Hike it: India

a hindu

rimage pilg
Matthew Crompton joins 10,000 pilgrims on the three-day trek to the Shiva cave at Amarnath in Kashmir. Think dance parties at 6am, divine phallic symbols and an experience like nothing else on Earth

India is larger than the world, opined the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. Since I first started visiting in 2007, its a land that has continually captivated me with its enormous human dramas, its colossal landscapes, its extreme degrees of beauty and ugliness. Its a place where religion forms the deep backbone of the culture, so intertwined with daily life that almost everything is invested with a spiritual significance. Hinduism in particular is often religion-as-riot, passionate and unruly, and never more so than on yatra. On these religious

pilgrimages, millions of people will travel thousands of miles for a single moment of darshan the glimpsing of a sacred place or idol in spots as distant as the eastern beaches of Puri or the hilltop temple of Tirumala in the far south. But no pilgrimage in Hinduism is as arduous or as revered as the three-day trek to the holy Shiva cave at Amarnath, deep in a snowchoked valley hidden in the far northern mountains of Kashmir. From the 3,377m plateau at Pissu Top on my first day, I can see an unbroken, three-kilometre-long line of overburdened ponies and footbound pilgrims down below

me, snaking up the muddy, ravaged hillside Ive just ascended. The sky is huge and blue above me, with snowcapped mountains all around, a scene that for its remoteness and beauty should seem peaceful, calm and meditative. Yet what I see before me, in the form of no less than 10,000 human beings teeming like a kicked anthill, is a scene of total madness. It will take me two hard days to reach the Holy Cave, and a further day to trek out to the base camp at the far side, a 44km loop topping elevations of 4,200m; and yet still this wilderness is packed with more people many of them very old, very fat, or manifestly

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Hike it: India

no pilgrimage in Hinduism is as arduous or as revered as the threeday trek to the holy Shiv a ca ve at Amarnath, deep in a snow-choked v alley in the mountains

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infirm than an Old Delhi bazaar. And its not just mobs of charged-up trekkers, nor the thousands of poor ponies alongside them, stoically bearing a somewhat more indolent group of pilgrims slowly along the way. No: there are also, so help me, hundreds of people being carried, on crude litters made of rope and lawn chairs and bamboo, each borne by a team of four dirty and understandably hassledlooking Kashmiri men, slipping and panting up the muddy track. There are people from all over here, a kind of India-in-miniature Gujaratis and Mumbaikers, Delhi-wallahs and Malayalees. As I walk along the gorgeous alpine river-valley beyond Pissu Top, open beneath that enormous sky, very green and dotted with scattered grey stones and crusts of old snow and herds of grazing sheep, a middle-aged Keralite named Pratab points out a huge group of emaciated, dreadlocked and shirtless holy men heading deeper into the mountains. Ah, babas! he says. You can see they go barefoot, even here, in the mud and snow. Thats insane. Ive never seen so many babas. Its like a baba party up here. He laughs. It is, actually. They all come, to meet other babas, to beg alms, to smoke hashish. In the camps there are whole baba cities. Youll see. Indeed, mid-afternoon sees me into the massive pilgrim camp at Sheshnag, an enormous and squalid sea of tarp-tents, many occupied by orange-robed babas who are either very holy or very stoned or both. My brochure from the Amarnath Shrine Board proudly touts the environmental measures said to grace this years camps, from reed-bed composting toilets to plastic recycling stations, but even at a glance its clear that these pronouncements are either hopelessly nave or sinisterly Orwellian. There are heaps of trash and plastic bottles everywhere, and scores of people are defecating in crude pits or on the open hillsides, the wilderness completely and irretrievably poisoned by humanity. Nonetheless, for all its squalor, the camp is completely fascinating. When night falls I venture out of my grubby pup tent to the communal

langars, huge open kitchens offering free food for pilgrims. Theres a real festival air; inside the tent I see dozens of people, men and women and little girls, all smiling and squatted around low wooden tables, furiously rolling out chapattis as devotional music booms from the loudspeakers overhead: Bom Bholay! Bom Bholay! Bom Bom Bom! The twilight is purple and mauve on the dusty mountains and theres a kind of happy madness in the air, passionate and infectious and wild as only India can be, and as I squat on the rocks with my metal tray of dal and rice balanced on my knees, I feel spontaneously joyful, different from the pilgrims around me but not

Whos writing?

Teacher, writer, photographer and part-time metaphysician, Matthew Crompton has at various times called Cleveland, San Francisco and Seoul home; in 2011 he was abroad in the world at large. Passionately devoted to trivia and the search for a freebase form of caffeine, hell argue at length about the relative merits of squat toilets and the complete validity of rice as a breakfast food. Women, zoo animals and most Marxists find him irresistible.

