with two points. The average score of a match goes from 1-1 to 9-7. 0-0 halves will be a thing of the past and strikers will be much more accurate if they know they can score w/out having to hit a one-foot by one-foot window. Sure it changes the job of the keeper quite a bit, but they’re standing around most of the game anyway. It’s not as hard a job as quarterback or catcher, so making them think of using their hands vs. making a kick save isn’t really stretching the abilities of man. (Oh yeah, two points if they use their head too; don’t want a rash of concussions in the youth leagues…)

It’s a simple solution that doesn’t require any new equipment or referee training. If the score at half time is 2-4, Americans will feel they’ve seen something and keep watching. And when goals are scored the celebrations will be just as wild as before (I was about to say, ‘even more exciting’ but that’s not possible in Soccer).

It’s a fairly radical change, but only for one position, the keeper. FIFA has made only one major rule change in the past two-decades and that is banning the use of keepers’ hands when the ball is played back to them by their own team (unless it’s headed back). This really doesn’t effect the skill set of any of the other players and it would bring all the casual fans to the stadium and the TV sets.

So there ya go, FIFA. I just made you another couple billion dollars in the U.S. market. This one’s on the house – the next one’s gonna cost you something.

Cricketainment

2010-04-20T13:23:00.002+05:30

If you haven’t caught this by now, I’m a sports junkie and in India that means cricket. Thirty years ago, cricket was the most boring, god-awful waste of time the sporting world had ever devised. Basically it was a way for Brits to spend endless months in foreign lands in between trying to kill all the people in those foreign lands. The foreigners took their revenge by dominating them at their own sport. Cricket is far more popular than baseball and is the top sport in India, Pakistan, Australia, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and South Africa. It also competes with soccer in all of Sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean. In England and New Zealand it shares time with rugby and even the Irish have now put up a formidable side.

What cricket has done, more than any other major sport, is change the game dramatically to make it more palatable to the international market. Although the five-day test matches are still taking place, the recognized world champion is the winner of the World Cup, which is a tournament consisting of one-day matches. And just five years ago, the world governing body, realizing they couldn’t get TV time for these 8-9 hour contests, came up with a stroke of genius – the 20-20 format.

20-20 (or T20 as it’s more commonly referred to) takes the best part of the sport (free swinging batting) and squeezes all the excitement of a 5-day sport into a palatable and exhilarating three-hour format. In the five-day format, each player on both teams was allowed to bat until they were forced out. In the T-20 format each teams scores as many runs as they can in 20 overs (6 pitches or bowls/over) then the other team bats. In the old format a batter could be at the wicket for days on end and never had to take a chance. They could bunt the ball for hours with no penalty. In T20 the batters need to swing early, often and hard. The ball leaves the grounds at unprecedented rates and the crowds go crazy for it. They also don’t have to plan a 5-day holiday to catch a match. They can go after work and even bring the kids.

Three years ago, the BCCI (Board of Control for Cricket in India), devised a new professional league consisting of the best players in the world. The Indian Premiere League (IPL) was born and it’s been a huge hit in India ever since. The IPL brings the best players in the world to India for a short season of t20 matches and spreads the games all over the country. Each match has the flair of an NFL or Champions League Soccer match, with local fans getting to see their heroes, many of them for the first time in their lives.

In 2004 in an attempt to attract major sporting events to Dharamsala, the Himachal Pradesh Cricket Board built a beautiful 30,000 seat stadium that any spectator (aside from someone in a wheelchair) will agree is the most spectacular stadium in all of sport. The stadium is perched high above the city so the grandstands rise above Dharamsala like a glowing red temple. The perfectly manicured pitch is the only flat piece of ground for hundreds of miles so spectators are in awe the minute they walk in. Looming just a few miles away are the dominating peaks of the Dhauladhar. 17,000 ft. Moon Peak, the king of the range, is only twenty miles away as the crow flies, although it would take days by any means of transport to get there.

Unfortunately for me, the Dharamsala Cricket stadium is without question the least accessible venue I’ve ever been to. To begin with there are no simple gate attendants or ticket takers. They only people working the game were police men and local army troops. Any time there’s a huge gathering in India, terrorism is not far behind so security is at a premium. I’m all fine with that – in fact there was a bomb at an IPL match in southern India on the same day. But the HP Cricket Board did absolutely no training with these people on how to manage the crowd. None of them knew where any of the gates were and spectators were universally ignored when asking where their seats were.

In trying to decipher the stadium layout, I was given directions far from the main entrance which lead me down a path through a military base (the terrain around the stadium is used for army exercises) down a huge rock pile (I was carried by four Punjabis), and finally down a series of two-foot high stadium steps. Once I got in line there I compared my ticket to one of the Punjabis and discovered my seat was on the far side of the stadium.

The four huge Punjabi guys (their team, Punjabi Kings XI were the home team) took it upon themselves to help me out. They lifted me back up the stadium steps (about 35 ft vertical), back over the rock pile and finally back to the far side of the stadium where I finally found my entrance. This entrance was through a metal detector and up a huge dirt embankment which of course I had no chance of getting through.

Once I was pushed up to the top, an army officer ran me down and spent ten minutes going through my bag. I had to explain to him what I was doing with catheters, petroleum jelly and rubber gloves in my bag. He spoke little English so I had to wait for another spectator who spoke English and could understand what I was doing with this medical gear (it’s for peeing, if you didn’t know).

I finally got to my gate, but my whole reason for getting there early (I was two hours before the first ball) was that I got in contact with a TV producer who was going to let me work in the TV booth. I called him and told him where I was, but seeing as all I could see around me were stairs, there’s no way I was going to make it work. He told me he was going to scout things out and call me once he knew how to get a hold of me. I didn’t see him again until the next day when he came to my hotel to apologize. There was simply no way to get me around that stadium.

But even though I was well ahead of game time, the stadium was filling up. There was plenty of music and entertainment planned, so I decided I should just get to my seat, relax and enjoy the game. I found the entrance to my section and discovered I was only 30 stairs away from the inside. Before going up, I found a bathroom, which luckily enough had no stairs. I did my duty which was going to have to last, because there was no way I could get back down once I made it to my seat.

Again I had to find four willing spectators to lift me to my seat. Everyone there was in an upbeat festive mood so this really wasn’t a problem. I found four huge cricket fans who lifted me up and carried me up the stairs to a floor section about four feet from the rail to the pitch.
Front Row! How about it! Biggest show in town and I was living large. Unfortunately they turned out to be the worst seats in the yard. This was the only exit for 5000 spectators so for the next five hours I was passed several times by each spectator. There was just enough room for them to walk in front of me so they did just that – all night long. Also, to my left, guarding the entrance were a dozen Army troops blocking 30% of my view all night long.

So it sucked for me, but for the rest of the crowd, it was a magical evening. This was the first time the IPL had come to Himachal Pradesh so the local fans were seeing their heroes live for the first time. Most of these players have enormous international reputations, so every time a defender would come close to the stands, the crowd would scream like a rock concert. The pitch is one of the smaller ones the IPL goes to so balls were leaving the yard at a good pace and scoring was high.

One of the funniest spectacles in the yard, however, were the cheerleaders, who were brought in from South Africa. I found out the next day the cheerleaders were staying in the hotel next to mine with the TV crew (that’s how I made my contact that wasn’t working!). But these were not the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders. These girls were average looking, not in any kind of athletic shape and were crappy dancers. They didn’t know the rules of the game, celebrated only when they were cued and seemed bored out of their skull every time they were required to do a dance. But the Indian men went absolutely bonkers for them. The locals rushed to the rail when they danced, threw them all sorts of notes and even tried to copy their dances (yes, the Indian MEN).

At first I thought they were mocking the cheerleaders, but they were absolutely going nuts over them. Marriage proposals; flashbulbs; the whole works. The next day when I spoke to the cheerleaders from my balcony I discovered them to be bitches of the first order, thinking they were some kind of television stars. I’m telling you right now, they couldn’t have made my high school JV cheering squad, and here they thought they were as big as the players. It was really pathetic.

The Punjabi Kings XI were defeated with only a few balls left in the match as the Deccan Chargers hit a boundary sending the home side down. The 5000 people in my section now had to all pass by me again, as the army captain told me he would help me down as soon as everyone left. So I waited until nearly the entire stadium was left before four soldiers carried me down. Luckily there was no beer at this venue because had I put down three or four glasses of suds, my bladder would have been bursting. As it was, I was dehydrated and hungry. The only drink at the stadium was sugary soda and the only food was potato chips and ice cream. I had some of everything, but it made me feel kinda gross. Thank god I ate a huge meal before going inside the stadium or I would have been a wreck.

Luckily for me, a group of performers from the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts were doing a dance before the game and I hooked up with them for a ride back to Bhagsu. Had I not connected with them (they only saw me as I left the stadium) I would have had to roll more than two miles up a steep incline to the nearest taxi stand – then wait until 2 a.m. for an expensive ride.

In the end it wasn’t quite the magical night for me that I’d envisioned. But for the 30,000 ‘normal’ cricket fans it was glorious. The play was top quality and they got to be proud of Dharamsala for something besides being the home of the Dalai Lama. So kudos to cricket! Had the game stayed as boring as it was in the 50’s a night like this would never have been possible.

Now if they could only consult an ADA architect before building huge monuments to the game, I’d be a lot happier!

Trekking on a Quickie

2010-04-16T14:05:00.001+05:30

(pics to come. My USB cable is stuck in the bag with my broken laptop!)

One of the main reasons people come to the Himalayas is to go on long walks through the biggest things on earth. This is my third trip to these behemoth creatures and unfortunately I’ve only been able to go on a few day hikes in Nepal back in 1991. Ever since landing in Dharamsala on this trip, I’ve been sequestered by injury, weather and chair breakdowns so the hilltops I see from my balcony have gone completely unexplored.

Ten years ago when I was here in a much better wheelchair, I managed to climb high above McLeod Ganj on the TIPA Road, a winding neighborhood path, to see a view most travelers take for granted. One of the coolest things about living in Dharamsala is taking in lunch on one of the rooftop cafes. The tourists gaze out on the city, the mountains and the plains miles off in the distance. But seeing as those cafes are three or four stories up with no elevators I’ve never been to one.

Knowing this splendor was just outside my grasp has been eating away at me for five months. On Wednesday I decided to throw caution aside and push my three-wheeled, frame-cracked wheelchair to the citadel hamlet of Dharamkot, three kilometers up a steep, crumbling road from McLeod Ganj. It’s not trekking in the Annapurnas, but in a wheelchair, it’s the next best thing.

The road to Dharmkot starts harmlessly enough rising slowly from the main square in McLeod. After a few hundred meters I was rising above three story buildings and actually looking down at some of the nicer cafes. Whereas most of the crumbling roads around Dharamsala were recently paved, this road remains a semi-paved obstacle course of potholes and chunks of concrete. When I made this assault in 2000, the road was nothing more than a wide path but it was somewhat smooth. For most of the climb I could grab both my wheels and push as hard as I could. It has since been paved, but during the monsoon season this road morphs into a raging wadi. Sometimes it’s dry, other times it’s a flowing creek. This of course has all but destroyed the surface.

Besides the road, my chair is in a sad state of disrepair. I bought this chair in 2004 and it’s been problematic from the beginning. The geniuses at Quickie thought it would be a great idea to put motorcycle shocks in their sport chairs. They thought it would cushion the blow when hopping off curbs. I personally never felt any pain when jumping curbs and when I first tried riding on the shock it felt like I was swimming, not rolling. I also had a justified fear that the extra parts would lead to extra parts breaking. Last year the aluminum bar that holds the shock snapped leaving me sitting six inches above the ground. I had to constantly lean forward or I would tip back. I found an aluminum welder in Eugene, Oregon who pulled the chair apart, fused the broken parts and sent me on my way. That weld lasted a month. When it snapped again, I found another welder, this time in Corvallis who fused a support bar along side the broken seam. That weld lasted two months. The next time it broke, I was in Kayseri Turkey.

This time, when it broke it stayed semi-attached so I didn’t need immediate surgery. I was on my way to France where Jackie Couty, my French substitute father lives. Jackie is a witch with any kind of building materials and he solidified the crack with a strong steel brace. That was in July and that is how the chair sits today. I’m a low rider, but it still functions albeit much less efficiently. Sitting up high and pushing is much easier than sitting down low and pushing. Had this been the only problem with my chair I would have tackled the TIPA road months ago. But as luck would have it, three months ago I cracked the support to my right front caster wheel (the small grocery-cart wheels in the front of wheelchairs). I had the support welded and that weld lasted all of two weeks. The second break was a month ago and I’ve just given up and gone on three wheels. I have to put a brace under my footpad when I transfer into bed or on the toilet, but in regular riding I don’t notice it’s gone.

Unless, of course, I try to do some climbing on a crumbling road. Then it becomes a major pain in the ass. Instead of leaning forward and pushing for all I’m worth, I have to do wheelies over the uneven sections. Leaning back and pushing forward is NOT the way you want to attack a big climb. But the houses of Dharamkot had been taunting me for months. Even if I did crack my third wheel, forcing me to ride in a wheelie until I get back to the States, I was going to attack that hill.

A half a mile into my trip, the road lifted above the buildings and curved around the hill that is the back drop of McLeod Ganj. Outside of the neighborhoods where there is less traffic the TIPA Road is much more consistent. It is also much steeper. But here, I could lean forward and push hard on both wheels. I was making good progress until I came upon a washed out, really steep section. I started attacking it with mini switchbacks, but it was one step forward for two steps back. I had to wait for help, but it came almost immediately. Two Tibetan hikers were on their way to the local peak at Triund and pushed me up the ugly section. Although everyone who walks next to me in Dharamsala offers to help me (even when I’m passing them up!), this was the only assistance I took on the day.

Once back on relatively smooth road I continued chugging up the ever-rising incline until I came upon the TIPA campus. TIPA or, Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts, is a school started by the Dalai Lama to preserve Tibetan music, art and dance. Children enter TIPA between the ages of 12 and15 and are rigorously schooled in every aspect of Tibetan culture. The Secretary of the TIPA is a friend of mine Tenzin Lhoksam. I stopped in for a chat with Lhoksam (goes by his last name) and he told me I was crazy for trying to get to Dharamkot on three wheels. Of course, by this time I was a sweaty, filthy mess (it was an 80 degree day) and I told him it couldn’t get any uglier.

Lhoksam sent me on my way and of course it got much uglier. The road past TIPA became so steep that I couldn’t go straight up. My chair was leaning back so far that I simply could not push forward without tipping over. I had to resort to tight switch backs in the middle of the road. This went on for about a hundred yards until the grade lessened enough where I could push forward. Unfortunately at this point the pavement returned to the crumbling mess it was on the lower sections. I was pushing as hard as I could, but there was absolutely no glide whatsoever. If I let go of the wheel, I would slide back ward. I was making it up this hill one stroke at a time. The hardest day I’ve ever had on a bike was a 78 mile romp into gale-force winds on a dead-flat highway in Mississippi. On that ride I was going stroke for stroke, much like this ride and averaging 8 mph. Eventually this ride would take three hours which meant I was going 2 mph – including rest stops.

I kept up this horrid non-pace for an eternity until I could finally see the first structures in the hamlet. The road was heavily wooded and I didn’t like gazing over the edge, because at most sections there was a 300 foot drop off. Between the trees, however, I could see my neighborhood in Bhagsu quietly going about its business. The buildings that mocked me for months were now just a few hundred yards ahead.

But of course, thinking your there and being there are two different things. Just a stone’s throw from the top, the road crumbled completely and even got sandy in spots. I could see the chai stand full of hikers who had passed me up along the way, but I was at a virtual standstill. My only resort was to put one wheel in the ditch alongside me where there was some traction and grunt the final few meters to the finish.

When I finally burst over the summit, I was greeted by two Belgians who were slugging down a victorious cup of chai. I pounded a liter of water then looked down at Bhagsu which was now open before me. The road continued in a rolly-polly fashion for another kilometer along a ridge so I continued until I saw a steep sandy downhill section that I knew I could never conquer.

But my conquest was complete. I was sitting amongst the neatly manicured lawns that I’d been spying from my balcony for more than four months. My chair survived the ordeal and so did I.

For a while at least. On the way back to the chai stand my right hand popped open and a dime-sized blister forced me to put on my gloves. I knew I was going to have to put on gloves for the ride down, but I really didn’t want them on for the climb. The gloves are made of hard leather and it makes holding on to the wheel and rim very slippery. I never would have made it past TIPA had I been wearing them. I was just hoping to get to the top before I ripped some flesh. I should have covered up at the chai stand, but I was too psyched to be done with the climb.

After a few snapshots, I pulled on the gloves and prepared for the descent. As hard as the climb had been, the descent was that much more dangerous. On a bike you can just drop your head and try to hold the line. But with a wheelchair I’ve got no brakes except my ripped up hands and the soft side of my forearm.

I propped into a wheelie so as not to let my lone front wheel dig into a rut and snap off. I held this wheelie for hundreds of yards at a time, only setting it down to give my hands a rest. My hands and wrists were already heavily abused by the time I started the drop so I had to hold on to the rim loosely and let the wheel slide through my fingers. Any time I picked up too much speed I had to squeeze down without burning through the leather. On the super-steep section outside of TIPA, I had to clamp down hard and let the wheel roll a meter at a time. Speed on two wheels front to back is good. Speed on two wheels side by side is a recipe for disaster. One slight turn with speed and I’m 300 ft down the side of a cliff.

The other problem I encountered was that this was an open road with plenty of traffic. Dharamkot is a popular picnic spot so those not wanting the reward of making it on their own simply hop a three-wheeled cab and bust on up without sweating. Every time one of these cabs passed me I had to slow down or even stop. Just a slight nudge from one of them would also send me over the edge. And they surely were not stopping for me.

Finally after two and a half hours of back-crunching climbing and 25 minutes of a harrowing descent, I made it back to McLeod. I felt like I was finished, but I still had to climb the Bhagsu Road hill and do one more drop before I hit the shower. I bust that hill at least ten times a week, but it was never as hard as it was after tackling the TIPA Road.

When I got back to the Akash Deep Hotel, I ordered up some fried rice and woke up two hours later with a plate of cold dinner sitting outside my door.

India: The Country Where Nothing Works.

2010-04-12T13:54:00.003+05:30

I’ve gone beyond frustration with the amount of things that don’t function in this country and have resigned myself to accepting that nothing here works. That way is something does work, I’m pleasantly surprised.

I woke up yesterday and decided to take note of everything I came in contact that does not work. I could barely go thirty seconds without running into some non or semi-functional piece of junk.

I woke up around 8:00 with the sun blasting through my windows. The room was pretty hot so I turned on the ceiling fan. It works, but there’s a crack in the base where it’s attached to the ceiling. So unless I keep it cranked up to ten, it makes an annoying click each rotation. The amount of pleasure it brings is negated by the annoying tick reminding you it's busted.

I flipped on the television to see if I could catch some highlights of the Masters. The on-off switch on the remote works, but not much else. The only number key that functions is zero. Channel up works, but channel down functions only 20% of the time. If I pass up a channel I have to decide whether I should ruin my thumb pressing hard, or go back to zero and start up again. Volume up works, but volume down again only works about 20% of the time. Most of the time I listen at barely-audible levels. There are plenty of other buttons like 'last channel' and 'tint' but they've never worked.

Luckily for me, ESPN/Star sports had a three hour Masters highlight show. The third round was on and Phil Mickleson hit back to back eagles when the power in the hotel went out. The power goes out about five times a week. There’s no way to know when this will happen or for how long. You just have to be ready for it. Sometimes it’s off for a few minutes, often times it’ll be off for several hours. An American friend of mine asked me if my hotel or job had an elevator. Hah! With power that sketchy I’d never set foot in one here. In December I was told by the man that runs my hotel that the power in Dharamsala was much much better than it was five years ago. I lived here ten years ago and I can tell you that the power situation is actually worse than it was back then. The fan stopped and my room turned into a sweat box. I picked up my book and read for a half hour before the power came back on. I flipped the tube back on to see if I could catch a few last holes and every station returns – except ESPN/Star. (This morning when I woke up, hoping to catch the last Sunday holes, ESPN/Star was still out.)

I gave up and decided to hop a shower and head into town. Enter the bathroom zone. Every pipe in the bathroom leaks. I have to turn off the main inputs to the sink and toilet after every use. I did my morning duty, making sure my pants didn't hit the ground because after opening up the toilet valve, the water in the cracked pipes seeps onto the floor.

After I flushed, I turned off the toilet input and transferred onto a wooden chair I use for showering. Before going to bed I turned on the hot water heater because it takes a few hours to heat up a nice supply of shower water. Showering here means dumping buckets of water over your head. I have one faucet for hot and one for cold. I opened up the hot tap; filled three-quarters of the bucket then finished the job with cold water. I dumped it over my head then soaped up. In winter, when there was no heat in my room, I had to do this job fast. But yesterday it was warm so I can took my time. After I washed my hair and removed all the crud from daily living in India, I filled up another bucket and got ready for the rinse cycle. Unfortunately, I forgot that for some unforgivable reason, the plumber ran the hot water pipe through the toilet. The flush I implemented five minutes earlier took with it all of my hot water.

I did a luke-warm rinse then went for an extra scrub on my still open leg burn which was caused, of course, by a faulty heater. I brushed my teeth using only mineral water as the water in this bathroom is non-potable. I spat into the sink and turned the faucet to rinse down the toothpaste, but I forgot to turn on the main water valve under the sink. I reached under the sink, turned it on and rinsed out the basin. I was going to shave the crust under my chin, but now that there’s no hot water left that’s out of the question.

I toweled off put on some shorts and rolled onto my balcony to get some sun. Once I was good and dry I returned to my room, and shut the door, but I can’t lock it. There’s a sliding latch along the bottom, but it doesn’t line up. I’ve got the same unaligned sliding latch to the main door into the hallway. I can lock the door from the outside, but I can’t even close it tightly from the inside. When I’m in my room, the door is always cracked open. This has lead to a number of occasions when Indian tourists simply walk into my room and stare at me. They know they’re not supposed to be there, but by leaving quickly they would admit to having made an error. That is simply not permissible in this culture. They stare at me trying to think of an excuse as to why they’ve barged into a stranger’s room, then turn and leave without saying a word. They never close the door behind them either.

After barricading my balcony door with a chair, I put my shoes on trying not to tip over due to my missing front wheel. The wheel, of course, was broken off after hitting too many potholes in India’s broken roads. Unbelievably over the past three weeks, Dharamsala has gone on a massive road repaving initiative. They’ve asphalted at least three miles of ripped up road making my day much, much easier. Unfortunately, they never stop traffic while they are repaving. As soon as the substance is down and steamrolled, they open up the street. So just a few weeks after this massive road project, many of the potholes and all of the bumps are right back to where they were.

As I’m rolling into town I’m passed by any number of vehicles that run, but wouldn’t exactly pass inspection in Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin. I pass by stores with broken doors; restaurants with rigged-up stoves and internet cafés with virus-ridden computers and connection speeds that are so slow a five-minute YouTube clip takes over an hour to download.

Basically nothing in this entire country works. It all just kind of half-functions. And India is a nuclear power and one of the fastest growing economies in the world. My friend, Sam Courtney called India ‘a 9-wheeled lorry’. It’s broken, but eventually it’ll deliver the goods. Just don’t try to do anything in a hurry here.

The Ugly Side of a Tourist Town

2010-04-08T14:00:00.002+05:30

I’m sure I don’t know a lot of what goes around me here, but I was shocked with what happened to me Tuesday night – as well as the reaction of the people around me.

