Infidelity

Dorje’s preferred bike mechanic is Mohan Sharma on the main highway, and for reasons that are not clear to me he's always referred to as "the Mohan." The Mohan would later tell Dorje that i shift very badly and that was the cause of Penelope’s mechanical problems, but a few days ago all i knew was that getting from first to second was exceedingly difficult and Penny needed repair.

So while the Mohan tinkered with Penelope, i pulled a John Edwards and took Dorje’s Bullet 500 for a spin. Technically speaking it's not Dorje's. A client of his rented the bike from a mechanic in Manali and had major altitude trouble in Leh, meaning he had to fly out the day he arrived. Hence the bike is here without an owner. Dorje asked me to drive the bike back from the Mohan, and stated that i could "take a little drive." Which i did.

The Bullet 500 is essentially similar to the Bullet 350, except with a larger engine. It's still 1 cylinder, so when you get it up to speed the thing rattles like an airplane coming apart. Being the largest bike on Indian roads, it is also the one with the worst mileage, so coming back from Basgo i actually ran the tank dry near the Ladakh Scouts base. Fortunately this one had a reserve tank (Penny lacks this), so i was able to switch and get to a gas station before major misfortune set in. Read More......

Travels with Penelope

"Actually a root word of technology, techne, originally meant 'art.' The Ancient Greeks never separated art from manufacture in their minds, and so never developed separate words for them."
-Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

So recall that i bought a Royal Enfield Bullet Classic 350 last summer from Santa, christened her Penelope, and promptly left her to fulfill nine months of academic duties. I returned to find her in Manali under a tent. After a few swift kicks she started just fine. Here, between Keylong and Jispa, parts of the road—the only major highway between Himachal Pradesh and Ladakh—could resemble an intermittently-maintained county road somewhere in Colorado, or the Cascades.

Other things are utterly unlike anything i’ve ever seen before in my life. The road at Baralacha La, although dry, was quite literally carved into a mountain of snow.

Once things smoothed out a bit after Pang, into the Morey Plains, i could finally get into fourth and Penny was in her element. Read More......

Four passes

What i did not tell mom, for fear she’d have a stroke, is that i was making the trip from Manali to Leh by motorcycle. I felt as thought it was preferable to say that i made the trip from Manali to Leh by motorcycle. So there it is. I made the trip from Manali to Leh by motorcycle, and both Penelope and i are mostly in one piece. More on the “mostly” later. But i’m here, i’m safe, and i hope i never have to drive that road again.

The Manali-Leh Road crosses four major mountain passes (the “La”): Rohtang La (pictured), Baralacha La, Lachulung La, and Tanglang La. Each one is progressively higher than the next.

Baralacha La was snowed in. Winter came very late this year. The picture is off-center because my helmet is my tripod.

Lachulung La.

Tanglang La tops out the passes at about three miles high (17,350 feet). For comparison, Mount Whitney—the highest point in the lower 48—is about 14,300 feet. This photo was taken by an Australian, Yuen, who was also doing the road by motorcycle. We kept bumping into each other throughout the trip. Read More......

In India, No Clothes!

Am presently in Manali. I’ve had some problems. Lufthansa (probably United, actually) lost my bag, meaning i quite literally have only the clothes on my back, plus a backpack full of everything that was too valuable to risk keeping in my checked baggage. Good move. I still have the laptop, camera, and the absolutely essential field equipment, e.g. my field notebook and GPS. Nevertheless, that's still more than $1,000 worth of gear that's lost if the bag doesn't show up sometime. Furthermore, Indian law prohibits me from declaring more than Rs.8000 of lost items going into the country, which is about $160. That's my stove. Suck.

When i arrived in Manali yesterday morning, Dorje/Vijay/Naveen had conferenced and decided i needed a few days mandated rest before making the fairly unpleasant overland trip to Leh. I do not have any other clothes, aside from the heavy jacket i wore on the plane. Today i'm in Old Manali to buy some shirts, a sweater, and hopefully some long underwear.

Manali is presently in the middle of its summer tourist season, and it’s easy to see why. The temperature maxes out at about 75F and dry in the sun, which is abundant in the pre-monsoon months. The hills are cloaked in pines, the last i’ll see before Ladakh, and framed in the background are spectacular peaks still above snowline.

The downside to this is that Manali quickly becomes nothing short of chaos in the primary tourist areas (New Manali). The secret is to follow the hippies. I prefer Old Manali’s setting—entrenched on a wooded hill next to the Beas. Vashisht rhymes with Hashish, and that’s all you really need to know about Vashisht. Read More......

Oh, yeah.

I leave for India tomorrow morning. I'm currently two months behind on last year's India posts, which is ok because the only thing really of interest were the pictures.

In any case. I'll be stuck in Dulles for half of tomorrow so i may do some updating there, with Dorje's computer. Who knows. Read More......

The grand scheme of things.

Q: Why does New Glarus Brewing Co. support Universal Healthcare?
A: Deb is a supporter of Universal Healthcare because she knows what it’s like to be poor. And not the kind of poor that you might have to buy a Gateway computer instead of the new iMac, or the kind of poor in which you have to choose to buy Gap instead of Louis Vuitton, or even the kind of poor that you might just have to wait for these items to go on sale before buying them… I mean the kind of poor that makes you choose between eating and getting medicine for an ear-infection. The kind of poor that only allows you to buy second-hand clothes on sale. And it’s not because she doesn't work hard. She is one of the hardest working women I know, which is probably the reason that she was the first woman to start and run a brewery in the US. The reason that she supports universal health care is because she believes, and knows, that despite how hard you work, a lot of what you have access to (be it health care, food, education, and the like) depends a lot on who you were born to.

