Day 89, 90, 91, 92

Manali is just about done for me; a taxi will arrive to take me to Leh in a few hours. Leh is a seventeen hour drive away.

(and I haven't even written anything about Manali).

I read in a 1990 Lonely Planet for India that even at that time there were droves of hippies living in the hills around town. They are all gone now, and the town is very commercalized. It's more of a scene now, with lots of dreadlocks and scruffy facial hair on display. Yuck. Tony Wheeler used the word "scene" back in 1990, though, so maybe things are exactly like they used to be.

It's a little sad, though, that the hippie sub-culture is just about dead now. I've been reading lots of Kerouac, these days, and it's sad to think that the beat generation, also, is long gone. Ginsberg's been dead for more than a decade now.

(by the way: the depiction of Ginsberg in "Dharma Bums" is pretty hilarious)

It dawns on me now that this journal is not what it was a month ago. I suppose I've stopped writing about what I've been doing. Perhaps this is because I don't really enjoy travel in India that much. I don't really DO anything except take walks and read books and eat decent food.

The walks in Manali are nice though. I have spent my time here with a nice Swedish guy, strolling around the three "villages" that constitute modern Manali. We saw a few decent temples and some residential areas, and even some trees and some water!

I found a copy of Kerouac's "Mexico City Blues" and read through it. I don't entirely understand K's meaning, and frankly, all of the references to Nova Scotia are particularly perplexing.

The Palak Paneer here is very well done. Spinach and cottage cheese... delightful!

My Swedish pal is nice. He's 30ish, and very new to travelling. He's a bit of a lonely guy, and works in a factory in a rural part of his homeland. His factory makes spare parts for forklifts: "not even a whole forklift," he told me. "Just a part. A single part. And they won't even tell us what it does."