It all started innocently enough as a few friends went out to dinner to welcome Mari Lang, an Austrian journalist who’s going to be helping out at 90.4 Tashi Delek FM for the next few months. Five of us sat around a table at Nick’s Italian Kitchen talking about the station and helping our friend, Wen, construct a web project. She’s working on a site to offer Chinese translations of Tibetan and English news stories concerning Tibet. Most of the Chinese content on Tibet is propaganda spewed by the government, so this project is a worthy cause that really needs to get off the ground.

We hashed over ideas, ate dinner and even had a slice of cake as Wednesday was Mari’s birthday. After dinner we strolled over to the Hotel Tibet and sat around a table loosening up the conversation over a few Kingfisher beers. Since it was a work night, we polished off our beers and went on our respective ways home. The stores in Bhagsu are all closed by 10:00 so I rolled to the center of McLeod to buy a big jug of water for the night. The center was still bustling, so I sat for a spell to see if I could find some musicians for our Saturday Night Dharamsala Live radio show. They only way I’ve found any of the musicians so far is by stopping people carrying a guitar or flute case and asking them to perform.

While I was parked at the bus stop two Punjabi tourists approached me and wanted to know if I knew of any big parties. I told them they were looking at one big party and they could go into any of the cafes where plenty of people having a great time. The first guy, was a long-haired hipster dufus who pulled out a hip flask of Indian rum and asked me if I wanted a pull. I said I was fine, but he insisted. I took a swig then washed it down with my bottle of water. Then the second guy, a short-haired smooth talker asked me if I wanted a girl.

The local Indians know me and have long since stopped bugging me for business like they do all the fresh-faced white tourists. These guys were out-of-towners and were bringing in some shady business to McLeod. I’m not so naïve as to think a town with a 95 percent tourist economy doesn’t have some illicit slave trade going on, but I’ve never been approached by anyone. I told the pimp that western tourists aren’t coming up to McLeod Ganj looking for women, so he might try a 'different demographic'.

The two of them caught my insult, told me to get my ass back to America then stopped just before hitting me in the busy marketplace. I’d had more than enough of the conversation so I packed up my water bottle and headed back to Bhagsu.

That in itself was the most unsettling event of my four months in Dharamsala. I rolled through the now-quieting streets of McLeod onto the dark hill that leads to Bhagsu. I got a few hundred yards up the climb when I heard a motorcycle behind me. I welcome the motorcycles because they light the road and I can plot my course around the potholes. But as the bike got closer I heard the familiar voices from the bus stop. It was the two Punjabi guys heading to Bhagsu where I’m sure they were told can be some raging vacationers. They saw my chair and made a slight effort to run me off the road. Then they passed giving me the finger and yelling what I’m sure were a long list of profanities.

Again, another very unsettling event, but I was sure this would be the end of it.

No such luck.

Just short of the summit of the hill I heard a commotion and saw the bike parked with the two Punjabis beating the snot out of two girls. I realized the two Punjabis came up to McLeod with a stable of women who were not faring well in the local skin trade. I’m sure they thought a town full of rich tourists would be a layup for them, but this just ain’t that kind of tourist town. Even the Indian tourists are coming for spiritual retreats, not coke and whores.

But now I was in a bit of a fix. Up until I heard the noise, my head was face down cranking out the last few meters of a tough climb. Before I realized what was going down, I became the prime witness to a crime scene. The Punjabis saw me, slapped up their women a bit longer then got back on the bike to chase me. By this time I was on a flat section just before the long decent into Bhagsu. I was hauling ass with the same pace I use when I'm chasing someone on the last mile of a marathon.

But I was no match for a bike. They pulled up next to me; the long-haired pimp jumped off the bike and grabbed the two handles on my chair. He tried to dump me off, but I tie my shoes to the side bars of my chair and that was enough to keep me in the saddle. He let go and I made the final fifty yards to the hill. I flung into a wheelie and shot the hill without once letting my caster wheel (note: still on three wheels these days!) touch ground. Thank god the road has just been paved or, at the speed I was carrying, I would have wiped out.

My crib, the Akash Deep Hotel, is at the bottom of the hill and luckily the hotel workers hadn’t shut down for the night. I burst into the door with the pimps chasing me into the lobby. I yelled for the concierge to call the cops, but he was too shocked to react. Before he knew it, two raging strangers were shoving him around and yelling god-knows-what in Hindu. The commotion woke up the second-in-command at the Akash Deep, who is a much sturdier fellow.

A scuffle broke out, but when I screamed ‘I’m calling the police,’ the fight broke off and, amongst what I’m assuming were a series of profane threats, the two hopped back on their bike and took off down the street. That left the two hotel workers looking at me, wondering what the hell I did to merit their rage. I locked the hotel door and told them I saw them beating up women and we need to call the police immediately. They told me to go to my room, clean up and they would take care of everything. I was drenched and filthy so I took their advice and went to my room to take a quick shower.

After my shower I rolled back to the lobby and saw the two of them asleep in their sleeping bags in the dining room. I woke them up and asked them when the police would get here.

“No police, sir,” the concierge said, “It’s a very bad look for the hotel.”

I was stunned and demanded he get up and call the police.

“No, sir,” he protested, “It is too late and this looks very bad for the hotel.”

I’d just been attacked and I witnessed two violent men commit a crime. Not only that, they knew where I lived and I know the hotel has several unlocked windows. I had enough information to lock those two guys up for a long time and I wasn’t satisfied to let this go unreported.

I whipped out my cell phone and demanded they give me the number for the police. I then realized that I had been living here for four months and I had never even thought of alerting the police. India must have a 911 number, but I didn’t know it and had never seen it publicized anywhere.

As it ends up their 911 is 100. I called the police station and waited for a half hour for them to show. I made my report and they said they would take me around in the morning to see if I could identify the two men.

With three gallons of adrenalin running through my veins and two crooks on the loose I didn’t fall asleep until sunrise. I woke again at 8:30 and cancelled my ride to the TCV. I laid back down in bed and waited for the cops to call so we could make our run through town.

At noon I finally awoke and rolled into the lobby to see the two workers staring angrily at me. “You should not have had the police come last night,” the concierge said. “Very Very bad for the hotel.”

I told him we’d see what the police had to say about that when they get here. He laughed and said, “No police coming. They were tired. Want to get to bed. They tell you this so you go to sleep.” Then the two of them laughed at my naiveté on the Indian justice system.

I was victimized; had the balls to report it and was being mocked by the two guys who run my hotel!

I’m fine now and the two pimps are back in their hole-in-the-ground hut somewhere in the Punjab by now. But my respect for India has dropped several notches.

Computer Crash Kills Blogger

2010-04-06T12:11:00.002+05:30

What I thought would be a temporary setback has become a major bummer for this trip. My laptop has completely fried taking with it my ability to sit in my room at night and write these blog posts. I do have computer access at work, but I also have stuff to do at work so it's not real cool to spend a couple hours writing up posts and editing pics. And these computers don't have Photoshop on them either so I'm forced to use some piece-of-crud Microsoft Photo Editor to tweak my pics. Quite disappointing, but I'll try to make a bit of a go at it anyway.

Aside from the computer crash, life here in Dharamsala has improved greatly. The reporters at the station are really cranking it up and we're almost ready for an official launch. The weather has gone from 'really nice' to mostly 'freaking fantastic'. We've got a high of about 75 degrees every day and a low of around 45 at night. Some days we have clouds, but most days we don't bother with them. McLeod Ganj really is a paradise this time of year. No cooler place in the world to be.

"And now back to the music on 90.4 Tashi Delek FM!"

Our 'Dharamsala Live' open mics have become a huge hit. Last Saturday we had a crowd of about 50 people inside Nick's Italian Kitchen, another 20 listening on the outdoor patio and a slew of passers by on the street who created a traffic jam. The musicians ranged from a Swedish harmonica player to an old English loon who got the entire crowd singing, "I Love Life!"

Rolf just wailed away on his harps!

Stevie P. and Johnny had the entire crowd singing nearly every tune.

I'm getting my kicks out of it to because I play a 30-45 minute set by myself while the crowd slowly comes in. We announced a 7:00 start, but the musicians don't start showing up until 7:30. As long as I don't see people running out of the restaurant, I'll keep playing!

I begged this street musician to come in and play his tuntuna, but the room full on Ex-pats freaked him out.

Next week is the biggest event in Dharamsala all year: The IPL Cricket Matches. The 25,000 seat stadium will be packed and the Dalai Lama himself is going to make it down to Lower Dharamsala on Sunday afternoon to catch a few overs.

So I'll keep posting sporadically, but until my computer comes back, I'm down to about one a week. Thanks for reading you guys!

Sh*t Keeps Breaking!

2010-03-30T12:40:00.001+05:30

Sorry for the short picture-less post, but the latest in my list of things that has broken since I left home is now my computer. I could sit at work and write for an hour a day, but that's really not what these computers are for. So I'll just jot down the list of things that have broken since I left Corvallis. Hopefully, I'll be back up with a slew of posts as soon as my computer gets fixed:

Front bike tire (flat on mile 19 of the Portland Marathon)
Car (desastrous strike by Bambi in Montana)
GPS plug in. (just stopped charging when I needed it most - in Charlottesville, a town with no straight roads)
Ipod to radio plug in (actually never worked that well to begin with)
Plastic shower chair (that one was pretty funny. I transferred into it and the legs spread like a dog on ice)
Voltage transformer (blew a fuse first time it got plugged in at the Pema Thang in Dharamsala. Second fuse has been solid)
Wheelchair handle (and my right elbow after I fell six steps!)
Chinese heater (!!@#%%%&%$$%ing piece of crap!)
Left calf (burned on that !!@#%%%&%$$%ing piece of crap!)
Portable sound board (luckily it was just the power cord, not the board)
Cell phone wall adapter (smelled something electrical burning...)
Lost bearing on left wheel (replaced by a joint US-India operation - Thanks Dan, John and Ron!)
Guitar pickup (fixed now, but one day it just all fell apart)
Front wheel on chair (snapped off on a bumpy ride between McLeod Ganj and Bhagsu - road has since been asphalted)
Front wheel on chair (had it welded; worked for two weeks; broke off on a similarly rough road)
Transformer US to India adapter (fried ten minutes before our first open mic - luckily very easy to replace in Dsala)
Computer (still hoping it's just the power cord)

So it hasn't been the cleanest of trips so far. I think it's my fault for claiming that my trip to Turkey last June was a 'perfect trip'. Never again. Those travel gods have VERY long memories!

90.4 Tashi Delek Cranks it Up!

2010-03-24T11:58:00.000+05:30

Everyone told me things would start to take off at 90.4 Tashi Delek FM, but for my tastes, things were taking too long. When I arrived in mid-December the town was beginning to hibernate for winter. Only the hardiest ex-pats stayed in town and most of the TCV students and faculty had returned home for winter break.

It was a good time to take stock at our situation, but I wasn’t convinced it was time to sit back and do nothing. There were still plenty of people in town and plenty of stories to cover. Unfortunately there was nobody there to cover them. Our station manager Kalsang and I were a two man crew which left nobody really to go out and get interviews and stories. And the times I did make a contact, they too, were in vacation mode and didn’t really want to come up to the station and talk business.

Tenzin Lhoksam, the director of the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts, was our only interview in January.

January was completely dead with us only spinning Tibetan tunes and me reading a two-minute news summary on the hour. No new content was created except for a couple of commercial scripts. February seemed even more desperate than that. Dharamsala was hit with a winter storm followed by Losar, or Tibetan New Year. At one point I didn’t even go to the station for two weeks. I was wondering what I was actually doing here.

But after the Losar break we had a meeting with our three reporters, our Director Phuntsok and Kalsang. We talked about our lack of initiative and how I felt like we were wandering in the desert. But we also formulated a plan to get back on track. The TCV students were on their way back in as well as the faculty which would make for interesting interview subjects.

Then good weather arrived allowing me much more freedom to roam McLeod Ganj at night. Along with the weather came Tibetan Uprising Day bringing with it the entire hierarchy of Tibetan activists. After meeting nobody for three months, I met just about everybody I’d had email contact with in less than a week.

Tenzin Choeden is our ace female reporter.

The energy in town was palpable and it carried over to our three reporters. They hadn’t been making calls or following up on projects since I’d arrived, but suddenly they all started kicking into gear. The ad copy that lay dormant for six weeks got recorded. Interviews were done and script copy was written. The computer geeks from Delhi who said since I arrived they would come up to Dharamsala to configure our sound board finally came up.

The TDFM team at work in the recording studio.

I found an anonymous donor to pay for station polo shirts, stickers and event banners. And, best of all, we held our first promo event, Dharamsala Live (see previous post). So after some very frustrating months both professionally and personally (the leg wound is 70% covered now!), things are really taking off. Today we’re broadcasting our first home-spun radio program, the recorded sessions from our Dharamsala Live event. Our student broadcasters have even gone live on air and are contributing to our first feature story on the history of the TCV.

Chimi Tenzing is hard at work recording a history of the Tibetan Childrens Village.

So it may have taken three frustrating months to get going, but 90.4 Tashi Delek FM is on the rise!

Dharamsala LIVE!

2010-03-22T14:42:00.000+05:30

After three months in Dharamsala, I finally got enough momentum going to initiate 90.4 Tashi Delek FM’s first ‘Dharamsala Live’ program. The concept was pretty simple. I had to round up the best musicians in town and get them to show up on a Satruday night to play a bunch of original songs. Effecting this plan was a bit more difficult.
When I first arrived I held the misconception that Dharamsala was as happening a town as it was when I was here in 2000. What I didn’t realize was the social scene all but shuts down from December to March. When the weather gets cold people go home at sundown. All but a few restaurants shut down and the steets become deadly silent. Weekends are no different from weekdays. You could hold pistol shooting contests down the Bhagsu Road on a Saturday night in January.

On top of that I burned my leg badly and the risk of infection was so great, I had to limit my motion to only going to the radio station and returning to my room at the Akosh Deep Hotel. I was afraid to turn over at night because putting even a little pressure on the wound could lead to a trip to the Kangra Hospital. I gave up the idea of hosting any kind of event until my fortunes and the night life of Dharamsala returned.

Three weeks ago with the Dalai Lama’s Spring Teachings and Tibetan Uprising Day on the horizon, the town started to come alive. The sunsets got later and night time temps went from 30 degrees to 50. The shops and restaurants kept their doors open later and the streets of McLeod Ganj filled with the eclectic mix of Indians, Tibetans and Westerners from all over the globe. My leg wound was close to healing and was no longer in any danger of infection.

In the dead of winter this usually signaled everyone to go home.

So it was time to kick start the 90.4 Tashi Delek promo campaign. When I first got to town I’d spoken to Nick, the owner of Nick’s Italian Kitchen, about hosting the open mic. He said it was fine with him, but when the months passed without me mentioning it, he though it was a dead deal. But when I rolled in for breakfast last Saturday and asked him if he was ready to actually do it, he nodded but assumed nothing would come of it. When I got back to the Akosh Deep I opened up my copy of Quark and designed a four-to-the-page handout announcing the event and telling people we would record the music and play it back on the radio. (The original plan was to broadcast it live, but we need a remote system that runs about $1000 to make that happen).

The next order of business was fixing the mini-sound board that had zapped out a few weeks ago. Phuntsok, the director of the radio station, knew an electrician in Lower Dharamsala so he ran the box down the hill and a few days later it came back in perfect working order.

Now I had get people to show up. This called for me running all over town with my guitar, playing songs and giving the handouts to anyone who stopped. If it were as simple as rolling out my door and playing to passers-by it wouldn’t have been much of an effort. But I live about a mile away from the main drag in McLeod and there is a steep quarter mile hill between Bhagsu and McLeod. On the nights where I was really tired I just played outside the Akosh Deep which has a decent amount of local traffic. But to get to the ex-pat crowd I had to hump the hill over to McLeod. I bought a soft-shell case for my guitar that acts like a back pack, and made my way to the drum shop and chai stands. The cool thing about McLeod is nobody is in a hurry so almost anyone will stop and listen to a tune, provided you’re not horrible. In the space of a few nights I’d gotten rid of all my flyers, but still had only confirmed one other guitar player.

Promo's hard work but it's got to be done!

When Saturday rolled around I slept in then played a long set in front of the Akosh Deep to catch the wave of tourists who flock to Bhagsu on the weekends to take a dip in the town’s healing spa. At 5:00 I showered, packed my guitar, loaded my laptop into my back pack and did a gear check. I put on my new 90.4 Tashi Delek Polo shirt and started the assault on the Bhagsu Road hill.

Rolling up the hill with the guitar is one thing, but hauling up it with a laptop and a bag of recording gear is another. I made it 70 percent to the top then, for the first time, accepted the offer of a push. It wasn’t that I didn’t think I could make it. I was sweating like a nose tackle during summer workouts which is not the best look for an MC.

Recording studio on wheels.

Once past the top of the hill, I dropped the long winding section into McLeod Ganj in a wheelie, careful not to let my one remaining caster wheel hit the mine-field of potholes (oh yeah, I forgot to say I’ve been on three wheels for two weeks now). I finally made it to Nick’s where I came upon a very surprised Nick who wasn’t sure if I would actually show.

It was a gorgeous night so Nick’s outdoor patio was hopping, but his inside dinning room was empty. I unloaded all my gear and set up the mixing board, microphones and lap tops. I did a short sound check and noticed the room was still empty with only 15 minutes to show time.

Mercifully a Belgian guitar player walked in holding one of the flyers he said he got from a friend. Then a couple of people I recruited from the Khana Nirvana (see last Wed. post), strolled in and sat at a table. At seven bells there were only seven people at Nick’s. Nick told me to just start playing and people would come in. I'd prepared a speech talking about the radio station and the TCV, but I’d envisioned speaking to a crowd, not a table.

I flipped on the recorder, welcomed the sparsely populated room, then blasted into some of my new material. I’d anticipated the first night wouldn’t be well attended, but considering the effort I’d made, I was hoping for better than just a couple of tables.

An empty room is a scary sight for an event promoter.

Then a Tibetan guitar player showed up. Ten minutes later an Australian violin player arrived with her ukulele-playing cohort. By the time I finished my four-tune set there was actually a murmur developing in the room. I handed the floor off to the Belgian player then rolled over to the door to find a half dozen people standing outside on the road listening. I told them to get their asses inside and by the time the Belgian was done I actually had a crowd.

The Bhagsu Road Ramblers (they'd just met the night before).

Then a Nepalese flautist arrived and a couple of drummers. By 8:00 the place was packed which actually became problematic for the purposes of recording. Instead of a room of people listening to music it just became a Saturday night bar scene – albeit with no alcohol. Two monks came in and took over the table next to the microphones and proceeded to talk so loudly that their voices were picked up louder than the flute.

A TCT Student even got into the act.

Ram is a local Nepalese flute legend.

But these were problems of affluence. I can try to get something to amplify the acts, but not having a crowd would have been disastrous. The best part was that people were laughing, cheering and singing along when they knew the song. Just an hour earlier I was afraid I was going to leave with my head tucked between my arsecheeks. But this was nothing of the sort. It was an actual happening.

Anu from Kana Nirvana crushed with an a cappella song against terrorism.

After all the acts played, I thanked everyone for coming then said the floor was up for open jamming. All the musicians stayed and a few shyer ones who had just been listening, came up and joined in. We played a half dozen cover tunes letting everyone on the floor take long solos.

This room was much warmer than the one I rolled into an hour earlier.

I was in the middle of singing Folsom Prison Blues when Nick walked over and handed me a note. It read: Closing Time 10 minutes. Normally he sends his workers home around 8:00 but it was coming up on 9:30 and they weren’t expecting to be there that late. We could have kept going for hours, but having someone tell us to shut up was probably the more sane idea. We finished up with a rousing rendition of 'All Along the Watchtower' then they all dispersed into the night. I was the last one to leave but before I rolled out I gave myself a private fist pump. 15 years ago, if you would have told me I would be organizing and emceeing a bunch of musicians in a small Himalayan town, I would have laughed you out of the building.

I packed up my gear, but left the recording equipment at Nicks. The Bhagsu Road is really dark at night and I didn’t need the extra baggage. By the time I got back to the Akosh Deep I was again a sweaty mess. I grabbed a beer from the liquor stall next door then washed up and crawled into bed. When I woke this morning the bottle was open, but still full.

TCV Spring Fete

2010-03-19T15:43:00.001+05:30

Photo Friday

Last Saturday the Tibetan Children's Village (operators of 90.4 Tashi Delek FM) held their annual Spring Fete. It's a typical school festival with games, food and music. It's amazing how these things are the same all over the world. So here's some of the action - school fair Tibetan style!

The inflatable slide was a big hit (for a huge profit too!)

That's not trash - those are the remnants of a MASSIVE water baloon fight!

Peaceout!

Too bad there wasn't a wrestling contest!

The baseball pitch was the hardest game on the grounds.

Best T-shirt at the Fete (Clones are People Two).

The clothes swap & sale was perfect for a boarding school.

As you can tell by the dented cans, this game was toooo easy.

PARTY!

These massive tents only come out a few times a year, but they're really useful when the get out of the box.

Sistahs~!

Yup - Hannah is a global phenomenon.

Tibetan Roulette

No you din'nt!

The TCV houses most of its students - like these three.

The path to knowledge... (gag!)

When you're this far from the Ocean a Coke bottle will do.

Toss the ring - win some TP!

Best Dressed!

A Tibetanmullet!

Kana Nirvana – the Handicapped Mt. Everest.

2010-03-18T13:40:00.004+05:30

In 2000 this sign read:

Kana Nirvana

Ten years ago when I was rolling the monsoon-soaked mud bogs of McLeod Ganj, my sister-in-law, Zoe, organized an open mic night at Tea O’Clock, a coffee shop just off the main bus stop. She called it ‘Poetry across the Planet’ and explained to the owners, Tenzin and Namgyal, that she hoped to get some local talent up there reading homespun poetry and open verse. Of course, singer-songwriters would be welcome to air their craft as well.

It was a great idea except for one thing: Tenzin owned a couple of amps and a few microphones. As soon as the first guitar player plugged in, music completely dominated Poetry Across the Planet. Zoe attracted a crowd of about a dozen for the first night but six weeks later when I made my final appearance, both the upper and lower floors of Tea O’Clock were packed and a crowd big enough to stop traffic hung outside the door as the electric music could be heard from anywhere in McLeod Ganj.

More and more musicians heard the loud music and showed up with gear. After everyone played a four-tune set it was open jam time and there were a half-dozen rotating musicians who formed the core of the new house band, The Himalayan Avalanche Orchestra. At that point my chops weren’t nearly as nice as some of the better guitar players in town, so I got to strum along on my acoustic while the HAO ripped into a number of didgeridoo-inspired rhythm pieces.

Even though nobody could hear me, I was in the group and I was actually stopped on the streets of McLeod by a hot Israeli chick saying, “Hey – you’re that guitar player – I really love what you guys do.”

It was ridiculously dangerous to my ego and I strutted around town as if I was Townshend in Soho. Zoe’s great idea turned me into a Rock and Roll tool. But there was a positive outcome too. I started writing my own material, something I still do when my brain is either settled or frazzled enough to take to the task. With a half-dozen new tunes in my satchel I looked for other places in town to play and everyone told me to go to Kana Nirvana on the Temple Road for their Monday-Night singer-songwriter showcase. I was more than game for it until I asked my brother Dan if it was a hard place to get to. Dan had been dragging me up a tight set of stepsto the performance area at Tea O’Clock for more than a month. He said there’s no way I was getting up to Kana Nirvana. It was straight up three stories with a wretched open-sewer moat separating the bottom step from the street. I’d relied on both Dan and Zoe for so much stuff that I didn’t push it. The Saturday nights a Tea O’Clock were damn fine nights as it was.