Either your parents have enough money to feed you every day or they send you to work after school at 16 to help pay the bills. Either your parents have enough money to pay for your health care, or they don’t eat (or eat mac & cheese) for a few months to cover the cost of your antibiotics from the virus you picked up at school. Many don't know what this is like, and have had a great many opportunities shown to them. That is one of the greatest gifts that a person can get. However, for those out there who aren’t as fortunate, universal healthcare could mean the difference between eating and not, being sick or not, and dying or not. And no one wants to see their taxes go up. But (I would hope) no one wants to see a sick kid not get help because his parents can’t afford it either. I don’t speak for Deb, but I do speak to her love of people, regardless of stature, education, or inheritance. The reason she supports this is to help people.

New Glarus Brewing Co. already gives their employees healthcare coverage, because we realize how important it is. We believe that it is the responsibility of companies to provide care for the employees who may very well spend their entire lives helping to make that business successful, and paying for healthcare is a very small price to pay in the grand scheme of things. Read More......

An Academic Trip.

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Okay, check it out: After i get back from India, Esteban invited me to go to Canada to "look at glaciers." Apparently he convinced Lowell that a visit to the Canadian Rockies would be sufficiently geologic to warrant time off of his thesis work to see. It helps also that Esteban has friends in Edmonton. So i thought, great! I like Canada. It would also help thoroughly expunge the travel bug from my system before i hunker down for the last year of my MS.

Then he mentioned that a certain somebody would be in Santa Barbara over the summer. I thought, hey. Jen will be in Santa Monica for her family's annual trip to Yosemite around that time. I thought, hey! I could go on that trip on the last leg of the other trip, and make it one huge and epic mega road trip to cap off my summer of freedom!

Hence the plan:

July 27 : Arrive in Dayton from Delhi, via Frankfurt and Washington-Dulles. That evening visit the Benchmark to shop for crampons and an ice axe.
July 28 : Leave Cincinnati for Winnipeg, via I74, I65, I90, I94, US 29, and PTH 75. Rendezvous with Esteban in Indianapolis, who is coming from field work with Justin in Quebec. Passing Chicago, Minneapolis, Fargo. Entering Canada at Pembina border crossing. ~20 hours, plus customs.
July 29 : Leave Winnipeg for Edmonton, via the TCH Yellowhead route. Passing Saskatoon and not much else. ~18 hours.
July 30-August 2 : Edmonton and Jasper NP. Meet with Esteban's friends, maybe a birthday party. Activities not determined. Maybe the Columbia Icefield? ~4 hours to Jasper, from Edmonton.
August 3 : I would like to go to my favorite place in the world, Yoho NP, to hike, look at more glaciers, and maybe even visit the Burgess Shale. ~3 hours.

August 4 : Yoho NP to Seattle, WA, via the TCH. Passing Kamloops. Entering United States at Huntingdon border crossing. ~10 hours, plus customs.
August 5 : Tool around Seattle or continue south to somewhere in Northern California via the 5. Target is Redding or thereabouts. ~10 hours.
August 6 : Continue from Northern Cal to Santa Barbara for Esteban's romantic rendezvous, via the 5, 680, and the 101. ~8 hours.

August 7 : Head to Santa Monica via the PCH. "Up to 2 hours 30 mins in traffic."
August 8-13 : June Lake, Yosemite vicinity with Jen's crazy family. Activities include swimming, hiking, eating, regaining weight, and being lazy. ~5 days.
August 14 : June lake to Zion National Park! via 395, CA 168/NV 266, US 95, and I15. ~9 hours.
August 15 : Zion NP to Kearney, Nebraska (the edge of nowhere) via I15, I70, and I80. ~14 hours.
August 16 : The edge of nowhere to Kalamazoo, via I80 and I94. ~11 hours. Read More......

Flushing racism

A comment from Bob Herbert's editorial about Sonia Sotomayor:

This howling gives lie to the meme that people of color can 'pull themselves up by their bootstraps' and be part of the culture of success that [the] right claims awaits in a level playing field.

Conservatives like to claim that hard work is the open route to equality. By all accounts Ms. Sotomayor has done just that - worked very hard and with a solid track record. But she gets no credit, since she is Latina.

Her brownness, in their reductive racism, means she was handed whatever she now has. This so utterly annihilates her long record of success that one wonders, in this framing, why any person of color should ever strive to play by the right's rules.

— Ralph W, Minneapolis

And this is really what it is: Conservative opposition to Sotomayor's nomination really lays bare the impossible situation into which American society places minorities. Sotomayor's life is almost too clichéd to write: she is the picture of Algeresque success that, on any other day, conservatives would use as an example of how minorities really can succeed in a cultural landscape dominated by whites. But here you see them opposing their own poster child, who--let's face it--isn't even that liberal, much less an "activist." Here's a judge who upheld the Global Gag Rule and even defended the racists who are now attempting to block her nomination.

It's the glass ceiling. The demagogues of the right just don't want a Hispanic, especially a Latina, to assume a position of power. This would be a non-issue if people didn't listen to them. Unfortunately, this is the United States, where the government is only as good as the people who elect it. Read More......

Another thing to watch out for is the impending demise of Hummers

Stay tuned! Hummer is, of course, a fully owned and operated subsidiary of General Motors. But already GM wanted to retire the fleet by 2011, which rather nicely coincides with the date when the H2 must meet CAFE standards.

Hummer, as a brand, may continue under Indian ownership, either as Tata (the Indian company behind the Nano) or Mahindra, which has a large share of the Indian light truck market. Read More......

George Tiller

The great irony of George Tiller's murder is that late-term abortions are only performed in cases where bringing the pregnancy to term would be severely injurious, if not fatal, to the mother or the fetus. They are never performed "on a whim."

Again we see the lethal consequences of fundamental ignorance.

Employers: go ahead and blacklist me now. Read More......