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Manali Highs
Destination story...
Cannabis in the Kullu Valley is an ubiquitous weed, colonising road verges, centre strips, abandoned stretches of land, and the tubs of soil outside the Manali police station. Farmers have to hack it back frequently to prevent it from choking their crops, and children play hide-and-seek in its lush clusters. It was here, in the Valley of the Gods, that Lord Shiva, source of all universal knowledge, spent a thousand years meditating under the effect of charas (hash). Now an estimated six million sadhus - ascetic wanderers who renounce all material things and emotional attachments, and live off the grubs of the earth and people's benevolence - emulate their God, smoking charas for its visionary inducements and spiritual calm. Like Lord Shiva, some of them roam the Kullu Valley, the Himalayan region in India's northwest state of Himachel Pradesh, sleeping in caves and isolated villages in the rugged and giddy mountainous wilderness, where the pure sky seems close enough to touch, and where their God's grace is evident in the abundance of his favourite plant and elixir.
That mythological imagery - the Hindus' charas-consumption for religious visions - has been adapted by souvenir shops in Manali for another kind of recipients. The recurrent image, drawn from  water-paint, depicts a holy man with the symbolic purple om daubed on his forehead. His hair is long and unkempt, his beard bushy, his eyes a wild green, and he holds up a chillum (the vernacular tube-like pipe for smoking charas), the smoke from the chillum rising in wreaths of green smoke - he looks like a hybrid between a sadhu and a hippie, a creature the joint- and chillum-toting Westerners can recognise as a reflection of themselves. The stoned-travelers' enclave is found in Old Manali, the old quarter twenty-minute walk out of the town centre, defined by a 2km-long squalid road that is hemmed on each side with restaurants, guesthouses, clothes shops, jewellery shops, convenience stores, travel agents, Internet joints, and cafes. Rugged travelers fill the street with a sort of pre-festival-like expectant merriment, spreading the word about the upcoming trance-music parties held in the deodar forests up-slope. Psychedelic sounds drift from The Moondance, the open-air caf‚ at the pivot of the social scene, where the clamour of excited cackles and emphatic laughter is incessant.
No one bothers with the naturally-growing cannabis, not even the sadhus, as it's considered wild and useless and impotent. The cultivated variety is produced into resin: a slightly soft, exquisitely-smelling, and potent variety called Cream. This hash - that appears under a variety of tags preceding the Cream definitive - has proved its worth by repeatedly winning the Hash Cup of High Times' Cannabis Cup. In Amsterdam's coffee shops Cream is the connoisseurs' choice, and in London 10 grams will cost you $40 if you're lucky enough to find some. In Manali the offers of Cream are as prevalent as the cries of crow and 10 grams costs $5: more joints are passed around than cigarettes. Restaurants are compelled to spray air freshener frequently to neutralise the narcotic reek; in guesthouse gardens and terraces, random congregations of travelers smoke late into the night; the hardened hippies, gaunt and haggard, lie in a hammock all day in a daze of smoke, gazing wistfully at the confluence of 5,000-meter-high mountain ranges. The question begs: Is this mindless hedonism or spiritual revival?
The hippies discovered this region in the 1970s. They had found paradise: the majestic ranges of the Himalayas, remote villages of paharis (mountain people) with their colourful wooden houses whose facades are carved with symbolic mystic designs, nomadic Gaddi shepherds roaming above the alpine tree-line with their yaks, a fantastic blend of Tibetan and Hindu culture, and, best of all, wild-growing cannabis. A decade later Manali started growing from an isolated mountainous village to an alpine holiday resort. Now, some 90,000 Western backpackers visit the Kullu Valley, mostly Manali, every year, and so do as many young Indians who have taken to Western hedonism like insects to electric light.
Last summer the Times of India called Manali "India's drug capital." Cannabis has superseded apples as the region's cash crop, and whole villages are now dependant on its cultivation - an estimated 10,000 tons of Cream are smuggled out of the Kullu Valley every year - which is one of the reasons why the police only mount sporadic and half-hearted clampdowns. Occasionally, there's a week or two of belated roadblocks, searching every car passing through the one road into the valley, and in effect seizing enough charas to keep the dealers fidgety and lying low. Equally, once a year or two the police swoop on Manali, and round up a few Western travelers who, given a dispensable $300, easily bribe their way out of the law's grasp.
Yet despite the commercialisation, a total escape into the charas-filled paradise of Lord Shiva is still possible. An hour's walk up the Beas River from Manali, along forest paths, you'll stumble into pahari villages where electricity and tap-water and motor vehicles have yet to enter the local lexicon, and deeper into the mountains, the Gaddi have no care for the century we're in. Among them, it might take you a while to recognise the Westerners who have gone native: the government estimates that up 10,000 Westerners have disappeared into the mountains, their visas and passports long expired, living in caves and ramshackle shacks and pastoral villages, and subsisting on cannabis cultivation.
© Victor Paul Borg
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