Fast forward to last week and I found myself in a bind. I’d told everyone at 90.4 Tashi Delek I was organizing an open mic at Nick’s Italian Kitchen, a ground-floor restaurant with plenty of space. I spoke with the owner, Nick, and he loved the idea. I made up some flyers and added in the big kicker: ‘All songs will be recorded for playback on 90.4 Tashi Delek the week after the performance!’

As long as the performer plays original material we can put it on the air. There’s just one problem: I only know one other guitar player. That meant I needed to find more players which meant I need to go play a set at Kana Nirvana. I’d been playing at a local drum store (actually just a tarp on the road covering some drums, flutes and didgeridoos) with the sales guy, Nuri, on and off for a few weeks and asked him if he could get me up to Kana Nirvana. Nuri’s the nicest guy in the world and he said it would be no problem.

In 2000 I hung out at the Bhagsu Chai stand. Now I hang at Nuri's drum stand.

Having never actually seen the venue, I just assumed it was something we could handle with four hefty dudes. Nuri had to close his store down which meant hauling his inventory to his dad’s place somewhere in the labyrinth behind the Bhagsu road. I watched over the goods and played a set to warm up while he took armloads of instruments down the hill.

Luckily a few friends passed by and I asked them if they could help drag my ass up the stairs to Kana Nirvana. I could see hesitation in their eyes, but the people in this town are just too damn nice. Before long I led a posse down the main market in McLeod and down the hill towards the main temple. But as we got closer, I noticed that for one reason or another, I was down to three people when we got to Kana Nirvana.

And there was great reason for the defection. Below me was the nasty moat and rising above, like Sagamartha herself, were the steps to Kana Nirvana. They were both narrow and steep with the only aid being a solid hand rail guarding a nasty fall to the open lot next door. In order to cross the moat I had to get out of my chair and drag myself across a flimsy piece of press-board that couldn’t even hold my weight. Two guys lifted my ass across and the board was only there to keep my legs from dropping into the filth.

It's hard to tell, but this moat is two feet wide and 18 inches deep. Not leapable in the old Quickie Wheelchair.

Uri, one of the drummers, took my chair and ran it up the 30+ steps to coffee house. Then Jack from Chicago and Ravi from town each grabbed one of my legs as I hoisted myself up towards the top, one pull at a time with the aid of the rail. It took a while to get some rhythm, but once we got it going, we knocked off the first 20 steps without a break. The last ten, however, were even steeper, there was a turn, and there was no more hand rail.

It might be the Stairway to Heaven but it felt like Hell getting up there.

At this point I was surprised I was still wearing pants and my shoes were still on. I tied everything really tight at the bottom but that rarely makes up for not having an ass or a viable Achilles tendon. But, once we got close, we had more than enough helpers to go the rest of the way. Four sturdy horsemen hauled me up the final leg and flopped me in my awaiting chair. The only casualty was Nuri who lagged behind and put his foot through the flimsy board that we left across the moat. He gashed the hell out of his shin and got a toxic soaker for his effort.

At last I’d made it to the sacred confines of Kana Nirvana – only to discover there was only one other guitar player. All that work just to score one player – and he didn’t even want to play. WTF! But the place eventually filled up mostly with westerners on short stays. I got to give them my spiel about coming to the open mic at Nic’s Italian as well as tell them about 90.4 Tashi Delek. I was hoping to find myself in a room full of eager players, and instead landed in a bunch of drummers. Don’t get me wrong – it was a really cool scene – just not worth the effort we all put in to get me there.

These cats kicked out a hell of a rhythm for the Scarlet-Fire!

But the good part about being the only guitar player is that I had a full house to myself. I played a short set then let the drummers and a novice dig player take the floor. Ten minutes later there were no more takers and a nice robust crowd. I pulled out my bag of tricks and played for over an hour with the help of a fantastic rhythm section.

Set went something like this:

Help Me Along *

Kalsang *

Bhagsunag *
LordTake Me Back to Portland*

Drum/Didgeridoo Set

Dear Prudence (Beatles request)

Scarlet-Fire (couldn’t resist w/the drummers)

I Can See Clearly Now

Dog (written by my dog Sydney)*

Let it Rain

Watchtower

Johnny B. Goode

Encore (they actually asked for one – then again they were stoned, it was Monday night and everything else was closed):

Somebody Tell Me Why I Can’t Get on a Roll *

So in the end it turned out to be a great night and hopefully I got a lot of people to come over to Nick’s on Saturday. The trip down the stairs was much easier as six people took turns and bumped me down each stair. It took a chariot carry to get me over the moat (cracked wood w/blood stain still floating), but soon enough I was humping it up the Bhagsu road back to my crib.

Now I just have to find a half-dozen players for Saturday night!

*My tunes: http://www.thcommunications.com/fun/fork/

Top Ten Jocks of the Decade

2010-03-16T15:32:00.001+05:30

I hope it doesn’t bother you all that I’m going to get a bit jocky over the next three weeks. It’s just that this is March Madness and, aside from the glorious three weeks that constitute the Tour de France and the month of October when real baseball is played, this is my favorite time of the year. Don’t worry, I’ve got plenty of good India pics coming for Photo Friday, but sports is what got me into this mess so for a couple of posts I’m going to give it its due.

But we’ll start outside of basketball and move into a conversation I had in McLeod at my local cricket hangout (Indian fast food place that shows cricket matches on a 17” screen). Star Sports (ESPN Asia partner) was showing the annual Laureus Global Sports awards show. It’s the international equivalent of the ESPY’s so it’s rare that an American Football player gets anything – but everyone else is up for grabs.

They gave their male athlete of the year to Usain Bolt and female athlete to Russian Pole Vaulter (who just missed the podium in back to back World Championships) Yelena Isinbayeva. Then the panel of experts had a discussion (no official awards) as to their athletes of the decade. Lots of names went up and no consensus was made. At the Indian place in McLeod their list consisted of 25 cricket players, Bolt and Michael Phelps.

My list went like this:

1) Tiger Woods - Let’s get serious here. Golf is a crap shoot. It’s not a matter of a great athlete pushing harder, or doing their best. You have to be awesome all the time. Golf is the hardest sport in the world in terms of consistency and this guy has aced the field (nah, I ain’t goin’ there…). Sure golfers are a bunch of stuck up rich boys and even Tiger couldn’t change that. There hasn’t been a ‘Tiger Woods Factor’ bringing minorities to the tour, but that’s not his fault. He rewrote the book in the most difficult test of athletic precision.

2) Roger Federer - If tennis was as unpredictable as golf, Federer would be number one on this list. But it’s not. If you’re good, you’re going to kick everyone’s ass. And that’s what Federer has done. With at least five more majors to go (dude’s only 27-years-old) he’s just started rewriting the record books. I remember when Doctor J stopped attacking the rim and started shooting jump shots in his late 20’s and early 30’s. He was still the best player in the game and that’s where Federer is going now.

3) Michael Phelps - I grew up in a swimming family and, after one season of chlorine poisoning, hated the sport so much I became a diver. I play in a rock band where everyone except the drummer is a swimmer. Let me tell you from personal experience – these cats are not normal. This is the worst most horrible sport in the world. Aside from the fitness thing, swimming is like putting chalk in your teeth and writing your name on the board 100 times. It’s just awful. It’s unwatchable unless you’ve got a horse in the race. My horse is Michael Phelps and I seriously don’t know how anyone can give the guy a ration over taking a bong hit. Please Michael, take many more.

4) Lance Armstrong - Now we’re getting into the ugly 00’s discussion on steroids. Lance was a doper. There’s no question. In French grand jury testimony his teammate Frankie Andreu (as well as Andreu’s wife) testified that in the hospital room, Lance told the doctor he’d done every performance-enhancing drug in the book. And because he’d all of them he was on his death bed. I follow cycling religiously and I know what kind of rider he was during that period. He was a one-day specialist, way too big to be a Tour de France winner. There’s no way he took those needles while he was the 7-time champ. Those are clean wins. As will, hopefully be the 8th, Mr Contador!

5) Shawn White - I just watched this guy win his second gold medal at the age of 23. Isn’t this guy 40 or something? From the age of four, Shawn White has taken me into a sport that didn’t exist when I was growing up. I was one of those short, flippy-twisty dudes so if this sport would have been around when I was a kid, I would have spent my youth on a ski hill instead of a swimming pool (OK, I didn’t have that kind of jack, but you get where I’m going).

6) Kobe Bryant - I met this cat in 1999 after he’d been voted into the starting lineup of the NBA All-Star game while he was the 6th Man on the Lakers. On the eve of the All-Star game, Adidas flew the 19-year-old on a private jet to the Atlanta Super Show (a sports industry trade show) to do a product presentation for his new shoe. In a crowd full of industry big wigs, he sold his shoe better than the 50 professional salesmen sitting in front of him. And then he went on to be a better clutch shooter than Jordan (last decade’s top athlete).

7) Serena Williams - This woman is a hyper athlete who’s only nemesis is boredom. She’s won half her grand slams ten pounds overweight so when she’s in shape nobody can touch her. It’s a shame she didn’t pick up soccer because she’d be as dominant as any woman out there if she did.

8) Albert Pujols - I’m still on the doping bandwagon. Pujols took a few weeks off in 2006 for an ‘abdominal strain’ which, for a young guy, is precisely the result of doing steroids. I’m pretty sure he, like A-Rod, Manny, McGuire, Bonds, Nomah, Sosa – the list is too long, was a doper. But I also think that episode, as well as his god-given talent, made him give up the spike and just rake. He stands above all the rest and it’s not just because of his physical makeup. This guy is the most complete hitter since Ted Williams.

9) Peyton Manning - Only one football player on this list and I’m sure that’s because football is the ultimate team sport. It’s not a team sport, it’s an organizational sport. You need a coach and a dozen great players to win a title. Dan Marino may have been the best QB in the history of the league and all he’s got for it is a piss-yellow jacket. Peyton’s four MVP’s get him on the list, but more than that, the fact that he’s his own offensive coordinator keeps him here.

10) Shaquille O’Neal – He’s a bit like Serena in the fact that he’s dominated a major global sport while being out of shape for much of it. There’s only about three months out of the year that really interest him, but he’s been the biggest force in the game when those three months come around. Sure he’s got a big body, but so did Kareem and Kareem took care of himself (lungs aside…). If he were a bit more coachable (free throws, conditioning) he could (read: should) be on the top of this list.

Honorable Mention

Tim Duncan - Again, as much as I don’t watch anything but the last ten minutes of an NBA game, I have to admit, I always stop the clicker when I see Tim Duncan. Every time I watch him, no matter if it’s the first quarter of a pre-season game or the waning minutes of the NBA Finals, he’s beating his opponents. He’s the most skilled, unspectacular player in sports history and he’s got four rings to prove it. If only he’d been an Oakland Rader: Just Win Baby. That’s all he does

Guo – Just Google her. I’m sure there are other Olympians out there, who have dominated, but she’s the best diver since Louganis and she goes on my list.

Usain Bolt – He happened too late in the decade to be a 10-year phenomenon. But sheeyaaah.

Haile Gebrselassie – Lots of his best moments were in the 90’s but he was pretty much unbeatable in the 00’s. Should have made his mark in the marathon to be considered the ‘best distance runner’ of all time.

Tony Hawk – Shawn White owes everything to this cat. But Hawk was not competing against the same caliber of freaks White is beating.

Pudge Rodriguez – Pudge is the best baseball player I’ve ever seen. And yeah, I’ve seen Pujols play too. Defensively, Pudge has denied as many runs as Hank Aaron scored. The only thing that keeps him out of the top ten is that I’m a catcher and, just like Guo, my journalistic non-bias puts him in the honorable mention category.

Brett Favre… Jesus, I just can’t talk about it.

Zendine Zedane. I’ve had the absolute privilege to watch this magician play twice in World Cup games. He’s the combination of Kobe, Duncan and Pudge. For six years the French won everything. Amazing skills; amazing athleticism; complete competitor. But the head-butt… Dude, it was the World Cup Final, not the film version of M*A*S*H (Spear Chucker Jones).

Lebron. Win something! (yeah, the Gold Medal does count…)

Sachin Tendulkar. The guy has rewritten the batting record books like Favre did the NFL passing records. It’s a different game now, but it was really cool to see his last couple swats when he broke the ODI 200 run mark. He’s not in my top because none of you know what the hell that means. C’mon America! Cricket is LIFE!!

Boxers: Greatest athletes; dumb foks – ALL OF THEM!

Michael Schumacker? Drivers may be athletes, but it’s not their athleticism that gets them wins. It’s balls and a good car.

OK, who am I leaving out? No Hockey players (Gretzky screwed that pooch – maybe Crosby at some point?), no handicapped athletes or long distance runners (none of them have dominated) and no race car drivers, poker players or female pool players (yeah, I watch them bend over the table). Rock climbers? Paddlers? Tell Me!

(Coming soon – Weirdest All-Time Athletes!)

p.s. anyone who wants in on the NCAA pool can email me at tomhaig@hotmail.com.

More Tibetan Uprising Day Pics!

2010-03-12T10:20:00.062+05:30

It's been a while since I've done Photo Friday, mostly because I've been unable to post on Fridays. But it's back with a special edition:

Tibetan Uprising Day II

(For pics from HHDL's talk go to www.dalailama.com/gallery/)

TCV Students early in the march.

A motorcyclist ready to brave the Library Road.

A plea to the Chinese to release the Panchen Lama, the world youngest political prisoner. Click here for more information.

The 'Middle Way' is promoted by HHDL, but possibly a little to soft a message for this crowd.

TCV Students at the Main Temple waiting to march.

Nuns are leading the charge for Tibetan Womens Rights. At the same time as the march the Kalon Tripa was hosting a conference on Empowering Tibetan Women.

Natasha is a long-time Dharamsala Expat. His Holiness went right from his seat to bless her child.

Speaks for itself.

This banner is right outside the offices of the Government in Exile. India has been incredibly generous in hosting HHDL and the Govt. in Exile - even though China has threatened and terrorized its citizens.

What was that driver thinking??

Hard to believe this is an open 2-way road here.

A little lost - but eventually everyone finds their way to the rally.

Young Monks (anyone need a name for a rock band?)

If you take a bike on the way down - it's MUCH easier than walking back up (If you have any brakes left).

Getting closer to Kotwali.

If you drive you don't have to carry the power source for your speakers.

A steep section off the top of McLeod.

I was planning on camping out here but I couldn't hold my chair still!

Coolest flag on earth.

The stage for the rally was right next to a main artery in Lower Dharamsala. Did they reroute traffic?

<stevemartinvoice>NOOOOOOO</stevemartinvoice>.

A flat section in Lower Dharamsala not far from the Cricket Stadium - which would have been a better venue.

Yup. Still in the Himalayas.

Tibetan Uprising* Day in Dharamsala

2010-03-11T11:32:00.003+05:30

*This has been called Tibetan 'Resistance', 'Uprising' and 'Awareness' Day by various groups. Take your pick*

I’m pretty sure this isn’t on any of your bucket lists but you might as well list it and run it right up to the top ten. Before you die, all of you should experience Tibetan Uprising Day in Dharamsala. It's one of the most exciting, inspirational and visually stunning events I’ve ever attended.

Before you leave the planet you need to put yourself in this picture.

On the eve of the 51st annual Uprising Day, I got a call from Phil Void, the founder of the The Dharma Bums (not the Portland outfit), a rotating group of musicians who since 1985 have appeared at numerous Tibet support rallies. Phil’s claim to fame is writing the song ‘Rangzen’ which is a big hit throughout Tibetan exile community. He was asked by the Students for a Free Tibet to sing to the thousands of Tibetans marching from the Main Temple in McLeod Ganj, to a street rally in Lower Dharamsala, more than four miles away.

Phil is a good friend of my brother Dan so he called to tell me of a gathering of SFT supporters at the Hotel Tibet, my home for three months in 2000. Even though I stayed at the Hotel Tibet, I was so obsessed with writing a book about my life in high diving and traveling in a wheelchair, that I never stepped foot in the hotel bar. I didn’t even know the place existed until Dan told me nearly seven years later. I went by the door every day, but I thought it was a banquet room.

Phil greeted me and handed me four Dharma Bums CD’s to put on the 90.4 Tashi Delek FM play list. With the exception of some of my tunes I mistakenly put on the air, The Dharma Bums are the only non-Tibetan act that gets air time on the station. We’d love to play non-Tibetan music, but we don’t have the money to buy the music licenses. We’ve got over 1000 tunes, all of them by Tibetan artists.

The normally reserved Tibetans were in full party mode at the Hotel Tibet slugging drinks and telling stories about their travels in the states. It’s surprising how many Tibetans have made it to America for school or visiting relatives. It’s difficult for them to travel because they can’t get Indian or Chinese passports. They have to get special permission to leave India then endure a complicated visa process for each country.

It was a much later night than I anticipated and the roll back to Bhagsu along the pitch black ridge was more harrowing than I’d predicted when I left the hotel. It’s been too cold to go out at night, so it was the first time I’d rolled the Bhagsu Road in the dark. I really miss my head lamp!

I woke up early and light headed from the effort at the Hotel Tibet. I tossed on my ’90.4 Tashi Delek FM’ polo shirt and busted up the Bhagsu road hill, sweating a bit more than usual. The Uprising Day festivities started at 8:30 and I was running late so I blew off my original plan of stopping at one of the chai stands for a quick omelet. The streets of McLeod were empty until I reached the Temple Road. As I wheelied down the steep incline, the crowd grew until fifty yards from the temple there was no room to move. The face-painted, flag-waiving Tibetans were chanting slogans and screaming with their fists in the air. The flag-selling business along the side of the road was hotter than the T-shirt business at the World Cup. That's probably because at $4 a shirt, they were a bit more affordable than the $30 variety at the World Cup.

When Tibetans face-paint they aren't just getting worked up over a college football game. .

The main entrance to the Main Temple takes one up 20 stairs, so I rolled to the vehicle entrance on the far side of the complex. I started pushing up an impossibly steep incline and was immediately joined by a security guard who pushed me to the entrance on the main level. Before I was allowed in they asked me if I had a cell phone or a camera. Of course I had both, but I wasn’t aware they weren’t allowed. I had to check them in at the gate which really sucked because it was the most colorful crowd I’d seen since the Dead shows of the mid-80’s. I asked the guard why these items weren’t allowed and all he said was, “Security.” That made absolutely no sense because they allowed me to keep a step-down power converter and a portable sound mixer that I brought along to get fixed in Lower Dharamsala. The power convert and sound board didn't look that much different from a bomb. So the bomb was OK, but cell phones and cameras were off-limits.

The security guard parked me in the back near the Dalai Lama’s private residence. Not two minutes later, His Holiness strolled out of his compound accompanied by the Kalon Tripa, the Speaker of the Tibetan Parliament in Exile and four armed Indian police guards. As they walked up the center aisle to the stage, Tibetan security followed them with ropes to keep the crowd back. Luckily I got right up next to the rope and followed them until I was about 20 yards from the action. After His Holiness’s group, a marching band from the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts paraded down the aisle stopping at the base of the stage. The band consisted of a drum corps, a dozen bag-pipers and ten flautists. When I closed my eyes it sounded just like a college football halftime. They played the Tibetan national anthem then went quiet as the Tibetans sang a seven-minute long prayer.

About 5000 people filled the Temple plaza. Half were TCV students and the rest were a mixture of Tibetan exiles and a scattering of Injies. Oddly enough, I didn't see one Indian. Seated next to His Holiness were members of the Tibetan Parliament and visiting dignitaries from Japan and Taiwan. The Kalon Tripa gave the first address followed by the Speaker of the Parliament. All the speeches were in Tibetan leaving us Injies in the dark. But with a long hike on the docket, the crowd wasn’t in a sitting mood so they murmured loudly through both talks.

This crowd knows no age. Everyone from students to this woman screamed all day long.

When it was time for the Dalai Lama to speak, the crowd quieted. His Uprising Day statement was also in Tibetan, but workers from the Temple ran up to each Injie and and handed them a copy of the remarks in English. I’ve seen the Dalai Lama speak a dozen times, but I’ve never heard him read a prepared statement before. In the past it’s always been him talking from his heart. But this was a carefully crafted speech reiterating the ‘Middle Way’ proposal he’s presented to the Chinese government over the past few years. After his prepared talk, he closed his notes then spoke to the crowd for just as long. I have no idea what he said, but I was told he asked the crowd to not make a nuisance of themselves as they marched down the Library Road. He is always careful to remind the Tibetans they are visitors – even if it's been 51 years.

These students wanted to start marching!

His Holiness finished then walked down the main aisle (passed by me two-feet away!) followed by dignitaries and the TIPA band. Once he left, local leaders took over the microphone and began the chants I would hear loudly for the next three hours:

What do we want!:

FREE TIBET!

Long Live!:

THE DALAI LAMA!

Release!:

THE PANCHEN LAMA!

China! China! China!:

OUT! OUT! OUT!

United Nations!:

WE ARE HERE!

As the crowd raised their banners and got ready for their four-mile march to Lower Dharamsala, I went to the security office and recovered my camera. I have no idea why I couldn’t bring in a camera when there were 50 press photographers and the event was covered on live television. Next time I go to an event at the temple I’m going to ask the radio station to get me a press pass. Not only will I get pics, I’ll get a front row seat.

The crowd had been restless during the speeches and began to build to a full rowdy pitch. The students rallied under their banners while Tibetans of all ages walked out of the temple waiving flags and screaming as loud as kids half their age. I rolled out with the crowd and had to constantly stop people from grabbing the handles on my chair. This happens every time I’m in a crowd in Asia. People want to help, but they don’t watch where they’re going and they can push me into a pot hole – which means I end up on the ground or in a ditch. I have to be polite, but after ten or twenty times it gets old.

The crowd at the beginning of the march was thick, but it thinned out over the course of several miles.

For those of you who have followed this blog you’ve heard me speak in fearful and reverent words about the great Library Road connecting McLeod Ganj to Lower Dharamsala. It is the steepest, curviest road in all of civilization. Fortunately over the past decade it’s been paved and is now very well maintained. But that actually makes it faster. The road drops 5000 feet in only three kilometers. At several points along the route it drops at greater than 20%. Although much shorter than the climb up l’Alpe D’Huez, the angle of decent makes that look like a rolling hill in Iowa.

These guys were too young for the long walk but they wanted to help out anyway.

As the crowd made its assault on the Library Road, I leaned back in a wheelie and slowly dropped the first insane section. I put myself in the middle of a group of school kids and chanted along with them while I kept my eyes glued to the 500-foot cliff on my right. The Library Road is not only steep and winding, it’s is also very narrow. At many points the two-way road is less than 10-feet wide. If this march were in any other country, the cops would shut the road down and divert traffic. But this is India where chaos makes more sense than order. Along with the mile-long line of 5000 screaming Tibetans was a full compliment of two-way traffic. At places where the road bottlenecks for one-way traffic (usually because the outside lane has been washed down the cliff) cars and motorcycles were lined up for hundreds of yards.

The first long switchback on the Library Road

While I was flying by the traffic in the midst of the chanting, Technicolor protesters, I noticed one of my Indian neighbors from Bhagsu sitting in a taxi. I pulled up next to her and asked her what she was thinking. She said she forgot it was Uprising Day and just wanted to go to Kotwali Bazaar to do some shopping. She’d been in traffic for more than an hour at that point. I told her I felt sorry for her, but I also left her far back in my rear-view mirror.

The Uprising March as it passes by the home of the Government in Exile.

After an hour on the Library Road my hands (read: BRAKES) began to cramp up something fierce. I could no longer hold a wheelie so I had to go on four wheels and zig-zag back and forth hoping to make my turn before heading over the edge. Towards the bottom of the road the switch backs become even more severe. To put an image in your head as to how steep these turns are, imagine this: Delek Hospital is a four-story building. The road passes the front door then 60 yards later around the switch back it comes up to the wheelchair entrance – on the fourth floor.

At this point my decision to forego breakfast was wearing heavily on me as my arms and hands were ready to shut down. For the first time since leaving the Temple I could see Kotwali Bazaar and it didn’t feel like I was looking out of an airplane window. Mercifully after one final and incredibly severe turn, I came upon the final decent to Kotwali Bazaar and the beginning of a normal road. Of course right at the bottom of the Library Road lies my main nemesis of Indian roads: the vertical slated drainage grid. I was moving pretty well when I came up to it and had to rely on my hands for one last emergency stop, otherwise my wheels would end up stuck in the grate and possibly bent beyond repair. If my hands had brake fluid in them you would have smelled that stuff for miles cause I was down to empty. I stopped just before the grid, made a sharp left and crossed the grid horizontally.

Finally I was on a normal stretch of road. Actually it was better than normal. It dropped at about a 3% grade which meant I didn’t have to push, only steer. I found an electrical shop and dropped off the broken mixer and step-down converter lightening my load even more. The ride went from a horrifying survival exercise to a glorious effortless breeze. The march had now spread out over more than a mile but the voices, many now completely hoarse, were still blasting out the chants: “LONG LIVE THE DALAI LAMA!”

As the march wound through Lower Dharamsala the grade of the road became a little easier – but if you looked up you easily remembered where you started from.

The march ended at the far end of Lower Dharamsala across the street from the main police station. Before going in, I rolled over to a nearby fruit stand and downed three bananas and a liter of water in less than two minutes. Next to the fruit stand was an India fast-food hut. If this was a crowd in a developed nation those places would be doing Black-Friday business. But even though there were 5000 people coming, there weren’t any lines. These folks just don’t have that kind of money. They pack a lunch.

The organizers created a stage under a covered roof above a mechanic shop. The street in front of the shop was closed off, but the main road right next to it was open to heavy traffic. As the thousands began to fill up the street, angry Indian drivers revved up their obnoxiously loud car horns to eleven. It was impossible to contain the crowd in the side street and I really don’t know how several people didn’t die.

As the school groups arrived each one of their leaders climbed up to the microphone and used whatever was left of their voices for one last scream. Standing next to them with video camera in hand was none other than Phil Void who was taking it all in while his axe was holstered in its case.

Two hours after the Dalai Lama spoke at the temple the festivities in Lower Dharamsala began. A few student leaders gave talks and this time one of them was actually done in English. Then it was time for Phil to pop open his case and pull out his axe. He got a polite reception then urged the throng to sing along with him. He handed out lyric sheets earlier, but most of the older Tibetans knew the song by heart.

Phil Void

He opened up his big voice, sang the fist verse then let into the anthemic chorus:

Rangzen! (freedom) Free just like the river flows

Rangzen! Free just like the wind blows

Rangzen! Freedom for the Land of the Snows!

The flags went up every time the crowd yelled, “Rangzen!”

Each time the chorus came around the crowd screamed and waved Tibetan flags creating a home-made wind. A few dignitaries had the bad luck of speaking after Phil’s tune, but by this time the crowd was cooked and thinking of the long walk back.

As the throng broke, I went around to the back of the police station to try to find some isolation so I cold pee. I found the back entrance to the police station and heard an Indian man screaming to a gathering of ten people. When I got closer I saw they were carrying Chinese flags. These ten people were the Chinese anti-protest to Tibetan Uprising Day. Their tiny numbers compared to the thousands across the street only served to hammer home the Tibetan cause.

The Chinese anti-protest was slightly less effective.

Once I’d done my duty, I began rolling back up the long incline towards Kotwali Bazaar. What was a leisurely roll on the downhill was a nasty climb on the upside. This time when a pair of monks grabbed my handles, I let them have at it. My arms and hands were cooked at this point so I ate my pride and just made sure I wasn’t getting pushed into road ruts. I thought I would have to wait for hours to get a cab back up, but again, there’s not a lot of cash in this crowd so I easily found one a kilometer away from the venue. Most of the marchers were going to walk all the way back up to McLeod. As I was heading back up the Library Road I was passing marchers who either got a late start, or stopped for lunch. They missed the main event, but they were going to keep marching and chanting until they made it down.

Six hours after I left Bhagsu, I was back in my room hungry and exhausted. I plopped down in my bed and took a nap with Rangzen and thousands of yellow, red and blue flags helping me to sleep.

US v. UK: Battle for the Indian English Speaking Population

2010-03-09T12:54:00.002+05:30

When I first came to India in 1991 the only thing that reminded me of America was the economy running on US Dollars. The Indian Rupee was a garbage currency with no value outside of the subcontinent. It barely had value inside the country either. The official exchange rate was 25 Rs to the Dollar, but there was a thriving currency black market where you could get more than 40 Rs/Dollar.

The problem with using the black market was that foreigners needed official government money changing receipts for many big purchases. Plane tickets, train tickets, hotel rooms and lots of hard goods required not only the Rupees, but also the precious money changing receipt – usually from the American Express Office.

Aside from the ubiquitous Dollar, the only other American presence was the brand new McDonalds in Connaught Place, and oddly enough a TGI Fridays (Thank Goodness it's Friday). Everything not Indian was British. The cars were British, the sports were British and the pop music was British. Every Indian speaking English was using British terms and every TV and radio announcer had Indo-British accents.

Move on twenty years and American pop culture is dominating India. It seems the only reminders of England are the cricket matches. American terminology has replaced British terminology. The cab drivers say, “Open the trunk” not “Open the boot”. People go out for dinner, not tea. Instead of leather shoes, most young people are wearing Nikes (or more likely the bootleg version).

But the biggest place where you see the domination of American culture is on TV. The BBC and CNN pretty much split the foreign news market (actually most English speakers watch a little of both every day), but aside from that there is almost no British presence on Indian TV.

On the other hand check out the list of US Television shows that appear within 24 hours of their US airdate: American Idol, Letterman, Leno (was Conan), TMZ, Larry King Live, Anderson Cooper 360, ENews, America’s Got Talent, The Amazing Race, Celebrity Apprentice – and probably many more. The Oscars were telecast live yesterday morning after weeks of big-hype promos. And of course the power went out just as they got to Best Actor.

As far as reruns go, An episode of ‘Friends’ is on almost any hour of the day. Also in daily rotation are Boston Legal, Ugly Betty, CSI (all of them), Pushing Daisies, Gossip Girl, Gary Unmaried, Desperate Housewives, Prison Break, Brothers & Sisters, Seinfeld, Two and a Half Men, Chris Angel: Mind Freak anything David Space has ever appeared in and - I’m not kidding either – I Dream of Jeanie. There are plenty more US shows, but I have come across only one British show, a slap stick comedy show that was axed after two weeks.

My guest house has a basic cable package with three English movie channels including Indian HBO – which has commercials. I have not seen any British films unless you count Bond films.

ESPN is now in Asia with a daily Sports Center broadcast from Hong Kong. While Cricket and Premiere League still dominate, every night there’s a recap of whatever sport that is in season in the US. The NBA is king among American sports and, oddly enough, the NHL is No. 2. The reason is that both sports are Olympic staples and any international sports will get there due in India. And now with so many Indians getting their education in the U.S. ESPN is starting to get decent ratings on college football and basketball (btw -the annual NCAA pool is ON! Shoot me an email if you want it tomhaig@hotmail.com).

But maybe the most telling sign on television is that voiceovers for promos are now done mostly in an American accent.

The music scene is heavily dominated by Indian pop so only the biggest bands (Coldplay, Metalica etc.) make a dent in the Indian psyche. And there's no preference of American vs. British bands. The best way for a band to get a headroad into the Indian market is by having a song in a popular movie or a TV commercial. But it's not likely to get much airplay. I'm pretty sure the Stones, the Beatles and Led Zeppelin are still better known than anything classic American acts, with the exception of Hotel California which, for some reason, is adored here. Unfortunately the American Idol contestants are more well known that any of those groups.

Up here in Dharamsala the Tibetans who speak English are all using American terms and those who are fluent are definitely speaking American. The students graduating from TCV have no interest in studying in England. They want to go to American Universities.

But this wave of American influence is definitely flavor-of-the-week as far as Hindus go. Hindus have been absorbing invading cultures for thousands of years and they haven’t let any of them become greater than the native Indian vibe. They take what works, put the local spin on it and it becomes part of their culture. I’m sure if I understood Hindu and watched Indian TV, there are plenty of Indian shows that have absorbed US formulas but keep them grounded in Indian culture.

But for all the America-bashing that dominated international opinion through the 00’s, this culture has been eating up ours.

Halfway Home

2010-03-05T14:49:00.002+05:30

I’ve just crossed the halfway point on this cracked Himalayan adventure, so it’s time to take stock and see where I’m at. The first thing I can say is that I am way out of ‘living abroad’ shape. In the late 80’s and early 90’s I made so many of these trips that I actually settled in abroad and thought I was going to live the rest of my life in a small French village on the foothills of the Alps. I felt at home in good old Les Avenieres, and a stranger to my native Milwaukee.

But that was after a difficult stay on the Island of Taiwan and a harrowing experience on a four-month tour of the Middle East. On those trips I never felt at home and rarely did I feel comfortable. Taiwan grew on me after a few months, but I was counting the days until I could get out of the Arabian Peninsula.

Unfortunately this trip has proven to be more counting days than feeling totally comfortable. And most of that is my fault. The evil burn on my leg had me at times feeling like I was going to die or at least have to get my leg cut off. It’s the nastiest skin injury I’ve ever had and you’re talking to a guy who walked away from a bike injury with half a windshield lodged in his back.

For two weeks I went to the hospital every day and looked in horror as the Tibetan doctor shook his head and repeated, "still infected." Te burn left me much more paralyzed than I already am. It was a constant buzz kill as I really needed to keep the leg up at all times. I was able to go to work, but I couldn’t go bombing the Himalayas in my chair which is one of the things I most looked forward to.

You really have no room to bitch when you live in a town where restaurants are supported by trees and Monks hang out at the bus stop.

Eventually the infections went away and the skin has only now started to really heal. I still have a gaping 5” by 2” open wound, but I don’t have to worry about staying in bed with my leg up. I’m back bombing the hills again and getting in shape.

But that, of course, was just in time for my wheelchair to break down. I’d just gotten to the point where I was crushing my half-mile climb to McLeod Ganj, when the caster wheel cracked off. Then we had the ice storm followed by Losar so it was two weeks before I could get it fixed.

Once I got it fixed I had a glorious day roaming the streets of McLeod jamming with other musicians and I thought to myself, “I’m finally over the hump here.” The Dalai Lama’s special one-day teachings were on the weekend and the Hindu festival of Holi (the one where everybody throws colored flour at each other) was just around the bend.

I missed the main festival, but I was around to see the gods enter town!

And, of course last Sunday I woke up with a fever, sore throat, runny nose and spent the whole event in bed – along with most of the following week.

Life at 90.4 Tashi Delek FM has been better, although much slower than I’d anticipated. I knew that coming to India to kick start a radio station in six months would be a challenge, but I thought we’d be further along. We’ve got all the equipment we need, but the Tibetans are very thorough which means things take much longer than need be. I’ve got three students who now know how to interview and edit audio, but they’re all a bit reluctant to take the next step to being reporters. They need to get on the phone and work their beat. We had a meeting last week and I told them I was going to start getting on them to make some phone calls, but being sick all week, I haven’t monitored them.

Aside from missing the teachings and Holi, it was actually a good week to be sick as a couple of community radio tech specialists have been in our studio installing a brand new scheduling program, (check it out - really cool NGO: http://gramvaani.org/) complete with phone-in capability. That means I may be calling you in the middle of the night, USA time, and asking for your opinion on the conflict in Kashmir. If this happens simply say, “It’s a dangerous nuclear hotbed and needs to be closely monitored.” That’s what all the Indian pundits say.

But to turn this semi-depressing update positive, I can that I’ve been playing a pile of music and have written and recorded five tunes (http://www.thcommunications.com/fun/fork). I’ve gotten to know what is, hands down, the oddest small town in the world. Everyone from the Indian woman who cleans my room to the doctors who have treated my wound have been unbelievably helpful and gracious. I’ve made friends with dozens of local businessmen and feel comfortable they’re not giving me the white-guy 50% markup. The days when the clouds are gone reveal some of the most stunning residential landscape on Earth.

So I’m going to quit my whining and remind myself that at the half-way point of my Taiwan trip I just wanted to come home. But by the end I was ready to stay another six months until I ripped my knee up in a van accident (yeah, it’s true – I was in full clown makeup when it went down, but that’s another story).

The 'before' and 'after' pics of the infamous 'Frowning Clowns' episode.

The temperature no longer drops below zero at night so I’m not freezing in bed anymore. Next weekend we’re going to start doing our first ‘Dharamsala Live’ shows at one of the local bars so that should kick start things as well. And only six more weeks before the Indian sports media descend on Dharamsala for IPL 20-20 cricket matches.

One month from now the Dharamsala Cricket stadium will be rockin'!

In the end I’m giving myself an 'incomplete' for sabotaging the first half of the trip and the town of Dharamsala an 'A+' just for being as totally whacked as a town can be.

Stay tuned for more hijinks!

And in the meantime hit this one:

So no, it hasn't been all that bad - I'm still waking up to this most mornings. And that wasn't happening much at all during the Monsoon of 2000.

Time to Fix the Olympics

2010-03-02T13:52:00.000+05:30

Now that the Olympics are over it’s time for that age old barroom conversation on what should and should not be in the Olympics. My criteria for this argument are as follows:

Is the Olympic Gold Medal the ultimate prize in the sport?
Are the best participants in the sport competing at the Olympics?
Is the sport attracting the same high quality athletes as the other sports?

The winter games are pretty clean, but there are two ‘sports’ that need to go.

First of all is Ice Dancing. This ‘sport’ is 100 percent subjective and by rule, all the participants have to basically do all the same tricks. It does not attract the highest quality of athlete it can. All the good skaters are in speed skating, hockey and figure skating. If you suck at all three of those, but really like skating, you go into ice dancing. It’s pure JV and belongs in shopping mall rinks, not the Olympic Games.

Next is Curling. As entertaining as Curling is, it requires no athletic talent, strength or stamina. I don’t doubt the skippers are quite skilled at what they do, and I don’t question their dedication. But it’s just not an athletic contest. It’s a fun game that gets good TV ratings. Can anyone explain why we need separate men’s and women’s events?

One thing I’d like to see happen is putting Basketball in the winter games where it belongs. The NBA could take a two-week break like Hockey and we’d get players in mid-season form without having to make them train all summer every four years. The only reason some of the stars sit out is because as they get older they can’t put up with the 12-month schedule. If they’re already in shape and they’re assured of taking the summer off, everyone will play.

Now to the summer games where there’s a bit more fluff.

There are two violating sports that will never come out because they come from a military tradition: Pistol/Rifle shooting and the Equestrian events. Again, I don’t question the skill or dedication of the gun participants. I just can’t call it a sport. The gun does all the work. The oldest medalist in the history of the games is a 72-year-old skeet shooter. If you can compete at 72, it’s not a sport.

The equestrian riders aren’t even doing the jumping – they’re relying completely on the athletic prowess of the horse. If they want to give credit to the horses like they do in thoroughbred racing, I’d be all for it.

Two semi-athletic endeavors that need to go because they don’t attract high-quality athletes are Synchronized Swimming and Rhythmic Gymnastics. I can tell you from first-hand experience that Synchro is easy and the women competing are no where near the quality of athletes as swimmers, divers or polo players. In 1988, I was on a tour of the Arabian Peninsula with a team of Syncho swimmers. These girls had a great attitude and made the trip much easier than it ever would have been. That being said, I learned their routine in the space of one afternoon. I even had the toe point to pull it off too. It would have taken the best of them several years to acquire the skill to do the diving portion of the show. So Synchro, like Ice Dancing is J.V. Rhythmic gymnastics? Please.

Two legitimate sports that need to go are Soccer and Baseball (gone for the London games, but probably back for Rio). Countries don’t send close to their best athletes for these games and the Olympic Gold Medal means very little compared to a World Cup, or World Series title. If Bud Selig wants to break up the season for two weeks and let the best players play, then it would be legit. Otherwise it’s got to go.

One sport that I could be convinced should stay, but is on my ‘out’ list is sailing. I know these guys are in shape and do a damn good job getting those rigs around the courses, but I still think the wind is doing more of the work than the athletes.

Next we have the sports that aren’t in and should be. These include Power Tumbling, Ultimate Frisbee, Water Skiing, Golf (including Long Drive), Bowling, High Diving, Endurance Racing, Cricket, Summer Biatholon, BMX and Skateboarding.

And finally we’ve got the list of ‘sports’ that have applied and are actually being considered. These include Poker, Bridge, Auto Racing, Chess, Dominoes, and yes, even Spelling.

I can hear Jim Thorpe turning over in his grave.

Could I Please Have a Normal Day?

2010-02-26T12:43:00.003+05:30

Yesterday was a microcosm of this entire trip: awful and awesome intertwined in each other.

We had a day off because there was a ceremony at the Main Temple to celebrate the 100th Anniversary of the 13th Dalai Lama’s exile to India, which most Tibetans consider their Independence Day. It’s tough to fathom a country celebrating Independence Day when they aren’t independent, but imagine if the U.S was taken over by Mexico. We’d still celebrate the Fourth of July and that’s exactly what the Tibetans were doing.

Perfect day to hang out with a bunch of monks at the Main Temple.

One thing making my life difficult at the radio station is getting accurate information about anything connected with Tibet. Up until around the year 2000, the only way information was passed in the Tibetan community was by gossip. Any official proclamations coming out of the Government in Exile or the office of the Dalai Lama were useless, because the information was already widely known in the Tibetan community. Somebody who knew somebody who knew somebody at the office had already leaked the news to the community at large. Things like newspapers, the internet and radio have been greeted with a giant, ‘Duh’ by most Tibetans. They already know it.

Unfortunately if you are not in the loop, like all us Injies, information is difficult, vague or just plain wrong. Such was the case with this ceremony. Tibet TV announced the Dalai Lama would be back in time for the ceremony. He was not. Dalailama.com didn’t mention it at all, and Phayul.com, the most reliable news source, said there was a ceremony on Thursday morning – no time listed. But, duh, everybody knows those ceremonies start at 8:30 don’t they?

Being somewhat in the loop now because I work with Tibetans, I did actually know the ceremony started around 8:30 so I got my butt out of bed at 7:30, dressed and started the two-mile roll to the Main Temple. I always have to do the quarter-mile climb out of Bhagsu to start off, but this time it was significantly more difficult. There was a bit of moisture on the road, but otherwise it was sunny, so I didn’t know why I was so slow. After my right wheel hit my pad for the fourth time I realized the packed bearings that give my chair the quarter inch I need to keep them from hitting my chair had fallen out.

One of the biggest pains about having a driver is that they have to take my chair apart and put it together every time I get in or out of the car. The little ring bearing had gotten loose and, despite several attempts to secure it, kept popping out. Apparently on Wednesday night, my driver put the chair together not noticing the bearing popped out. HOPEFULLY that meant the bearing was still in the floor of the car, not over some 500 ft. ledge in the greater Dharamsala metroplex. Without that bearing, I can’t workout and I can’t drop hills in a wheelie. Basically I’m stuck in my room.

Eventually I made it to the Main Temple and embarrassingly took a push to get up the hill to the main level. I’d been there many times in 2000, but this was the first time I’d seen it in ten years. It’s a very plain-looking yellow structure with a big open courtyard for outdoor ceremonies. Since 2000 they’ve erected a steel infrastructure that can be covered in vinyl to keep rain out during the monsoon. For this ceremony only about a quarter of the courtyard was covered for those who need the shade. Otherwise it was a gorgeous day.

Monsoon be damned! We've got a big-ass tent!

Monks, nuns, school kids and the cream of Tibetan society filled the courtyard before a marching band in traditional costume lined a runway and led the procession of government officials onto the speakers’ platform. There were drums, flutes, bagpipes and singers, but no Dalai Lama. There may have been a dozen westerners in the crowd and I can guarantee all of them assumed His Holiness was on the docket. So much for being out of the loop.

Tibetans know how to throw a parade!

Nonetheless it was an impressive ceremony and they even fed rice and served butter tea to every single person in the crowd. Whenever the Dalai Lama speaks at the temple you can get small radios that broadcast English translations (or Chinese when the Taiwanese are in town). But since he was not speaking, this service wasn’t provided. The speeches were all in Tibetan so us whities looked around the courtyard and smiled. Just because we didn’t know what was going on didn’t mean we weren’t blown away by our surroundings.

The Stars and Stripes are nice and all, but that's a FLAG! And I'm pretty sure the State of Arizona copied it!

When the ceremony was over I had to swallow my pride and take a push up the steep hill back to the main market in McLeod. I’ve been up and down that road dozens of times and I never once have taken a push. I figure if the pilgrims can prostrate themselves around the Potola, I can bust my ass up that hill. But the extra friction my wheel put on the chair was too much. Every time I push up any hill here, strangers grab my handles and start pushing. I politely tell them I’m ‘training’ and they begrudgingly let go. Sometimes I have to stop the chair, turn around and insist they let go, but eventually they get the idea. This time I just let them push. I had no idea who was pushing until I got up to the top of the half-mile climb. Then I discovered it was an elderly monk. Yeeesh.

Back on flat ground, I went about town doing running some errands and talking with the random collection of friends I’ve made over the past three months. I was slowly making my way back to Bhagsu when I stumbled by Nick’s Italian Kitchen. Nick serves a killer breakfast and seeing as it was only 10 o’clock, I slid in for some cheesy eggs and hash browns.

I hoped my bearings were sitting in the back of the TCV SUV, but I had to make plans in case they weren’t there. After I ordered, I jumped out of my chair and pulled the wheels off so I could take pictures of both the good and the bad wheel. My friend, Ron in Corvallis, used to build chairs and he’s a witch when it comes to mechanical stuff. I figured that if I sent him a picture of the good bearing, he could run over to the handicap store in Portland, pick up a good set of bearings and mail them to a friend of brother Dan’s who is coming over in a few weeks. Unbelievably, when I pulled off the bad wheel, I discovered the bearing was there, only the driver had installed it on the outside of the wheel instead of the inside. It actually fits better on the outside of the wheel, it just doesn't function. I reassembled the wheel, hopped back in the chair and uttered a huge grunt of relief. Now I was only down to one bad wheel as my right front caster wheel was still broken off.

I’m quite mobile on three wheels, so after breakfast I rolled over to the Internet café and checked my email. I noticed that I hadn’t had any hits on the blog and that's when I discovered I’d been attacked by Chinese hackers. Anybody clicking on the latest post, which talked about the triumphant return of the Dalai Lama to Dharamsala, was greeted by a thousand duplicate windows opening up. Nice security Google! You let those arseholes hack into blogspot! When I went to my own website, www.thcommunications.com, I discovered that it too had been hacked and each page sent out waves of gibberish. (both fixed now) So much for my temporary good mood.

I logged off and headed back to Bhagsu but just before taking on the long climb I decided two weeks on three wheels was enough. I was waiting for a free car from the TCV, but my normal driver was on vacation and it wasn’t their problem anyway. It was mine. I turned around and headed to the cab stand to see how much it was going to run me to get to the gas-welding shop in Mataur, 33 kilometers away.

After a big of haggling and looking pathetic, I got the cab company down to a 700 Rs round trip. That was about 300 Rs less than I thought it would take so again, I was feeling pretty good. It was just after noon and by three o’clock I’d be back on four wheels busting up all the hills Dharamsala could throw at me. The other benefit is that as cool as McLeod Ganj is, it’s a tourist town and I really like going down to Kotwali Bazaar in Lower Dharamsala to see how normal Indians live. And this trip would take me 25 kilometers past that to the blue collar town of Mataur where the REAL Indians live.

Kotwali Bazaar is always buzzing.

The driver was a great guy who spoke really good English. The night before the great Indian cricketer Sachin Tandulkar had the first one-day two-hundred run performance in the history of cricket. The entire country was giddy over it and the two of us talked about it all the way to Mataur. I couldn’t believe I remembered where the welding shop was, but my instincts pulled me through and before long we were parked in front of the shop and they were looking at my busted wheel post.

The welder asked to see the wheel and I told him it was in my bag. He dug around my bag, looked up and shrugged his shoulders. I shot him a puzzled stare then he passed me the bag. I dug through the bag and an awful realization hit me. Sometimes you have to go through a metal detector in order to gain entrance to the temple. Before leaving the Akash Deep six hours earlier, I took the wheel out of my bag for the first time since it broke.

FOK!!! FOK!!! FOK!!!

No matter where you are in the world, a machinist shop is still a machinist shop.

I had no choice. We had to return all the way back to Bhagsu, get my wheel which was innocently sitting on my bed and drive back. An hour and a half later (and 700 additional rupees lighter), I found myself back at the Mataur welding shop.

Of course, this was no simple welding job. There was a small disc that cracked that held the entire wheel in place. The welder had to take the entire assembly off; reweld the disc; then reassemble everything. He also had to wait for all parts to cool before continuing on the next part. I thought I would be in and out in a half hour, but more than three hours later I was still looking at my chair in five parts.

Although in India, the girlie calendars are replaced by altars.

Finally it was reassembled and, according to the welder, ‘stronger than when it was built!’ While the American health system thrives on ripping off the disadvantaged, in India that's some really bad Karma. The total price for three hours in the shop and a weld that nobody else in town could do: 50 Rs. ($1.05). I gave the guy a hundred note and refused to take his change. The driver not only waited for me, he helped hold the parts and put the chair back together. He told me on the way out (the first time!) that he had a baby at home and was glad he was going to make a quick day of it. It made me feel like crap when I opened up the empty bag.

In the end we got back to McLeod around 6:30. I had to make yet another stop at the ATM to pull out the 1500 I owed him for the ride. I hopped in my rig, back on four wheels, and felt solid for the first time in two weeks. I apologized for the delay and thanked him, but he was actually psyched to catch a nice payday – even if his wife called every half hour. He drove off to the cab station and I reached back in my bag to get my leather gloves which I'd also just had repaired.

They, of course, were left under the seat of the cab!

Dharamsala Ready for a Grand Homecoming

2010-02-24T13:27:00.008+05:30

These two monks came down from Manali for this week's festivities.

I’m sure it hasn’t been lost on all of you that His Holiness the Dalai Lama scored several big headlines last week. Up until a month ago, the word here was that HHDL would meet with President Obama sometime in September or October. He’d already scheduled a trip to the States to speak in California and Florida, and it appeared that his D.C. schedule was already booked.

But as the Government in Exile stole the headlines by sending an envoy to Bejing to restart talks, the real back channels were speaking to the White House to set up the Obama meeting. When the meeting was announced, the ambiance in Dharamsala was similar to being in Wisconsin the Monday morning after the Packers beat the Vikings. Everybody had a skip in their step; a smile on their face and sure, the kids got some soft serve at the McLeod bus stop too.

This was the most welcome sight in Dharamsala in almost 18 months.

The more the Chinese objected, the wider the grins on the monks’ faces grew. Last year when Obama blew off HHDL, it was a devastating blow to a community in post-Beijing Olympic depression. The year before the Olympics, Dharamsala was buzzing with energy as the Students for a Free Tibet and the International Committee for Tibet planned and brilliantly executed several non-violent protests that brought their cause to international front pages for the first time since the mid-90’s.

The world was on the side of the Tibetans, and the army of journalists flocking to Beijing weren’t fooled by the slickly-run games. The Chinese government made it worse when they restricted internet access and created off-limit zones. If this was the bold new China, the western journalists weren’t having any of it.

But just as soon as the games were over there was a huge US election and the only American foreign policy issues on the table were the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Once again, China had outlasted a Tibetan onslaught, and although world opinion was unanimously in favor of the Tibetans, a bubble had burst in Dharamsala. The expat NGO population in town dwindled and even the Tibetan activists were suffering from a lull in purpose. The Olympic activities could only be considered a success, nonetheless there weren’t any logs left to toss on the fire.

Alice Walker

When the new American president who charged the world’s batteries with post-Bush optimism refused to meet with HHDL it sent Dharamsala into a deeper funk. Phuntosk Dorjee, the director of 90.4 Tashi Delek FM summed it up best when he questioned Pulitzer Prize winner Alice Walker during their Christmas Day interview. Dorjees question was:

“As a Tibetan we have enormous admiration for your writing, and we also know that you addressed President Obama in your open letter to him. Our people have huge expectations from the President of the United States, but lately the bilateral talks are more than the heart can bear. Can the President make a difference in reality knowing that the U.S. owes a big debt to the PRC.”

Walker’s response took over five minutes, but the pain in Dorjee’s voice over the disappointment was palpable. (www.tashidelekfm.com).

So you can understand why the town has gotten all giddy. Frst with the announcement of the meeting; then with the Chinese condemnation (falling during Losar); and finally with the White House telling the Chinese to piss off.

While HHDL is in the States meeting the President (and Larry King – Oprah must have been booked) and speaking on both coasts, Dharamsala is filling up with Tibetans awaiting his arrival in just a few days. HHDL is scheduled to arrive late Wednesday, preside over a ceremony marking the 100th anniversary of the 13th Dalai Lama exile to India Thursday morning, then attend Government in Exile meetings for two days followed by a public teaching at the main temple on Sunday morning.

Next time you bitch about doing some business travel check out what the 75-year-old ‘simple monk’ did over the last few days: Dharamsala -> Delhi -> Washington DC -> Hollywood -> Ft. Lauderdale -> Boca Raton -> Delhi -> Dharamsala for four major days of talks.

Monks have been pouring in through the McLeod Ganj bus station all week long.

Did I Really Need a Two-Week Vacation?

2010-02-22T12:48:00.003+05:30

As it turns out my two-day snow vacation turned into a very unexpected two-week work vacation. Had I known about it in advance I could have made something of it, but it all developed on a day to day basis. First the snow hit and that shut off the road to the studio for four days. The rest of Dharamsala was fine after two days, but the unpaved cliff-hanging road up to the studio is about 500 feet higher than McLeod Ganj. It’s also in a forest and gets no sun so it was probably the last road to clear in the entire city.

When it cleared, however, it was the beginning of Losar (Tibetan New Year - marked among other things, by putting up new prayer flags) and, like Christmas vacation in the States, nobody was doing squat at work. Then Losar finally hit and McLeod Ganj turned into a ghost town – at least as far as the Tibetans are concerned. The Dalai Lama said that in respect to those killed in

China

over the Olympic Games massacre, this Losar was to be a solemn, family affair, not a civic blowout like it is most years.

Even though it was a mellow Losar, McLeod Ganj is still a pretty special place to spend it.

The shops closed for three days and the only Tibetans I saw in town were the local hotel owners who still had guests. But even those hotel restaurants were shut down. Luckily there are plenty of Indian business that never close so it actually made me go into some business that I hadn’t been into. I found many of the Indian shops to be much better stocked than their Tibetan counterparts.

The biggest example of this was the Indian pharmacy located 50 yards from the Snow Lion Medical Store, the only pharmacy I ever used in McLeod Ganj. The owner of the Snow Lion is an elderly Tibetan doctor who only opens up between 11:00 and 5:00 which means I can only get there on weekends. Almost every time I’ve asked for medicine or handicapped supplies he’s either told me I have to go to lower Dharamsala (300 Rs cab ride) or he’s bungled the order. He never told me there was a perfectly good pharmacy just off the McLeod bus station.

I stopped off at my favorite hole-in the-wall Indian fast-food place and asked the guy if he knew any place where I could get some gauze for my still-festering burn wound and he pointed me to the Indian pharmacy which was a bit hidden underneath one of the restaurants. I rolled in and found everything I needed, including antibiotics. It was all cheaper too. The free market has spoken and I’m now a connoisseur of Indian businesses!

Maybe TMI. But at least you can all see it's healing - albeit SLOWLY.

Once the Tibetan shops opened up, I assumed we would go back to work, but that was not the case. The station manager wasn’t answering his phone and nobody was answering the station phone. The big boss spent Losar at a Tibetan settlement he helped create in Mongod in southern

India

(3-day bus/train ride each way!).

After 10 days of being shut out of work and the free internet & lunch that came with it, I finally got a call from the station manager who said he had two weddings to go to over the weekend and he wouldn’t be back in until Monday (today). At now I knew I didn’t have to be anywhere, so I tried to make the best of it and get some workouts in. And of course led to another meltdown.

Most of the roads in Dharamsala have been resurfaced since I was here in 2000, but that doesn’t mean they’ve been maintained. The worst example of this is the road connecting Bhagsu to McLeod Ganj. There’s a steep quarter-mile climb between the two villages and it’s a nice fun challenge. At the bottom of each side of the climb at the entrance to either town, the road is starting to crumble again. Busting up to the top of a climb is always the hard part, but the reward is dropping down the other side and picking up some good speed around the curves. I like it best when I’ve been honked at by an obnoxious driver on the way up and I’m passing them in traffic on the way down.

My chair has built in suspension and after 13 years of riding this bitch, I can control it like Korean video game champ. I'm always tweaking my big wheels, but I’d never thought one of the small caster wheels in front could crack off. I’ve had them break in half before and that’s a pretty easy replacement, even in

India

. But breaking right off the mounting is another situation and that requires another trip to my favorite aluminum welder who is 40-minutes away in Mataur.

One of these wheels is not like the other...

That’s a 1000 Rs ($22 – or the price of ten amazing Indian meals) cab ride, if I could actually find the shop again. There's no way I could so it would probably require an additional 1000 Rs while the cabbie and I drive all over paradise looking for the place. But the TCV is really good about such things so I decided to wait until I went back to work to see when they could swing a ride out there. So for the last six days I’ve been a three-wheeled bandit. The chair is amazingly balanced so I only feel it when I’m getting in or out. But one more nice hit on the existing caster would probably put me in the hospital again and leave me chairless until we got to the welder.

It would be really great if I could sit back in my room and watch the Olympics until the TCV opened up again, but since I wasn’t going to work on a daily basis, I also wasn’t going to the clinic either. I still had to change my leg bandage at least every other day which meant going into town for supplies as well as stopping off at the Delek Hospital Clinic, a small nursing station in McLeod Ganj. The nurses know me well and do a bang up job of changing my dressing, but they were gone for Losar and don’t work weekends. So for one reason or another, I had to bust into town every day to do something.

The chair and the leg wound appeared to handle it quite well, and I was even able to hit up an Internet café a few times (VERY slow connections) over the mini-break. On Friday I was getting low on funds so I went to the McLeod Ganj Bank of India ATM (still freaks me out that it exists) and tried to pull out 1000 Rs to keep me going until the end of the month. I slipped the card in and tried to pull out the grand when I got the infamous ‘Insufficient Funds’ message.

Last time I pulled out a grand there was plenty of Rupees in there, so this must be some glitch. I put the card back in and tried to pull out 500 Rs. Again, the I.F message appeared. I got plenty freaked out this time because I should have close to 20,000 Rs in there and they say I don’t even have 500. I also read last week that the Bank of the Punjab ATM near the TCV was ripped off by an ATM maintenance worker who somehow figured out how to get in and grab 500,000 Rs from it. (He turned himself in after realizing he was the only guy in Dharamsala who could have pulled off the job.)

I wasn’t sure if I’d been hoodwinked by Indian thieves or if somehow the bank had made a terrible mistake. But either way, I found myself in the Himalayas with less than two dollars to my name. I quickly went to the Internet Café and checked my account which was, in fact, down to two dollars. The only place that has access to my account is my car insurance company whom I pay online religiously each month. They had no records of any transactions within the last thirty days.

Instead of spending my last few dollars on FaceBook, I sent my brother, Dan, an email telling him I was screwed and asked him to contact my bank. Then I rolled back to Bhagsu and tried to watch the Olympics without freaking out on the fact that I didn’t even have enough money to pay for my bandages or antibiotics.

It took a day to sort it out, but the insurance company somehow decided I wanted to pay the entire 6-month bill and drained my bank account. I still have no idea why, but at least I know I don’t have to send them another payment until July. Brother Dan bailed me out until the end of the month and I breathed much easier.

The freakouts never seem to stop on this trip which is getting QUITE OLD. I hope this makes good reading for you all, cause I’m sick of it.

Now THIS is how I anticipated spending weekends in McLeod! The two of us built up a nice crowd of about 50 people, but had to stop because we caused a traffic jam.

Finally on my last day before going back to work, I had a most awesome and calm day carrying my guitar to a bunch of chai shaks and playing a ton of music. The temperature still drops to 32 at night, but during the day it’s a nice balmy 65. So here’s to more days like today and NO MORE FREAKOUTS!

I Missed My Home Olympics - AGAIN!

2010-02-17T11:59:00.000+05:30

(Sorry for the lack of posts. I've been shut out of my office for nearly 10 days and the Internet connections in town are so slow that even blogspot doesn't load!)

I’m simply obsessed by the Olympics, but for some reason, I’ve done my best to avoid going to them. For the second time in my life, the Olympics are taking place in my home territory, and I’m 12,000 miles away.

In 1992 the Winter Games were held in Albertville, France just an hour away from Les Avenieres, France where I had spent the better part of four years. One of the French families that adopted our team of acrobats was from Albertville and I’d spent tons of time there on bike trips and hiking adventures. The summer before the games I tried as hard as I could to score a job as a translator or English guide, but my skills weren’t exactly unique. In order to work legally as a foreigner in France you had to prove that you were not taking the job of a French person. There wasn’t anybody lining up to light themselves on fire and jump off high dive ladders, so my job there was safe. But just being English-French bilingual wasn’t getting me past the visa office.

So as Albertville was putting the finishing touches on what would prove to be an amazing Olympic games, I was on a plane for – you guessed it – India. By the time the games took place I was living in a hotel on Darling Harbour in Sydney where I’d scored another diving gig. The gig didn’t pay very well, but we only had to work weekends which left me with hours a day to ride my bike and, of course watch the Olympics.

When I say ‘hours a day’ I’m not exaggerating a bit. When the Olympics are on, I’m watching them. I watch pool matches of games I don’t understand between countries I’ve never been to or couldn’t care less about. I watch the quarterfinal rounds of the 10,000 meter runs and 1650 swims. During the Beijing games when I was unemployed I was rotating between six NBC stations and even caught a few soccer matches on Univision.

So, of course, when it was announced that Vancouver, just six hours north of Portland, won the rights to host the 2010 games, I jumped out of my chair and did a set of virtual back flips. This time there’s no way I was missing it. One of my best friends lives in Vancouver, I’d been there plenty of times and I’d even skied Whistler mountain, the home of the Alpine skiing events.

Ever since the ’72 games when Marathoner Frank Shorter became my biggest sports hero, I’ve been nurturing a passion for the Olympics and now finally there was no way I would ever miss it. I’ve been lucky enough to go to Final Fours, a World Series Game, a pair of World Cup Soccer Finals and a dozen stages of the Tour de France. Seeing as I don’t believe the NFL actually exists outside of my television set, college football has no legitimate championship and the NBA doesn’t differentiate between the regular season and the playoffs, the big feather remaining in my sporting cap was a trip to the Olympics. And this one was a shoe-in.

My biggest interview score as a TV reporter in Pullman, WA was with John Furlong, the head of the Vancouver Olympic Committee. He was in town to round up student volunteers and give a presentation at the Cougar Rec Center. We set up our cameras; I miked him up and did a five-minute interview on what kind of help he was looking for as well as how he got involved in the games. The interview went smoothly and we scooped the local NBC station. Their reporter was a 25-year-old kid who never watched much of the Olympics. He had no idea that the competition had a full-fledged Olympic idiot on the mic.

Vancouver OC CEO, John Furlong

After the interview I handed Mr. Furlong my resume and told him I would quit school on the spot and follow him back to Vancouver if there was a job for me. But getting a job in Canada was the same problem as getting a job in France. Just because I was a foaming-at-the-mouth Olympic fanatic with a couple job skills didn’t mean there weren’t 50,000 Canadians with the same qualifications. And besides, all the paying gigs were already filled. He told me I should contact some of the sponsors, like maybe ADIDAS! (ugh.)

So working at the games didn’t look likely but that didn’t matter. I was going even if that meant sleeping in my van – which I do all the time when I road trip anyway. Even as I took off for this very trip that I’m on right now, I was plotting with my friend Jeff to score tickets and make the road trip. We were sitting at a sports bar with his girlfriend, Diane, who grew up in Vancouver. She said we were more than welcome at her house and that her Polish mother would smother us with food while we were there. So as I left Portland for Charlottesville, Virginia and the Washington D.C. Marathon, I fully expected to be on my way back in a few weeks to start hunting down tickets.

Somehow along the way East, I got rerouted and yesterday morning I flipped on the television set to watch the opening ceremonies – taking place 12,000 miles away. Fortunately ESPN/Star Sports in India is broadcasting four hours live/day which means I’ll be getting up at 5:00 a.m. for the next two weeks. I’m actually pretty surprised they’re giving it that much coverage since they only have a handful of athletes at the games and no contenders. The only sports that matter here are Cricket, Soccer, Field Hockey, Golf and Tennis – oh, and oddly enough, rifle shooting since they’ve won a few Olympic medals. Their entire Winter Olympic team consists of Indians living abroad. Their biggest threat is luger, Shiva Keshavan, who is hoping to crack the top twenty.

But with the influx of new cash in India, that will surely change. Directly behind me are thousands of square miles of potential downhill slopes and only one ski resort (in Minali). Himachal Pradesh is exploding with tourism and the jock market hasn’t even kicked in yet. It won’t be long before the infrastructure improves and a few more of these towns will turn into ski villages.

Manali Olympics - 2038!!

In the meantime, I’ll be happy with my four hours of Olympics per day – as opposed to the dozen I would probably log in the U.S. But knowing the power in Bhagsu will surely go out at some point, I’ve already braced myself for the fact that Lindsay Vonn will be just about to win the women’s downhill on her propped up leg and the screen will go black.

Out in the Cold Rain and Snow

2010-02-11T16:56:00.002+05:30

(Thanks to all of you who emailed wondering where I was. We had a nasty snow/ice/wind/thunderstorm and I haven't been able to get access since Monday)

Ever since I’ve come to India two months ago I’ve had nothing short of hall-of-fame weather. There was one day of rain in Delhi and one day of rain in Dharamsala. Period.

Aside from that it’s been sunny and relatively warm. Most days it floats up around 60, but I work in a cement box with windows facing away from the sun, so I’m cold most of the day. We’ve got a propane heater at the studio that keeps us around 60, provided people aren’t coming in and out. I get home around 6:30, just as the sun is setting and the temp usually drops to freezing. I’ve got two big blankets and the infamous Chinese heater keeping my room right about 60 degrees.

The weather's been pretty much like this ever since I arrived.

In my pre-accident days, I liked keeping the room temp low, but ever since I cracked my back, my natural thermostat has gone haywire. If there’s no sun, I’m pretty much shaking unless the temperature is above 75. At work I’m always in a sweatshirt and winter hat and at night I’m either under my covers or hovering dangerously close to the heater which, after my burn, sits above the skin I can’t feel.

On my days off, I wait for the sun to warm up Dharamsala and I head out for a push to McLeod Ganj. The sun has been so consistent and spectacular I don’t even wear a sweatshirt. (I’ve got it in my bag for when I go inside, where it’s always freezing.) The buildings here are either cement or brick with no insulation. The locals all seem to worship the cold and keep the doors and windows open no matter how cold it is outside. The door to my guest house, for instance, stays wide open until 11:00 at night. I have a screen window to my bathroom that has no glass option. Seeing as my bathroom door was removed so I could wheel in, I’ve got an open window at all times. There’s a red felt curtain that keeps some of the cold out, but until the front door is closed, there’s a nasty draft in the room.

So during the work week I’m pretty much chilled all the time and on the weekends I bask in the sun until I can’t stand it.

Until this weekend when, for the first time, we got a dose of rain. Saturday morning I smelled the rain a few hours before a dark cloud drifted up the valley and we were privy to a sprinkle. It smelled great, but rain here means the cow-monkey-dog poop soup can get on my wheels, my hands, and through the process of the catheter, directly into an inner organ. So I don’t go out in the rain if I don’t have to.

When the rain comes McLeod Ganj can turn into a swamp.

Sunday morning the rain went from drizzle to constant stream followed by intermittent downpour. I rolled out of bed up to the open front door of the Akash Deep and was chilled like a banquet jello. I returned to my room, turned on the Chinese heater, jumped under the covers and flipped on one of the eight English TV channels.

HBO India was playing the Schwarzenegger Rambo counter, Collateral Damage. Watching TV in India is kind of like eating camping food. When you’re at home you rarely go digging around for white beans and rice or chocolate, graham cracker, marshmallow treats. But out on the mountain, it’s a feast. If I were in the States with TIVO and 200 channels to choose from, I never would have stopped the zapper at a Schwarzenegger flick. In India it was that or reruns of cancelled American sit coms (was David Spade in every sit com last decade?).

As it turns out, it’s not such a bad flick so I settled in to watch Arnold running around Columbia trying to catch the drug lords who killed his wife and kids. I got about an hour into the flick before I remembered the golden rule of TV watching in India: Never get attatched to what you’re watching; the power can go out at any moment. Which of course it did.

I should have known that a fresh downpour would lead to a power outage, but seeing as we’d had so few power breaks in the span of nice weather, I forgot that it could happen. I was told by the owner of the Akash Deep that the power grid in Dharamsala had improved over the past several years. Seeing as this was my first movie harshout of the trip, I was inclined to agree.

I assume Arnold got his killers, but it would have been nice to see. About two hours later, after I’d exhausted a long set of tunes on the guitar, the power popped back on and I settled in to a series of English Premier League Soccer Matches. Between the Indian and English channels there were three matches so I could randomly switch between them and not get really attached to any of them. I’d learned my lesson from Arnold. I caught three goals, but none of the finishes as again, the power went out.

As the day grew, the rain increased, the temperature dropped and my boredom level ramped up. This was my precious day off and I was wasting it like a slacker home on Christmas break. I went to the restaurant and pretended I was being social, although I didn’t speak to anyone but the waiter. I stretched out my egg-fried rice and newspaper for 90 minutes, when finally the cold from the open front door was too much and I returned to my cocoon.

After some BBC, CNN and Cricket highlights it was time for the Sunday movie of the week which was The Wrestler, a flick I’d missed on it’s original run. I watched the grotesquely disfigured, but excellent acting Mickey Rourke make a shambles of his life until again about 90 minutes into it: Power Failure.

This power failure, however was a black out leaving me in the dark with the warmth of the Chinese heater fading with every second. My mom sent me away with a hand-crank lamp which I wound up, hoping it would give off enough light to read by. My brother Dan sent me off with Sun Tzu’s The Art of War which kept me both entertained and enlightened for a half hour until my nose started to freeze off.

Just then the lights, heater and TV flashed on and I saw the Wrestler at some sleazy strip bar hitting on Marissa Tomei. As I was putting together the missing plot pieces, a massive lightening strike shot through the valley, rocked the building and zapped out the power again. Outside my door I could hear a half-dozen Indian tourists yelling at the top of their voices for candles, blankets and anything else they hadn’t brought with them. Between the lightening strikes, thunder bangs, window shaking and Hindi yelling, I was fairly entertained. I managed to fall asleep just in time for the second power tease of the night. This one lasted less than a minute, but managed to jolt my adrenalin enough to keep me staring into dark space for the next two hours.

The power stayed off all night and I woke up shivering to the continuation of the downpour. For eight weeks I’d woken up to bright sunshine, but for the second day in a row I was afraid to get out from under my covers.

But it was a work day, so if I got up and brushed my teeth the reward would be a trip to the office with a back up generator and that propane heater. I bundled up and waited for my driver Suresh to scoop me up and haul me to the hospital to have the doctor redress my burn wound. Surely the hospital would be warmer than the Akash Deep.

Once I mounted up the infamously long and now slippery ramp, I realized for the first time the hospital didn’t have a door; only a sliding gate to close and lock at night. It was a cement ice chest just like my hotel and office. The doctor showed up in a dawn jacket and mittens. He replaced the mittens with sterile gloves, then redressed my wound taking breaks to blow into his freezing hands.

I made it to my office where the propane heater was cranking and the auxiliary generator was giving us not only light, but broadcasting capability and Internet connectivity. For seven hours I was relatively warm (still wore the sweatshirt, jacket and winter hat) and felt in control again. Outside, however the temperature was dropping and the rain was pounding even harder.

In preparing for my hourly news blast I looked at the Dharamsala weather site and, for the first time, saw snowflakes on the screen. It was going to get colder and in higher elevations (that’s Bhagsu!) it was going to snow. At quitting time the students lifted me down the 20 steps to my car and we sped away through the muck to the Akash Deep.

Luckily power had been restored so when I got to my room, I quickly turned on the Chinese heater, ordered room service and ducked into the covers. I caught a rerun of Conan then was psyched to see the Diane Lane film, Untraceable (filmed in good old Portland, Orygun), was playing in an hour. I whipped out the computer and started writing this very post until the flick started.

This time I got all the way until the final 10 minutes before a massive wind, lightening thunder blast blew everything silent. Almost instantly my room became an ice box. I realized the wind blast had blown open a window with a high latch that I could not shut. I hopped in my chair to get some help, but the desk was empty with the door of the Akash wide open, and snow coming in.

While my room was pitch black, Bhagsu was turning white.

I shut the door then navigated the dark hallway back to my room and tried to seal the window by jamming a curtain in it. I crawled back under the covers bundled up only to get the next violent wind, snow, lightening, thunder blast blow my window and curtain wide open.

I refixed the curtain and leaned my guitar case up against it which held for the next three or four blasts until it too finally gave way. At this point I had to give in and take refuge under the blankets and pray for slumber.

At some point over the next eight hours I got some sleep, but I awoke to no power and a freezing room. I donned two sweatshirts and two pairs of sweat pants and wheeled out to the front door to check out my environment. The door, which of course, was wide open, revealed six inches of slush getting hammered by a 32.5 degree down pour.

Hindus are not often equated with snow, but the two workers at the Akash Deep Hotel just love the stuff. In fact, they won't even close the front door when it dumps!

I was hoping to be able to go to work and warm up, but my driver said if there was snow there’s no way we could get me up to the office. And he was right. Now it’s 12:30, it’s still ice-raining, there’s still no power and I am about to lose the remaining battery power on my computer. So bye for now!

Believe me, this vehicle has no business being on these roads in this condition!

Btw – if anyone knows how Collateral Dammage, The Wrestler or Untraceable end – cough it up now!

My new backyard!

Pimp My Ride: Himalaya Style!

2010-02-05T13:45:00.003+05:30

Today on Photo Friday we’re going to take a look at the vehicles currently cruising the roads in the Indian Himalayas. In the last ten years everything about motorized transport in Himachal Pradesh has changed – except the mini cab. And even those have been upgraded with cleaner engines.

When I was here in 2000 it was common to see ox-drawn carts and gas-guzzling Tata ‘Goods Carriers’ that barely made their way up the switchbacks. Now all of the older vehicles have disappeared and they’ve been replaced by newer, sturdier SUV’s and super-powerful haulers. Down in Delhi you can still find some older vehicles, but up here in the hills, those creatures met their day long ago. The reasons for this are three-fold. First of all, Himachal Pradesh is the wealthiest state in India so there are more people with cash here than in the flatlands. Secondly, due to the US outsourcing, India itself is richer. Since Dharamsala is basically a tourist town, a lot of that discretionary income ends up here. Local business owners can afford not only the rig, but also the gas – which is about $3.00/gallon. And finally, in the last few years the Indian government has offered low-interest loans to small businesses specifically for vehicle replacement.

A couple of quick facts (from http://www.mapsofindia.com/):

The leading brands are: Hindustan Motors, Reva Electric Car Co., Fiat India Private Ltd., Daimler Chrysler India Private Ltd., Tata
It is expected that by 2030, the Indian car market will be the 3rd largest car market across the globe. Small cars seem to be ruling the roost in the Indian automobile market with over 7.5 million small cars being sold in India in 2006-07.
World Vehicle Rankings:

Two wheelers - 2nd largest in the world
Commercial Vehicle - 4th largest in the world
Passenger car- 11th largest in the world

OLD SCHOOL:

The roads of Himachal Pradesh used to be lined with these ancient TATA Goods Carriers. I found this one in the flatlands of Kangra. They're a very rare sight up in McLeod Ganj.

Back in the day you used to be able to ride from city to city on the roofs of these puppies. Now you have to sit inside - and believe me, the view is not as nice!

The old standard three-wheel cab is still in use, but the two-stroke engine is a thing of the past.

There are a couple dozen minicabs still left in McLeod Ganj.

Tight fit for the chair, day bag and computer.

Bus Jam

Beginning of a bus jam.

This driver let his passengers out in the middle of the road blocking traffic for a good 15 minutes.

Regardless of how messed up a traffic situation can be, pedestrians have no problem walking right into the middle of it.

New School

This SUV is quite common these days; nothing like it back in '00.

The TATA equivalent of a Vanagon. A decade ago this would have passed for a schoolbus. Today it's just some wealthy Indian's vacation mobile.

Needless to say, these roads weren't meant for rides like these.

There a hundreds of these 'Tourist Vehicles' at the foot of McLeod Ganj. I'm assuming they'll be in use during tourist season, but right now they just sit there.

Same as it Ever Was

Even though the rigs are getting nicer, there's always a couple broken down at the side of the road. BTW - my driver just drove around this wreck, barely stopping.

Indian drivers LOVE their horns. It's getting better, but you can still run into the occassional driver who will honk loudly at ghosts.

Christianity in the Home of the Dalai Lama

2010-02-03T15:26:00.005+05:30

Maybe the oddest location of any Christian church in the world.

One of the strangest sights in a land full of wonders is the mid-19th century Church of St. John in the Wilderness, tucked in the woods between McLeod Ganj and Forsyth Ganj. While it’s mostly ignored by locals, almost every Western visitor takes the time to visit. What is a gothic Anglican Church is doing in the midst of a Hindu region with the face of Buddhism living a quarter mile across the valley from its archivolts.

Just across the valley from St. John's is the home of Buddhism's most revered figure.

In 2000 I had a picnic at the church grounds with my brother Dan, his wife Zoe, their daughter Tashi and Lock Berkebeil, a computer security expert from the Bay area who flew in with me from London. We were in really great spirits because the monsoon had temporarily broken giving us a dry mile walk from McLeod to the gates of St. John's.

The gates to the church ground were open, but held together by a chain so that no motorized vehicles could enter. Unfortunately the opening was wide enough for bipeds, not for wheelchairs. On that occasion I hopped out of my chair, crawled along the ground and remounted my chair which had been hoisted over the fence. The four of us downed Zoe’s picnic and washed it down with a bottle of Cote du Rhone that Lock bought in duty free. (He’s actually brought two bottles but I backed into one of them our first week in town and painfully watched while our maid mopped it up in her soap-water bucket.)

The walk through the woods and the view across the valley back at McLeod was a great break from the daily deluge we faced. Before we could take a tour of the church we saw a storm sponge come at us from Lower Dharamsala, and high-tailed it back to town before we got saturated.

Once the monsoon season gave way, I started a training routine that took me past the church every day. It always intrigued me, but seeing as I couldn’t get through the gate by myself, I never went on the grounds again.

This six-pointed star on the gate has no affiliation with Judaism. Father Kaja just likes it.

That is until two weeks ago when I patiently waited outside the gates for a visitor who was kind enough to fetch the parish priest for me. The visitor, who was a Punjabi tourist, told me that there was no priest, but only a grounds caretaker. I asked him if he could bring him to me so I could get the phone number of the priest. The caretaker, a dark-skinned, sixty-year-old Indian in brown pants, a flannel shirt and a wool cap, approached the fence and asked me if he could help.

“Excuse me sir,” I said, “I would like to interview the parish priest for our new radio station. You wouldn’t happen to have his phone number would you?”

“I am Father Kaja,” he replied. “What can I do for you?”

This soft-spoken, timid man looked more like a rail worker than a priest. I told him that I wanted to interview him and he told me he thought he would be a bad subject. I told him I would ask simple questions and he could take all the time he wanted to answer. Reluctantly he agreed and we set up the interview for the next Tuesday.

When Tuesday came, my driver, Suresh, took me to the church gate and ran in to get father Kaja. Father Kaja unlocked the gates and laid down a piece of wood over the drainage grid that accidentally acted as a mote for wheelchairs. Anybody else could walk over the grid, but the metal slats were too wide and my wheels could easily fall through, or worse yet, get bent leaving me without locomotion for the next five months.

The Moat.

Once over the moat, I rolled down a paved stone path to yet another moat, just outside the two wooden church doors. Father Kaja set the bridge down across the second obstacle and then lifted me up two steps to the a vestibule. The nave opened up to reveal a lofted wooden ceiling that is covered on the outside by corrugated steel. There were seven rows of pews in front and another ten rows of folding chairs towards the rear. A short transept divided the modest altar with a stain-glass background.

You might have to travel all the way to Delhi to find more stained glass like this.

As I set up my recording equipment, Father Kaja went into the sacristy that doubles as his apartment and came out with a cup of hot chai. He couldn’t have been more accommodating, but unfortunately he was a bit shy with the microphone. As I asked questions, he started to answer, then got timid and turned off his microphone. He gave me great answers off the record, but didn’t think they would be appropriate for the interview. So what resulted was an awkward 20-minute talk that was edited down to less than ten useful minutes.

Christian scripture in Hindi text. Strange for Westerners, but normal for Hindus who tend to absorb all other religions as they come.

Luckily, at the end of our talk, a group of western parishioners, who all lived in Dharamsala, came in for their weekly prayer meeting and sat for a much more coherent conversation.

So if you’re interested in what being a Christian is like in the most unlikely of locations, give this podcast a listen. It’s a bit chopped up, but in the end there’s a great story there.

Can One Really Roll in the Himalayas?

2010-02-01T14:35:00.002+05:30

A lot of you have responded to some posts saying that you don’t know how I get around this place in a wheelchair. Most of you assume the mountains would be the biggest obstacle, but in reality they're a small part of the issues I face. I’ll just start at the beginning of the day; walk (roll) you through the various obstacles I encounter and show you what needs to be done to combat them.

I'm not the only one who's got issues with these hills.

By waking up at the Akash Deep Hotel in the suburb of Bhagsu, I’ve already defeated most of my daily problems. This room is one of only five I’ve found in all of Dharamsala that could pass as handicap accessible, and there are more than 100 hotels and guest houses in the region.

First of all, I have roll-in access from the street. There’s actually a stair at the front door, but I can easily put my hands on each side of the doorway and pull myself up. Secondly the bathroom is on the same level as the room. I spent three months in a room in 2000 where the bathroom was two steps above the level of the floor. Had the bathroom door been wide enough, I probably could have pulled myself in. But it wasn’t, which brings up accessibility rule No. 3: My new bathroom door is wide enough for my chair. But it didn’t start out that way. They had to remove the door from the hinges which usually is an easy task unless the hinges are glued to the door in which case you have to remove the hinges from the door frame – which they did without question.

Once inside, the bathroom is quite huge allowing me to roll about without impediment. I can easily reach the sink and the toilet without having to do any crazy chair gymnastics. That’s a rarity even in U.S. hotels. Had this been the situation with my room in 2000 I probably would have been able to wash my hands everyday and not have gotten the infection that sent me home two months early.

My new bathroom has room for a nice big wooden shower chair which because of the long seat is the most efficient shower chair I’ve ever used. If my leg didn’t have a gaping wound in it, I’d take more showers, but the doc suggested I try to keep the leg as dry as possible. No, mom, there aren’t big plastic bags to wrap it up in.

The only problem with the room is that all the pipes leak which means I have to shut off the water after every use. But that’s standard for Indian bathrooms. My hot water heater works great too; I just have to remember to turn it on an hour before I need hot water.

Eventually I do have to leave the room. As beautiful as these puppies are, and as cool as it is to be here; there are just some things I can't do.

My room at the Akash Deep is much better than just about every handicapped hotel room I’ve ever been in. And that includes some pretty swanky places I’ve stayed at for medical conferences. The room goes for around $15/day which in Indian standards makes me a get-the-hell-out-of-here-crazy-rich-white-muther-fukker. In Portland this studio would go for about double that, and I wouldn’t have room service, cable TV or a maid.

Once I’m dressed and out of the room, I can easily roll the half-mile to McLeod Ganj and pick up just about everything I need. From food to medical supplies; soap to beer. With some difficulty I could roll the three miles up to the entrance to my job at the Tibetan Children’s Village. Then, for the first time, the mountains would become a problem. The roads from Bhagsu to the TCV are challenging, but nothing I haven’t tackled in the past. The road from the TCV entrance to the 90.4 Tashi Delek FM studios is straight up a destroyed road that even the local SUV’s have trouble ascending.

So, the TCV has decided to send me a car every morning. That way I can show up at work un-sweaty and I can haul my computer along with me. The TCV says it’s no problem but it makes me feel like an actual get-the-hell-out-of-here-crazy-rich-white-muther-fukker. All I can do is treat the driver, Suresh, like a co-worker and not some kind of servant. After six weeks I try to joke and kid around as much as I can with him. I’ve invited him for dinner and even after-work beers. He just refuses and still calls me sir. I think he knows I don’t consider myself above him in anyway; he’s just being an incredibly polite person.

Ever since I burned a gaping hole in my leg, I have to start every day with a visit to my doctor at the TCV Health Center. He’s a western-trained Tibetan G.P. but his office is two floors up in the clinic. There is a ramp, but it’s nothing I could ever scale myself. Suresh grabs my chair out of the back of his rig and the two of us struggle like hell to get me up to the second floor. Every day the doctor removes the dressing, scrapes off whatever he thinks is gonna turn green, then coats it in iodine and wraps it back up. Suresh and I decend the ramp, trying not to recreate the O.J. Simpson Naked Gun scene, before he piles me and my chair back in the van. This whole episode, of course, would be unnecessary had I been able to feel my damn leg (ugh).

The longest and steepest ramp I've even encountered. It's now been made worse by the fact that the road to this parking lot, which is just as steep, is now under construction.

Once I get to Gmeiner Hall where our studio is located, Suresh again grabs my chair out of the back of his SUV and brings it around to the passenger seat for me to flop into. Suresh and our station manager, Kalsang, lift me up three steps to the front door, trying not to let my wheels slip into a wide drainage grill at the base. From there I roll into the building and face five steps, before a landing leading up to the final 12 steps to the studio. Kalsang and Suresh have done this every single day without a single complaint.

The studio space is tight, but we’ve set it up so I can reach the soundboard, a microphone and all three computers without having to roll around. I flip on my computer, scan the web for little news items and create a little 3-minute news blast that I read once an hour on the hour. Right now, the students are on break so I’ve got some time to work on the station’s website, write my blog, edit photos, edit audio and all sorts of other little busy work things.

Kalsang and Suresh are saving my arse (and lifting it!) on a daily basis.

This has to keep my busy until my adult class which starts at 4:30. In the meantime I can’t go anywhere. The negatives are that there’s no bathroom on the second floor so I have to pee in a jar and save it until I get lowered down the stairs at the end of the day. The positives are that somebody from the TCV cafeteria brings me a delicious hot lunch every day.

I would love to be able to take an hour at lunch and go watch the basketball or cricket games going on just a few hundred feet away from me, but instead I’m stuck up in the studio. It’s a little annoying now, but eventually the students will arrive and I’ll try to sop up that time by teaching English, French or guitar.

These guys are actually playing cricket on a 10% slope. EVERYBODY makes adjustments here!

Finally after my adult students are done, they help me back down the 21 steps to Suresh’s SUV. They pile me back in the front seat; Suresh drives me down the horrible mountain road to the TCV entrance and then all the way back to my crib in Bhagsu. From there I either order $2/meal room service or roll to one of the half-dozen restaurants in town where I can eat without being lifted up stairs.

On a day to day basis that’s about it. But I feel the wheelchair much more on a day off. I live in Shangra-la, but I’ll never be able to hike the mountains around me. There’s a bustling Indian city just three kilometers away, but without a taxi, I can’t get down there (actually I did it once in 2000, but that’s another story – and nothing I could repeat on a day to day basis). There are at least 20 roof top restaurants I haven’t been to because I need someone to lift me up there. And once up there, there are no bathrooms so I’d be sweating it out until the end of dinner. I have limited access to most every shop, although I can see most of the goods from the street.

So although there are dozens of impediments to me being here, the attitude of the people who help me try to overcome them are more than worth the effort in being here.

Goes something like this:

Photo Friday: Monks Rockin' New Kicks

2010-01-29T14:31:00.002+05:30

It's time for a new feature on Captain Crip: It's Photo Friday.

Our first installment is dedicated to the Monks of McLeod Ganj and their ever-increasing sense of footwear fashion. When I first came to India in 1991 everybody in the entire country wore flat leather sandals with little or no support - the kind of footwear you would imagine Jesus wearing. I bought a pair in Delhi so I would have something to wear when I stepped into the Hare Krishna Guest House bathroom in the middle of the night. But these torture chambers were so awful, even for the few minutes a day I sported them, that I left them at the bathroom door when I checked out.

In 2000, when I moved up to McLeod Ganj for three months, there were still a few remaining sandal adherents. But most of the locals and nearly all of the monks had slid into hard black business shoes. They had some support and went quite well with the maroon robes, but again, not the best footwear for walking around the world's tallest mountain range.

Come 2010 and the monks have made a cosmic leap; or at least they can now make that leap without hurting their feet. The monks have moved up to some damn fine, high-grade, ass-kickin' footwear. Sure they may clash a bit with the maroon, but every monk I spoke with said they were happy as hell to not have to rub their feet back into shape every night - and sometimes these guys will put more than a couple miles in those dogs.

So here is a former athletic footwear industry worker's tribute to the monks and their comfy kicks!

You have to admit these guys need good shoes in this place.

The Shoe Boot.

The Cross Trainer.

This Korean Nun brought hers from home. Incidentally, she was the only monk/nun I spoke to whose shoes weren't donated.

These puppies added a full inch of height!

I found this monk stopping for a quick polish.

Not quite Chuck Taylors.

But he really wanted to walk the runway in them.

AND THE MEDALISTS:

BRONZE: The Soccer Boot (If you haven't see the Australian film, The Cup, go rent it. This will make a lot more sense).

SILVER: The Samba Ripoff (please: no authentic footwear here in Asia)

GOLD: By unanimous vote - THE CROCK!

Kalsang Namtso

2010-01-28T13:27:00.005+05:30

This is my second stint in the town of Dharamsala, but the last time I came, I was freaked out about being in a wheelchair and what my life had become. I had to go some place as far away as I could and rebuild the thing from scratch. The monsoon turned the roads into rivers of cow poop mud so I spent most of the first two months in my room. It was the most productive and creative period of my life so I don’t regret a minute.

This was the view from my room in 2000. I saw the courtyard on the right every day, but the valley on the left was a treat that rarely came out during monsoon season.

I wasn’t unaware of my surroundings, I just welcomed and profited from the solitude. Once the rain stopped I did plenty of exploring, but I had little interaction with the Tibetans. I made a few friends and started exploring the culture, but before I had a chance to get immersed in it, I was on my way back home.

This stay is completely the opposite. Almost from day one I’ve been working in a Tibetan office; teaching Tibetans; learning more from them than I could ever teach and engrossing myself in the most exceptional community in the world.

There are a few situations that are similar to the Tibetan predicament, but since the fall of the Soviet empire there are much fewer. The Palestinians live in a similarly precarious national situation, but both they and the Israelis have always resorted to violence for quick and obviously non-permanent fixes. The Kurds have fought for their capitol and, although they don’t have a sovereign state, they do have autonomy in the new Iraq. The Gypsies have been floating from town to town in Europe, but their in-fighting has been their own undoing. As Europe gets less racist (believe me – Europe is MUCH more racist than the states) and the Gypsies are more accepted in the local communities, their situation will get better. As horrible as the American Indian saga has been, the US government and all rational Americans recognize it was a tragedy and are willing to help make amends; however miniscule they may be in lieu of what was lost.

Even though the Indian government has been extremely gracious to the Tibetans of Dharamsala, they still feel captive by the Chinese in their borrowed home.

There are others, but none have suffered with more dignity than the Tibetans. Thanks to the grace of the Indian government (btw – yesterday was ‘Republic Day’ in India) they have been able to create a stronghold right up against their former border. But the Tibetans living here still have only refugee status. They must register once a year at the local police station, even though most of them were born here. They do not vote except in their own elections which have no official bearing on even the city they live in. Fortunately they are crack businessmen and Dharamsala is an extremely profitable city so the Indians have no qualms about them staying.

There's no way Dharamsala would be this clean or advanced were it not for the Tibetan struggle to survive outside of their country.

But the thing that makes this situation exceptional is that it has all been done in peace. They were forced from their homeland in a wave of violence, but the only leader this community has ever known refuses to raise a fist.

This, of course, cannot be said for their adversaries, the Chinese Government. I don’t say ‘The Chinese’ because the Dalai Lama is widely revered in China. Due to horrible propaganda campaigns, as well as restrictions to the Internet and almost any form of free speech, most Chinese citizens are left in the dark as to what is taking place. For the past fifty years there have been waves of mass murder throughout Tibet that have only slowly been made public in the west.

I’m not breaking this story by any means, but since arriving in Dharamsala one story has gripped me more than others. It’s the story of the 17-year-old nun, Kalsang Namtso. In 2006 Namtso was crossing the Nangpa La pass from Tibet into Nepal when she was gunned down in cold blood by a Chinese sniper. It’s impossible to say how many others have been gunned down because the Chinese military isn’t exactly releasing figures.

Fortunately for us a Romanian Journalist, Sergiu Matei, caught them red handed:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPSbVPILEj8

I saw his documentary on Tibet TV and went to work the next day shaken by what I’d seen. I told my coworker Sonam I’d seen the documentary and he nonchalantly told me he’d made the same trip as a ten-year-old.

When I got home this is what came out of my guitar:

A sign leading into the military base in Dharamsala.

Illini Hoops! Live in India?

2010-01-26T14:49:00.001+05:30

I woke up Wednesday morning to perhaps the most bizarre sight I’ve seen since arriving in India six weeks ago. I flipped on my TV and the ESPN/Star sports network showed the live Illinois vs. Purdue men’s basketball game. I have been traveling abroad fairly consistently since 1986 and this is the very first time I watched one of my teams involved in a real live television broadcast. Sure I’ve seen scores of US Olympians and international teams play, but this was MY university playing on MY home court.

As I was watching the 2010 Illini miss shot after shot, I thought of how much my existence outside of the US has changed since my first long trip in 1987. That November I was on my way to work a high diving show in Hong Kong’s Ocean Park. When I said goodbye to my parents at O’Hare, I didn’t expect to see anything familiar again for the next five months.

Just one of those India things - this guy walked into my hotel the night before the game. First Chief I'd seen since leaving the Midwest.

I wasn’t far off either. The only connection Americans living abroad had were the two international newspapers, the International Herald Tribune and the USAToday. Somebody on our team got the IHT every day and everyone read it cover to cover. On Tuesday I would grab a USAToday to check out the NFL scores (games weren’t over in time for the Monday edition) and read the paragraph news summaries on Wisconsin, Illinois and Missouri – the three states I’d lived in up to that point.

I wrote close to a dozen letters a week to my family, my close high school friends and my college team mates. To their credit, I don’t remember one single time anybody left me hanging – they always wrote back. Which made the lunchtime mail call at Ocean World Dolphinarium in Yeilui, Taiwan (I got transferred out of HK ten days after arriving) the highlight of my day.

I did bring along a few comfort items on that first trip that I continue to bring – although their format has changed wildly. I brought along a walkman recording deck; a case of Grateful Dead bootlegs I’d recorded; a crappy camera of some ilk (kept losing them) and my guitar. Looking around my room today the guitar is still there albeit an $800 Epiphone, a much better axe than my $200 Lys. Thanks to my sister Sue, The camera has been upgraded to a snazzy hi-res digital that shoots video and fits in my pocket; and the walkman & case of tapes have morphed into an 80-gig Ipod. There’s more music on that puppy than I’ll be able to swallow by the time I leave India. And thanks to my friend, Tom, instead of 12 Grateful Dead tapes, I’ve got almost every show they played from 1967 to 1975.

On that first trip to Taiwan, the only television I saw was a bunch of MTV videos on small TV screens hung above the tables at our local pool hall – which was called ‘The MTV Bar’. Three months into my stay I found out the Tien Mu (the western enclave we lived in) American Legion post had NFL games videotaped and Fed Exed to them from Los Angeles. Unfortunately, by the time I discovered this, it was Super Sunday so I only caught one game.

I'm pretty sure nobody in my nieghborhood got up early to catch the Illinois game.

As the years went by I took long contracts in Holland and France with the only immediate home-spun gratification continuing to be the two newspapers and mail call. The only time I ever had any daily contact with the U.S. was when I lived in the United Arab Emirates (Abu Dhabi, Dubai). We were on a four-month tour and stayed in hotels with TV’s. This was 1987-8 and cable TV usually meant a dozen channels coming in without having to adjust the horizontal hold. Saddam was in power in Iraq and he declared war on the U.S. which compelled Reagan to send a few battle ships into the Gulf. Along with the Navy came Armed Forces Radio and Television Service (AFRTS).

In Abu Dhabi, if I bothered to get up at 7 a.m., I could catch Carson followed by Letterman. If I really wanted to make the effort they aired live US sports, but it came on at 4 a.m. For some reason the head of AFRTS couldn’t find it in his head to repeat the games later in the day, so I never caught any of them. Again, I settled for a taped Super Bowl, this time at a Mexican bar run by Philippinos (the resemblance to Mexicans was 100% convincing). The idiot local business man who videotaped the game just so he could hang out with the Americans, cut it short in the 4th quarter. Thank God it was the Doug Williams, Redskins v. Broncos blow out otherwise the guy would have had plenty of angry sailors in his face. Instead they were all just drunk and didn’t notice. We, on the other hand, had evening shows and soberly let the guy know what a dill weed he was.

Our choice of live sports in Abu Dhabi was limited to waiting for the field to cross the line at this camel race.

For the most part I spent six years knowing very little about the daily lives of my family and friends or the fate of my teams – Packers, Brewers, Bucks and Illini.

Fast forward to 2010 and the world that seemed to be so huge, is only as far away as my computer; the new comfort article I’ve been traveling with since 1997. Through FaceBook and email I’m in constant connection with everybody I’ve ever met. I can be as avid a fan of any of my teams as I care to be. If I had a quicker connection – which is coming here within the next year or two – I would be able to video conference and watch The Daily Show. And I’m 6000 ft. up in the Indian Himalayas!

Oddly enough the newspapers are gone now, but when I go on-line at work I’ve got more information than I care to digest. I can even pay my car insurance online and pull money out of my bank from the local ATM. Did I mention I’m in the freaking Indian Himalayas?

When I caught the game from Assembly Hall in Champaign (The House of Paign!), it was a nice surprise, but also a reminder of how tiny the planet has become. And incidentally four days later I even caught my new team, the WSU Cougars, get spanked around by UCLA

So is it a good thing? Sure it is. Pining for the no-contact days, would be like an old NFL QB saying how great it was in the days of the weekly concussion. I can’t tell you how much easier it is to get medical supplies up here than it was in even 2000. But I can’t help feeling that students traveling abroad are missing a big part of game. When I was diving off a cliff in the Gulf of Oman, I really felt like I was on the far side of reality. Nobody I see in the internet cafe where I'm typing has any idea what I'm talking about.

Today I found out a friend of mine who I haven’t seen in fifteen years had a broccoli omelet for breakfast – and hated it. I’ve been here for six weeks and I don’t know the price of a stamp. I'm not giving back any of my gadgets, but I do have to remind myself from time to time that I'm 12,000 miles from home!

Maybe I shold look through the telephone, DSL and TV cable lines and see if I notice anything...

ESR

2010-01-25T12:39:00.004+05:30

An esteemed guitar colleague of mine from Chicago uses a saying when he knows he is about to be forced to hang up his axe for a week or two because his day job, being a high-powered Loop lawyer, is about to consume his life to the point where even his passions and vices will have to sit down for a while.

The saying sums it up succinctly: Evil, Shit, Rain – or ESR for short.

While I haven’t had a job consume me since leaving the hallowed corridors of Adidas America, I have had considerable use for the phrase since becoming a paraplegic. Thursday qualified as an ESR day. I thought my burn had been healing but I’ve now learned that burns can change in a matter of hours.

The odd thing about this burn is that it looks nasty and would be incredibly painful if, in fact, I could feel anything. But I can’t, so I haven’t experienced a moment of pain or discomfort ever since it happened. Sounds like one of the few benefits of being a paraplegic, but then again, if I could have felt the heater I never would have gotten burned. Had I normal blood circulation in my legs, I wouldn’t have had the need for a heater in the first place. But had I not broken my back, I would be in my 10th year of some desk job in Portland, and not in the Himalayas needing a heater.

The fact that I couldn’t feel anything however did not make the situation any less dangerous. And on Thursday morning it got a lot more dangerous. One of the benefits or working at the TCV was having access to their local health clinic. The TCV has 2000 students and houses about 1/3 of them on campus. That means they can’t have a simple nurses office, they need an actual hospital. In 1997, they built a fantastic four-story ward complete with a pharmacy and several examination rooms. There are two doctors who rotate their time and a couple dozen nurses who do most of the work.

Ever since I’d been burned I’d been going to the TCV health clinic every day to get my dressing changed. For a week things had been progressing normally, if not a bit slow because of my poor leg circulation. On Thursday morning when the wrap came off, my original thought was positive. Every other day there was nothing under the wrap but raw pink flesh. On Thursday, however, it appeared to start to scab over. I looked up at the doctor and said, “Hey, looks like it’s really starting to heal!”

“No, he said, that cover is light green, you now have an infection.” In three seconds I went from total optimism to dark ESR. “You need to go to the burn specialist at Kangra Hospital,” he said. “This is a dangerous thing.”

I was just hoping to take a pop off this jug in the Kangra ER and wake up with my leg all healed. Hah!

Instead of motoring up to the station to prep the daily news brief, I was off to Kangra Hospital, 20 kilometers down the valley. The crew at the station told me not to worry about anything – just do what it takes to get better.

The last time I’d been down the road to Kangra I was in search of an aluminum welding shop. Even though it was the day after my burn, I was in great spirits because my chair was getting fixed and I was exploring small Indian towns at the base of the Himalayas. My driver, Suresh, and I were laughing at bad drivers and talking about the difference between US and Indian roads (aside from pavement, they’ have NOTHING in common).

This drive, however, was dead silent. I wasn’t prepared for the downgrade to my condition and I didn’t like the look on my doctor’s face. When we got to the Kangra Hospital, I was admitted and within a half an hour I was looking at the same unhappy grin on my new doctor. He shook his head and said, “This thing is all infected. Be happy you didn’t wait another day.”

The doctor turned to three nurses and spoke sternly to them in Hindi. They circled around and listened attentively, then went for their sterile cabinet as if he broke their huddle. The doctor looked back at me and said, “They’re going to debride your wound, and put you on IV antibiotics. You will need to stay here for two days.”

Two days! What the hell was I going to do in an Indian hospital ward for two days? I didn’t even have my book with me – it was sitting on my night stand in Bhagsu. I didn’t know for sure, but I was pretty sure they didn’t get ESPN. Wyfi? Could I be so lucky? Not a chance. The only computers were a couple of hard-wired boxes in the doctors' offices.

Unfortunately that IV bottle was just out of reach. I was stuck.

While the crew was using me has a human pin cushion trying to find a vein (apparently over developed forearms are not advantageous to vein finding), I avoided the pain by wondering how the hell I was going to not die of boredom over the next 48 hours. I was hoping the procedure would take a few hours because once they were done, there was nothing but staring at the walls for two days.

Unfortunately I was debrided and wrapped up in less than a half hour. They rolled me on the gurney from the exam room to a dark empty room with four beds and no windows. The room resembled a cell more than any hospital room I’ve ever stayed in. They flipped on a dull florescent light and instructed me to transfer onto my bed. I looked at the dull green walls and tried to think if I had anything in my back pack that I could use to take up any time at all. The most interesting reading material included a visa application, notes from the first three interviews I’d done and a copy of my birth certificate.

I was afraid to sleep because any time I spent with my eyes shut would mean more staring into the dark at night. It then occurred to me I couldn’t reach the light switch. Even if I wanted to transfer into my chair, I was hooked up to an IV bottle that was attached to a wire strung across the four beds and slightly out of my reach. There wasn’t any phone in the room so if I needed to call a nurse for any reason (like to turn on or off the light) I would just have to scream.

I was less than an hour into my bit when a pair of male nurses came in speaking Hindi (or the local Himachal language, I have no idea) and unhooking my IV bottle. I got from their gestures I was moving somewhere else, which was a great relief to me, because I had to be better than where I was. They wanted to move me in the gurney, but I motioned it would be much easier to move me in my chair. They understood this, but I should have known by the fact they didn’t speak English, that they weren’t the most educated of aids (any educated Indian speaks a great deal of English). When they went to unhook my IV, they pulled the plastic tube out from the needle and my blood squirted all over the floor and bed. Having bled frequently from hitting springboards with my head as a youth, I knew I had plenty to spare, but I was hoping they could put an end to this. The second aid put his finger on the needle and turned a couple turns the plastic valve attached to it. The brighter aid and I were laughing at the incident, while the first guy couldn’t even look us in the face. He’d lost face and that’s something you just don’t do in Asia.

The two aides pushed me up a series of six long ramps that took me up to the fourth floor. I was wheeled into a similar room, except this one was occupied by three Indian families looking after three Indian patients. Nobody in the room spoke much English, but for some reason it took away my solitary-prisoner freak out. Even if I could barely communicate with them, just trying would take up plenty of time. If I needed anything, I could ask one of them to get a nurse. Then it occurred to me that in a room with three adult Indian males, one of them had to have a deck of cards. I relaxed, put my head back and let myself take a nap.

My Kangra Hosital family. No English; excellent vibe.

When I woke, I looked over at one of the mothers who smiled and offered me a cookie. As freaky as living in a foreign country can be there are some experiences that let you know we are all pretty much the same. One of them is being in a hospital room. No matter where you are in the world, a family gathering around a hospital bed will always be the same. Everyone is concerned; everyone is trying to be positive; everyone is looking for a little diversion. A white guy in a wheelchair was plenty of diversion. Before long there were hand signals, chopped up English and lots of laughing. I didn’t feel sick so I was actually looking forward to the next 44 hours.

That is until the doctor came into the room and told me I could go home as soon as I’d drained the 400 cc’s of IV antibiotics. Much as I’d like to stay and chat, I called the TCV and told them I was out of there. Within an hour, the station manager, Kelsang, was there with another driver and I was on my way back to Bhagsu, 3200 rupees, or $72 shorter for my effort. In the states, $72 would not have gotten me past the front desk, but in India 3200 rupees is three-weeks salary. And if you don’t have it – they don’t treat you. Then again, if I were an Indian, I never would have gone to this hospital for this treatment anyway. I would have gone to my local Ayervedic clinic and have them treat it there.

Personally, I’ll take the antibiotics.

I met this TCV worker in the Kangra Hospital parking lot. Neither one of us give a shit about Wisconsin Football.

Update: As of this writing, the antibiotics have once again kicked in and at my daily TCV Health Clinic checkup, the doc said the infection is being held at bay and the wound is healing nicely again. We HOPE!

The Story Behind 90.4 Tashi Delek FM

2010-01-20T14:43:00.002+05:30

Phuntsok Dorjee

Now that I’ve been going to work for about a month, I’m finally wrapping my head around what I’m supposed to be doing. We need to create a ton of content for the station as well as teach the students how to record and edit audio. Unfortunately that job is still a month away as the students at the Tibetan Children’s Village are on their winter break until Losar, the Tibetan New Year, Feb. 20.

In the meantime I’ve got two adult students who are going to turn into crack radio men and will run the content side of the station once I’m gone. Lobsang and Chimi both took quite quickly to audio editing on Adobe Audition and Nuendo even though they were dumbfounded at first.

Their first project was editing an interview I did with our station’s creator, Phuntsok Dorjee. I conducted the interview while the station manager, Kalseng took levels and the two of them sat close by to see how it was done. Once they figured out it was just organized talking, their fear of being on a microphone was greatly reduced.

This picture has nothing to do with this post whatsoever. I bet you're really bummed you're looking at it too.

Next week they get to interview Phuntsok in Tibetan, but this week was spent painstakingly changing the levels on each exchange between Phuntsok and me. So instead of a long blog entry, you can see how they did for yourselves. And as you’re listening you’ll find out exactly what’s going on here at good old 90.4 Tashi Delek FM!

Where to Find an Aluminum Welder?

2010-01-19T13:21:00.008+05:30

The fact that my leg was a blister blob had little effect on the fact my wheelchair was still broken (although I did kind of forget about the elbow being swollen). One of the handles the Tibetans use to yank me up 15 stairs every day had snapped making it impossible to lift me up to the studio. The doctor told me I should rest, but my legs are basically at rest all the time. Instead I asked the station if I could borrow Suresh, my driver, to go in search of an aluminum welder. The TCV had a few errands for him to run, so the two of us dropped out of the clouds and went down to the real Dharamsala, down in the valley.

Dharamsala is split into two different and distinct areas. I spend 95% of my time in Upper Dharamsala about 3000 ft. higher than the main city. There are two roads between the two sections. The Main road is nine kilometers long, full of gradual switchbacks and long rises that gradually lift you from the lower city into the burbs of McLeod Ganj, Forsyth Ganj and my crib, Bhagsu. Along the way there are plenty of smaller villages and a big army base. I forget sometimes that I’m only about 50 miles from the hottest nuclear front on the planet, Kashmir. As the crow flies Pakistan is no further from Dharamsala than Portland is from Corvallis. Dharamsala to Afghanistan is the same distance as Portland to the California border. But even with proper visas, it would take days to get to the Afghan border.

The second road is what used to be the most treacherous road in the civilized world, The Library Road. The Library Road does that same eight kilometer stretch in three kilometers. It’s a barrage of thin hairpin switchbacks that up until 2007 was barely paved. Depending on which side of the road you’re on, a little hiccup could send you careening over a 1000 ft. cliff, or dump you into a 3 ft. draining ditch. Now, however the road has a glistening new blacktop and lines where it’s wide enough for two way traffic – although in India, they ALWAYS assume two vehicles can pass. In sections the Library Road is so steep and narrow I can’t even ride it in the wheelchair. As it approaches McLeod Ganj it splits into two one-way sections each ramping up at around 20%. Cabs can make it but only the most souped-up motorized rickshaws have a chance.

Cell tower to the heavens - heavily used by monks at the main temple.

The TCV is located off the Main road so Suresh took the long route to the lower city. Lower Dharamsala is almost all Indian and you get a much better feel for the country than the cultural hodgepodge up in McLeod. The main market is full of things people actually need, not Tibetan handicrafts. The food is about half price of that in McLeod and the streets are twice as dirty. Women in saris walk with grain baskets on their heads and school kids march to class in dark blue uniforms. The terrain is still extremely hilly and only flattens out four kilometers from the bottom of the main road. There’s still quite a big tourist infrastructure including a water park and a small amusement park. But it’s all for Indian tourists; the whities aren’t here for roller coasters.

The markets of Lower Dharamsala cater to residents, not like the tourist trade up in McLeod Ganj.

The trick was finding someone who could weld aluminum. Aluminum is more heat resistant than steel so you need someone with a super-hot welding torch – and that means a huge electrical supply. Extra electricity is not an easy thing to come by in these parts as the region suffers from at least two blackouts a week. They used to go on for almost a full day, but now they’re usually over in just a few minutes. Unless it’s a weekend – then they’ll still last a few hours. Most of the restaurants and hotels now have generators, but they only flip them on if someone asks, or if it’s necessary for the business (like an Internet café). Aside from that you just stare at the mountains. After all, it’s what you’re here for in the first place.

Unfortunately the Tibetan garbage trucks do not service Lower Dharamsala. The ditches have decades' worth of composting trash.

Suresh had no idea where to start looking so he went to his gas station and asked around while we filled up. Gas is 33 Rs/liter or about $2.90/gallon. That’s prohibitively expensive for all but the most affluent residents of Dharamsala so most vehicles (including mine) are company cars. Most workers commute on foot, bus or motorcycle. There are very few bicycles because either the hills and the traffic would kill you.

We were directed further down the valley past the biggest structure in town, the new Dharamsala Cricket Stadium. Built in 2003 and holding 19,000 fans, it is now one of the most famous pitches in India. It’s only held a few national matches, but the players and journalists claim it to be the most beautiful athletic complex in the world. The stands are high enough to keep the dust and noise of the city out, but nowhere near tall enough to obscure the peaks. In April Dharamsala will host four very important national matches and the entire town is just giddy over it. Much as they are thankful for the Dalai Lama bringing in cash to the region, they are proud they will be famous for something purely Indian – their cricket pitch. Come April you’ll find me at that stadium with a Kingfisher Strong Beer in my hand.

Not my pic - but hopefully in April I'll have something like it!

A few clicks past the stadium we came upon a section of town that was nothing but building supply stores and carpentry shops. Suresh spent an hour trying to find the right shop, waiting for the owner to come in, then finding out they couldn’t do aluminum. Finally he got a hot tip that the best aluminum welder lives in Matour, 10 kilometers further down the valley – probably a 45 minute drive on these roads. Neither one of us had anything else to do and I really had no choice, so we headed off to Matour.

Matour, out in the valley, has no tourist infrastructure at all. Just your random town in paradise.

The ride to Matour was on a muddy one-lane road along a trickling river bed. The river bed was 100 meters wide, but since there’s been so little snow in the mountains, there was only a small stream winding around huge boulders. Had I been on this quest by myself, I would be eternally lost and forced to join the ranks of Indian beggars. There are no directional signs except on heavily trafficked roads. This road had very few cars, yet there were houses and business in identical caving brick structures almost the entire way. Once inside Matour, there were a few signs, but only for cities, not for roads. Suresh knew the place a little bit, but we also spent a lot of time asking around – something he could do because he speaks the local language. I wouldn’t have stood a chance.

It looks like there's barely room for one bus going one way. But none of these three busses even slowed down as they passed.

Finally about two hours after leaving the TCV we stopped in front of a garage door in the middle of a non-descript street and, sure enough, this guy had the big gun. Suresh disassembled the padding from my chair; the welder fired up his magic wand and I sat in the car praying it was going to work out. The welder did a phenomenal job putting the handle back on and assured me the second handle was in good shape. Total cost for his services: Rs 30 (66 cents).

What I hadn’t noticed on the way to Matour was that behind us loomed the full Dhauladhar ridge of Himalayas. In Upper Dharamsala you can catch the tops of the peaks, but the ‘foothills’ (10,000 footers) can block much of the granite. Out here in the plains of Himachal Pradesh the monsters are in full glory. And as opposed to the monsoon season, the winter sun was glistening off each peak and avalanche.
Suresh drove back via one of the quicker national roads while I stuck my head out the window like my pooch Sydney used to. It wasn’t long before we were at the base of the Library Road. No matter how many times I take that drive it still gives me a thrill. It may have been the most beautiful day of errands I’ve ever experienced.

While I was looking ahead for welding shops, this was in Suresh's rearview mirror.

For three hours I was having the time of my life; completely forgetting there was a giant gap in my leg.

The Meltdown (literally)

2010-01-18T12:15:00.001+05:30

Ever since I’d recovered from Delhi Belly, things had been going surprisingly well. Working for the radio station has been an absolute dream; I’d moved into a relatively cheap 100% accessible hotel with a dozen English speaking cable chanels – including ESPN; I’d interviewed a Pulitzer Prize winner and my two students had learned how to edit audio and are ready to become reporters.

The Culprit.

Considering my track record, it was a little too much to ask for. And slowly things started to sour. It started with the purchase of a brand new Chinese space heater I picked up to keep my room above freezing at night. It doesn’t stay cold long here, so there’s no heating in any of the hotels. Before I broke my back I had no problem camping out in near freezing temperatures, but since my body just can’t take it. My extremities chill up quickly and worst of all, my nose gets so cold and clammy that it gives me a slight headache.

The space heater was only $8.00 so picking one up was an easy call. The problem is they are all cheap pieces of garbage. By the time I rolled the mile and a half from Mcleod Ganj to my crib in Bhagsu, the entire mechanism had fallen apart. Screws came undone, heating filaments fell out of the box and after putting it back together only one of the heat coils fired up.

But it did kind of throw out a bit of heat, or at least enough to warm my nose if I stuck it a few inches from the grill. A minor setback, but of course it would lead to more calamitous events.

Next on the agenda was my cell phone. Dan’s co-worker, Helen picked up an Indian cell phone during here trip here a few years back and lent it to me for my stay. It seems like every other shop in McLeod Ganj is a cell provider, so I just stepped into one and within minutes I was hooked up with a new number and a fully functioning phone. I left the charger at the studio where I plugged in my computer. Whenever I saw it running out of juice, I just plugged it in for the day and I was fine. Fine until the charger went missing one day and 24 hours later I was out of phone, with several potential interview subjects trying to reach me. Meltdown number two.

Then yesterday after I had a great class session with two very eager Tibetan reporters the meltdowns started getting worse. As they were carrying me down the dozen steps from the studio, one of the handles on my chair snapped off and I went tumbling down to the bottom of the cement staircase. I managed to avoid breaking any bones, but my elbow took a nice crack and I caught a fat contusion on my left calf. It was nothing to take me out of action, but a thick bit of hurt to carry around with for the next few days. We’ll call the chair meltdown number three and the elbow thwack meltdown number four.

I made it back to Bhagsu and flicked on the heater to try to warm up my legs which were icy cold from the first snow day of the year. Although none of the snow stuck, the temperature never got above freezing so my body never really warmed up. I tried a little experiment and flipped the device on its head to see if the second coil would fire up. Nothing doing, so I put the heater next to my legs, opened the laptop and whipped out a blog entry. Fifteen minutes later I noticed my nose wasn’t cold anymore so I lifted up the laptop and saw that my trick of standing the heater on it’s head worked. Both coils were firing away and the room was getting toasty warm.

When I finished writing, I folded up the laptop and hopped into bed to catch The Tonight Show which was right in the middle of the Conan v. NBC fiasco. Before tossing the covers over my legs, I rolled up my right pant leg to see what was happening with the contusion. This is when I realized the contusion was nothing, but the large patch of white wrinkled skin was something – something big. As the double heater coils warmed me up, they’d also bubbled up my leg. I immediately doused it with water and used another cold water bottle to keep the skin cool (no ice machines up here in Bhagsu). I could feel the skin was loose but I couldn’t tell the extent of the burn. I fell asleep praying that it would just be a red spot in the morning.

But, of course, it wasn’t. The heater (which went completely dead in the middle of the night) had left me with a 9-inch by 4-inch bubble on the left side of my left calf. There was enough fluid in the blister to fill a coke can. Thus we have king of the meltdowns rendering all the other meltdowns meaningless.

When my driver Suresh came to pick me up, he took one look at it and agreed with me that I had to go to the hospital. He zipped me down the harrowing Library road to Delek Hospital, not far from the Tibetan government offices. I’d been to this hospital once in 2000 when it was little more than a waiting room and a doctor’s office. Since that time there’s been an enormous improvement. It’s now a four-story building with several wards, an x-ray machine, a full lab, a pharmacy and even a minor operating room. When I showed the burn to the admitting clerk, he quickly sent me to a western-trained Tibetan doctor who told me I needed to take care of it immediately.

He said he was going to have puncture the bubble and admit me with IV antibiotics. This is not what I wanted to hear, but what he said next was much better. He informed me that the TCV also had a very nice clinic on campus. I had no idea there was a hospital just a few blocks from my office, but I told the doctor I think it’s best if I got treated up there. He agreed and Suresh zipped me up the Library Road, though the main drag in McLeod and up to the TCV.

ADA standards require 12 feet of horizontal for every one foot of vertical. This baby at the TCV Health Clinic is 5:1 - and two stories up !

Oh yeah - there's stairs in the middle of it too!

The doctor at the TCV clinic agreed it was a nice burn, but didn’t think I needed to be admitted. He covered the bubble with iodine then carefully punctured it letting the seepage drain until the blistered skin again lay on my leg. He bandaged everything up, gave me a stock pile of antibiotics and told me to come back in the morning to change the dressing.

Eight inches long by four inches wide. I'm sure I'll be able to show you all the scar when I get home - because it won't heal overnight.

The handle on my chair will get a new weld, the phone has been recharged, the heater is in the trash can, but my leg… That’s gonna leave a mark!

UPDATE: Here's my right leg for the next few months while this heals. This actually happened on Jan. 13 and as of Jan. 18, it's healing quite well. It's a first degree burn, quite wide but happily not at all deep. I go to the hospital every morning where they rebandage it and check for infection (there is none!). So I'm all chocked full of antibiotics which is probably good for UTI's too!
And no, it's not serious enough to get out of work. I'm reading the news in five minutes!

Alice Walker for Christmas

2010-01-16T15:02:00.001+05:30

To say it was my first week on the job is a bit misleading since I’ve actually had the fortune to interview quite a few famous athletes while I was writing for L’adidas, the most successful in-house newspaper in the history of corporate America. So successful, in fact, that we were shut down by the international corporate headquarters of Adidas, in Herzogenaurach, Germany. Alice Walker

The international guys published (probably still do) a 32-page color glossy rag that was nothing more than group photos and pontifications by members of the board of directors. It was summarily tossed in the bin within hours of each production run. L’adidas, a four-page monthly infotainment piece was read cover to cover by every employee (including the slugs at international) and if you went through 95% of the desks in the Adidas cube farm in Beaverton, Oregon you would find nearly every employee had a collection of their favorite issues.

We wrote it as a celebration of a growing company, not a mausoleum for a decades old dynasty. We interviewed athletes, coaches, CEO’s of other companies, as well as someone from every rank of the corporate chain of command. Even the head of the mailroom got a column. We had a wise-ass lawyer write a column as well as a racist octogenarian who was somehow still on the payroll.

All the interviewing and reporting told me no matter how high or low someone is, they've got a story - and almost everyone is willing to tell it. I can’t say I didn’t get goose bumps interviewing a star athlete, but I did learn how to put them at ease and get the best out of them.

And this was perfect training for my first assignment at 90.4 Tashi Delek FM. Not three days into the job we were told that Alice Walker, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of the Color Purple, was in town for an audience with the Dalai Lama. Our contact at the temple spoke to her, told her that we were a fledgling radio station and wanted to know if we could interview her. Great lady that she is, she said it would be just fine.

While I was giddy at the prospect of interviewing a Pulitzer Prize Winner, it also occurred to me that I was unfamiliar with her work (saw the move, didn’t read the book) and really had no business interviewing anyone who didn’t wear a jock strap or a sports bra. For some reason I didn’t think a 65-year-old Hall-of-Fame writer and human rights activist would be up for talking NFL.

Not much was made of Christmas in McLeod Ganj except for this dancing Santa.

For the next eight hours I scoured the Internet for content. I read her blog, digested her website and read four or five random biographies. From that I whipped out a slew of questions and showed it to Phuntsok. Phuntsok looked at the questions and said, “This would make a great interview for somebody in the States or Europe, but not a Tibetan. You need to tie this all into why she is here and what she thinks of us.”

Back to the drawing board. Well, not exactly, but there were plenty of revisions to be made. When I showed him the final list he thought it was a good start, but added that he might throw in a question or two as we went. Phuntsok’s not only the boss; he’s a very astute guy so having that backup was great for me.

Alice’s trip visit just happened to fall on Christmas Day, so this was either going to be one of the greatest Christmases of my life, or a gigantic disaster. As we drove to her hotel (the nicest place in town – triple what I pay) on a brilliant sunny day I gazed back at the Himalayan monsters behind me and fell into a calmly insignificant state. Those cats have been around for a few million years, so what effect would a nice talk in their shadow have?

Whenever you think you're doing something important in the Himalayas, you just look up and laugh. These big boys have seen it all before.

With that Suresh (the driver) pulled into the hotel, and Kalsang (station manager) and I unloaded and set up all the gear. This was also a test of all the electronics I brought with me from the States. We did a few mic checks, and waited for Alice to show up. I’ll let you be the judge of how well we did, but man is that one incredible lady: Alice Interview

The action shot! (Nice place for an interview eh?)

And the celebrity pose: Me, Alice, Kalsang Tsewang (station manager) and Phuntsok Dorjee (big boss).

90.4 Tashi Delek FM!

2010-01-15T12:19:00.000+05:30

Five days after arriving in Dharamsala, ten days after arriving in India, 60 days after arriving in Charlottesville, 85 days after leaving Oregon, 18 months after graduating from the Murrow School, and four and a half years after I got the craw in my shorts to become a broadcaster, I sat down to my first job in my now chosen field.

Of course is wasn’t as simple as driving to work and sitting down in front of a microphone. My commute was only three miles, but it was three of the craziest miles one could imagine. I thought I would roll to work everyday, but since I needed my computer at both work and home, I accepted the offer for a driver from Phuntsok Dorjee, my new boss and the head of 90.4 Tashi Delek FM.

A View of McLeod Ganj from Forsyth Ganj.

I’d been exchanging emails with Phuntsok for weeks and upon meeting him earlier in the week, found him to be both competent and affable. He’d taken on the radio project three years earlier but. due to very strict and cumbersome Indian communication regulations, was only able to get a license and start broadcasting in October.

The three years Phuntsok labored getting permission to mount a radio station was nothing compared to the decades that Indian free-speech advocates suffered through to open up airwaves to the private sector. India has had radio since the late twenties, but only granted it’s first private license in 2000. Before that you could switch on a radio and everything on the FM dial from 90 to 96 would be one government channel. Everything from 96 to 100 another – and so forth.

Since 2000, at the insistence of some major players in the global communications industry, the government has been selling frequencies for huge sums and the private owners have been making a killing on advertising. The new radio giant, Big FM, has huge 20,000 watt stations in all the big cities: Delhi, Calcutta, Mumbai, Madras, Bangalore. They had enormous sums of cash and expertise to rely on and it’s been a tremendous success for them.

But this left the small community radio entrepreneur out in the cold. In the rural regions of the country they had no one to create and broadcast local content. This left enormous populations lacking in free health, agriculture, and legal information. TV is almost all national, low literacy restricts them from reading newspapers and very few of them own computers or have internet connections.

So in 2006 the government opened up licensing to local rural agencies who could both come up with enough gear to open a station , and also wade through the still tedious process of Indian bureaucracy (locals call it 'license raj'). I’m not saying running a democracy of over a billion people is easy, but if they’d just loosen up the leash they’d find the dog knows where it’s going.

One kind of rural agency the government was looking for were schools. The Tibetan Children’s Village might not only be the best college prep school in the Himalayas, it’s also the centerpiece of an international network of TCV’s. If Phuntosk could wait out the license procedure, he had plenty of Tibetan connections to muster up the gear and expertise. He also had the backing of the TCV for studio space.

Finally in September the license came though and all the wires started getting plugged in. By the time October came around it was time to flip the switch and start broadcasting from 90.4 Tashi Delek FM!

Only one problem: They had no idea what to broadcast!

They had a bunch of music and a bunch of recordings of the Dalai Lama’s teachings, but they did not have the money for either an Indian or western music license. They also had nobody who knew how to speak or what to say on the radio. They were required by the license to develop local interest content, but didn't know where to start. Basically they needed a Com-school moron and through my brother, Dan, they found me.

But I’m in a goddamn wheelchair and that’s a huge pain in the ass for them which brings me back to the commute. The TCV has a couple of cars and a driver and one of them, Suresh, was dedicated to me. Suresh drove up to the Pema Thang guest house and the two of us figured out how to get both myself and my gear (computer, sound board, mics, daily bag, wheelchair) into his 4 x 4. There was plenty of room in the back for the gear (the truck doubles as a school bus sometimes) but the passenger seat was a good foot above my chair. I tossed my right leg in the car, grabbed the handle on the roof and did a one-arm pull-up, while Suresh shoved my ass in the seat. Luckily the rig had seat belts (very few Indian vehicles had them in 2000 – now they all do) because I was going to need them.

Suresh isn't 'my driver'. Sometimes he's the school bus driver too!

We pulled out from the Pema Thang and caught a few hundred yards of open road before coming into the main market streets of McLeod. Suresh slithered through the morass of monks, cows, vegetable stands, shoe shiners, and chai vendors until we came upon the old bus stop and our choice of roads to take to the TCV. Suresh made a call on his cell and discovered the low road through the town of Forsyth Ganj was jammed, so we opted for the slower, riskier high road. We buzzed unscathed through some thick forest until we arrived at the neighborhoods in Upper Dharamsala leading up to the TCV. These twisty tight roads took us up steep, but populated ridges until we came to Holy Dall Lake, which unfortunately was drained so that it could be dug deeper and cleaned (it was pretty nasty back in the day).

This was also the entrance to the TCV, but we weren’t going to the school. We were going to the studio on the second floor of Gmeiner Memorial Hall, a 1000 seat auditoruim built in 1990 for school functions. That meant a quarter mile diversion along something that used to resemble a road, but is now just mountain of rubble. Up to that point I thought that, with a couple weeks of training , I could actually make my way up the the TCV. But now I could see that even if I got in marathon shape (it’d only been 8 weeks since DC!) there’s no way I would ever be able to navigate the last stretch – they would have to send a car down for me just to go the last quarter mile.

The TCV hoops court. How the hell are you going to concentrate on a free throw with that backdrop?

Finally Suresh pulled in front of the Hall and I met my co-worker, the station manager of 90.4 Tashi Delek FM, Kalsang Tsewang. Kalsang plays in one of the hottest local bands, who were on enough of a hiatus that he could take this gig running the station. He’s great with the soundboard and the recording software so he was a natural for the job. Kalsang and Suresh lifted me up the three steps to the entrance, then we came up on the 15 steps up to the studio. I knew they had a wify set up, so I told them I could just work downstairs. They wanted no part of it. They lifted me up the fifteen stairs (something they’ve done for three weeks now) and showed me to the studio.

Doesn't look like something you would see in the Himalayas does it? Tibetans just rock when it comes to tech stuff.

I was as far away from home as I could possibly be, but when I saw the computers, the board and the mic – I felt right at home. As a matter of fact, I was more freaked out when I rolled into the studios of KUGR in Pullman, Washington. This time, I knew what to do and it felt great.

Kalsang flipped on the mic, I rolled up and said, “You're listening to 90.4 Tashi Delek Fm broadcasting from the Tibetan Children’s Village in Dharamsala, India. Now back to some Tibetan music….”

Finally, Ladies and Gentlemen, The Indian Himalayas!

2010-01-13T12:53:00.001+05:30

Aside from the cab ride from the airport up to McLeod Ganj, I hadn’t really connected with the fact that I was no longer in a pedestrian location. When I awoke on the 6th day of my Delhi Belly incarceration, I finally had a clear head, with no sweats or chills and a clean diaper. (TMI? Sorry, but remember you’re reading a crip blog!). I rolled out of my room to see the screaming Dhuladhar range, chocked full of baby Himalayas – the 16,000 footers. Their 25,000 ft siblings are cached behind them, but seeing as this is the first major ridge of Himichal Pradesh, the view is adequately impressive.

Looking out the back side of the Pema Thang Guest House, I had a clear view of the Dalai Lama’s residence, and just beyond that, a 3000 ft. drop to the market in lower Dharamsala. McLeod Ganj is a tiny ridge, less than a mile long that sticks out of the first major Himalayan ascent into the clouds. Actually, on most days in winter, it’s above the clouds. Sometimes the entire world is obscured by low hanging haze, while McLeod basks in sunlight at 6000 ft.

The view from the back porch.

And the view out the front door.

Along this ridge there is no more open space as the entire spit is covered in hotels, restaurants, apartments, shops, taxi & bus stands and some government & NGO offices. Halfway down the impossibly steep Library road to Lower Dharamsala lies the Tibetan Government in Exile.

There's no more room left along the ridge, but builders continue to contruct into the sky and further down the valley.

As one makes their way down one of the four streets of McLeod Ganj you notice the town is as international as New York, Dubai, Hong Kong or London. You are just as likely to run into someone from Taipei as someone from Cedar Rapids. The majority of the town is Indian, but there is a large minority of Tibetan refugees and a smaller, but very noticeable, group of westerners. Noticeable because no other town of its size in the Indian Himalayas has more than a few lost Injies (whities!). Dharamsala and the surrounding area have more than a thousand.

It wasn’t just Delhi Belly that kept me from recognizing the town when I arrived. Since 2000 the town had gone through a major and needed growth spurt. The only negative effect I noticed was that many of the buildings had added on one to three stories which left the narrow streets sunless in the middle of the day.

They can build as high as they want, but they're still not going to obscure the peaks!

The other growth effects have made the place much more palatable. First of all the streets – all of them – had been paved and effective drainage put in effect. This, for me was the most reassuring sight since leaving the states. Although the opportunity to teach broadcasting to the kids at the Tibetan Children’s Village was something I couldn’t pass up, in the back of my mind was the fact that I didn’t survive my first stay in McLeod Ganj. In 2000, after two months of rolling along muddy roads chocked full of cow/dog/monkey/human urine & feces, I’d developed an infection that even powerful antibiotics could not get rid of. After battling it for a month I was forced to return to the states for better treatment. And even there, they couldn’t get rid of it. I just had to ride it out for a year until it finally just became part of my body.

Not only were the streets paved, but they were swept clean every day. As I took my first stroll into town I caught another, most welcoming sight – a garbage truck. In 2000 shop and restaurant owners simply tossed their trash into the street or out their back window down a ravine. One of the main entrances to the town was a festering garbage heap that gagged even the Indians who grew up next to it. It has since been replaced by the new McLeod Ganj bus terminal with (gulp) an accessible ATM! The hillsides that had a grating skin of plastic trash on them have been cleaned up and the old pockets of dump-funk air have all but disappeared.

Yup - an honest to god, GARBAGE TRUCK!

After my first roll around town, I realized I wasn’t going to battle my health this stay around. If I just kept my hands clean and used disinfectant goo before cathing, I was going to be able to simply go to work and concentrate on my job.

And what a freaking incredible job it is…

Sandwich from Hell

2010-01-11T12:43:00.000+05:30

This piece may not be for the squeamish, but it’s part of traveling in India, so you’re all going to have to put up with it for just a day – which is four days shorter than I had to!

The day after the cricket match, I left the Vivek and went to Delhi National, or Palam Airport, for what would be the final leg of my trip. There are a couple of ways to get from Delhi to Dharamsala, depending on how much gear you have and how much pain you are willing to put your body though.

In 2000 I was privy to three 12-hour Dharamsala-Delhi (or return) bus trips, all of which were quite cheap (<$10), but only one of which I survived unscathed. The problem with me taking a bus trip is that once I’m on the bus, I’m on it for the full 12 hours. I say goodbye to my bags and my chair and don’t get to see them until I get off the bus. Leaving your bags out of sight for a long period of time is a great way to get ripped off. And I can’t hop off the bus at the road stops with everyone else. I wait for then end of the ride; watch everyone get off the bus; ask a stranger to find my chair; slide along the floor of the bus to the door; bounce down a few steps; hop in my rig and finally see if I still have my bags. The whole bus trip I try not to think of how screwed I would be if the stranger came back into the bus saying, “There’s no chair back there?”

To my great luck, I’ve never had any baggage taken, although I did sit next to a guy who just had all his gear stolen from him at the New Delhi Railway station. So it happens frequently and I’ve just been lucky.

Of the two bad bus instances I had, one was common to India travelers and the other is something that would only happen to a paraplegic. The crip story is gruesome, but it came from an act of kindness on the part of one of the drivers. The driver took pity and asked me if I wanted to ride with him in the front of the bus, which on India tourist busses, is like a cockpit. It’s a separate compartment with three padded benches. I sat on one of the benches and put my feet on, what I later discovered, was the engine block. It was covered by plastic and the driver used it as a table. When I put my feet up, it was a little warm but not hot. I was on a night bus so around midnight I fell asleep in my comfy cabin. What I didn’t realize was as the bus kept going, the engine block heated up and slowly cooked my right ankle. I woke at sunrise outside of Delhi and lifted my ankle to find a two-inch oval of broiled Tom. The skin was black and had already started to get infected. Luckily I was going to Delhi to get a UTI checked out. The doctors cleaned up the wound really well and set me up with a bucket of antibiotics that eventually (5 weeks later!) healed the wound.

But my second mishap is more germane to this story, that being a bad sandwich. Again, I was on a night bus and was offered a breaded chicken sandwich from an Italian who lived permanently in Dharamsala. The bus took a break at a roadside food stand and the Italian said he’d eaten food from this place on several occasions. I saw a couple of cucumbers and some white sauce on the sandwich. I wiped it off, tossed away the bread and just ate the chicken. But the chicken paddy had already sipped the evil white sauce. I ended up spending the next five days in my room, moving only to rush to the bathroom.

It only takes one time for this to happen and you swear you’ll never get fooled again. It’s a nasty existence complete with chills, body aches, fever and dehydration due to the fact that absolutely nothing you put in your body stays in for long. You have to keep drinking water but you realize you’re going to pay for every sip. You starve yourself for the duration and, only when the bug leaves your system and your head clears, do you realize how weak your body has become.

The trick is to eat only well cooked foods (rice is boiled!) as well as fruit with thick skin, like bananas and oranges. Bottled water is a given (Delhi claims to now have clean drinking water, but the pipes are still old) and any meat really needs to be cooked well done. But if you follow these simple rules, you can avoid the dreaded Delhi Belly.

But there are the things that throw the most experienced travelers off guard. The one that got me was airplane food. Seeing as I had tons of electronic gear with me I decided against risking the bus trip and found the one-hour flight was only ten bucks more than renting a car with a driver. Add to the fact that I might get a crazy view flying into the Himalayas, and the decision was a layup.

Delhi’s local airport is a brand new facility for domestic flights. Another byproduct of all the new wealth is a burgeoning internal airline industry. In 1991 there were only major carriers, but now there are a dozen small airlines offering discount fares all around the country. Cutting your travel time by 92 percent over Indian roads and rail has made anyone with a job buck up for the tickets – which are still cheaper than U.S. flights.

The new airport is spotless and makes the cruddier US airports (read: Atlanta, Miami) look like - well India. I was flying on Kingfisher Air (yes, the same company as the beer) and was treated like a diplomat as soon as I rolled into the airport. Immediately there were four Kingfisher employees, taking my bags, pushing my chair and skipping me through all the customs and baggage lines. Normally I like airline employees to leave me alone, but with all my gear I was happy to take the help.

One problem, which I encountered earlier in the year in Turkey, was that the airline didn’t want me to fly alone. They asked me a gazillion medical questions and wouldn’t let me on the plane unless I promised them I was meeting someone at the airport – which I wasn’t.

The plane was a dinky 40-seater and the flight crew was dumbfounded as to how I was going to get on the plane. They get plenty of geriatric travelers in wheelchairs, but no paraplegics. They had no lift and the plane loaded via a staircase from the tarmac. I rolled up to the staircase; transferred onto the bottom step and had a worker lift my legs while I hoisted myself along the handrails. The stairs were at the rear of the plane and my seat was in the front, but it was a half-full flight so I was able to pull myself into the first seat.

Kingfisher was horribly embarrassed by all of this but I was just as happy to be in my seat with all my gear on the plane (I saw them load it). I was sweating after the lift so a stewardess loaded me up with bottled water and a spicy nut mix. Once the plane took off I was the first to be fed. I hadn’t eaten anything all day and was starved, so I was a little off guard. I opened up a sealed package containing a big veggie sandwich with a killer hot mayo sauce. I took one bite into it, realized it was mayo (a big no-no on the India food list), but assumed an airline would have to have a pristine kitchen. Right?

Unfortunately it was cloudy so I only got a short glimpse of the big peaks before the plane landed in the dinky Kangra airport. After climbing down the stairs and flopping back in my chair I split a cab with a teacher from St. Louis. Before long I was riding along the strangely unfamiliar streets of Dharamsala. I knew these streets extremely well, but my head just wasn’t processing. My brain started floating; my body started aching and, before I had settled into my guest house in McLeod Ganj, I felt the first rumblings of Delhi Belly. The Kingfisher mayo was calling.

This is not how I remembered the streets of Dharamsala!

I don’t need to get into the gory details, but it was a full four days before I left the guest house. On that day I went to my first day of work at 90.4 Tashi Delek FM radio station. I know many of you have had pretty ugly first days at a job. But has anyone literally shat themselves?

Not “Oh I was so nervous, I almost shat myself.” But actually being in a meeting and crapping your pants – all knowing that your ride home is in your new boss’s car?

You just know it had to get better from there…