Basic and bustling: a campsite on the pilgrimage

Never-ending: a queue of pilgrims and ponies

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Hike it: India

The idea of climbing a thousand vertical metres at six in the morning on a head full of hashish seems more than faintly hilarious

Colourful pilgrims beginning the trek to the holy cave

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apart from them, both accepted and embraced into their revel. Sleeping like a stone, I wake rested at dawn to stumble back to the langars for breakfast. As I sit gobbling milky tea and sweet biscuits, a group of 20-something boys from Jammu sit down next to me. Do you take Baba-jis prasad? one asks me under his breath, prasad normally being the term for a kind of consecrated food or sweet. Whose prasad? Baba-ji. You know, Ba-ba-ji? he mimes holding a joint to his lips. I just laugh. Ha! I think Ill pass right now, thanks! The idea of climbing a thousand vertical meters at six in the morning on a head full of Kashmiri hashish seems at this moment more than faintly hilarious. Instead I join them in a spontaneous dance party that has arisen just outside the tent. Someone has remixed the devotional music with some kind of house beat, and people are there in the early-morning sunlight clapping hands and busting a move. And why not, I think? I do a simple six-step and the robot and people go wild. Sometimes its nice being a minor celebrity. Nonetheless, I quickly pack up and move on. This second day is the most arduous of the trek, 18km over the 4,270m pass at Mahagunas Top and then onward through the security cordon to the camp at the mouth of the Holy Cave itself, much of it on a narrow, muddy track with a steep drop to one side and a sheer wall on the other, being body-checked by litter-carriers and hire ponies all the while. I make the boggy climb to the pass in about 90 minutes, and find hundreds of pilgrims there gleefully playing in the dirty snow like little children. He left his soul here, you know, a man says to me, rather randomly, as I stand snapping pictures in the blinding sunlight. The saint, Bholay, he left his soul at the holy cave, but also here in the mountains. All around? I say, And you think its still here? It is here, my friend, he smiles. Cant you feel it? And I think: perhaps I can. Its a long descent through the high green meadow, down and down across the grass and rock and patchy snow, and Im drunk and

A sadhu (holy man)

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Amarnath Yatra the lowdown

The Amarnath Yatra pilgrimage, like anything in the high mountains of Kashmir, is a summer-only occurrence, happening in the Hindu month of Shraavana, coinciding roughly with July and August in the Gregorian calendar. In 2011 the pilgrimage ran from 29 June to 13 August, though dates will vary slightly from year to year. Pilgrims can register on site, but its a far better option to register ahead of time with the Jammu & Kashmir (J&K) Bank, either online, or in person once arriving in India at any of the J&K offices spread throughout the country. The permit costs only 15 rupees (about 20p!) and requires three passport-sized photographs. Once youre registered (to manage the massive number of pilgrims, youre assigned a specific date on which to begin your yatra), its best to proceed to the resort town of Srinagar in northwestern Kashmir, which has no rail links but can be reached by road or by air. The yatra itself begins either from the pilgrims town of Pahalgam, or the massive Baltal Camp, both a couple of hours by bus or share jeep from Srinagar. Expect deep mud, rain, cold temperatures (sometimes below freezing) and even the possibility of summer snowstorms. Good footwear, waterproofs and cold-weather clothing are a must. Adequate and very inexpensive (if squalid) tent accommodation is available in all the pilgrims camps along the way, as well as free food (very basic but filling) in communal kitchen tents. Personal cooking gear and tents are not therefore necessary. The climax of the pilgrimage is the holy cave at Amarnath, where a phallic lingam representing the Hindu god Shiva becomes naturally covered with ice each summer during the pilgrimage season. The shrine is said to have served as a site of pilgrimage and worship for over 5,000 years. While the yatra is wildly popular among Indian Hindus, very few foreigners undertake it, and accordingly as a foreign pilgrim youll be the subject of intense but overwhelmingly good-natured attention. Expect offers to dine and talk with people in their tents, and lots and lots of requests for photographs. Though the spiritual value of such methods is dubious, it is also possible to be carried by pony to the holy cave, to be borne on a crude litter, or even to be flown in by helicopter! See www.amarnathyatra.org for official information and details about the yatra.

Proud pilgrim: Matthew having reached the holy cave

giddy on oxygen and pain. In all this space, I find myself suddenly saying spontaneous prayers for friends and enemies, forgiving people who wronged me 20 years ago, singing happy songs out loud. I trek on, through the security cordon and up again onto the precipitous paths, deeper in to the mountains. By the time I reach the narrow, snowy defile at whose distal end the Holy Cave lies, hours later in a steady drizzle, I feel completely ready to make the acquaintance of Lord Shiva. He is said to reside here, within the cave, in the form of a stone lingam a kind of divine phallic symbol that each summer becomes mysteriously coated with a tower of ice. Im filthy, stinking and unshaven, but I drop my pack and climb the long stone staircase to the mouth of the cave, yawning and lambent in the semi-darkness, music spilling out into the dusk. My feet are shredded from blisters, but I leave my shoes in the pile and pad barefoot through the grit and the filthy water on the cold stones, and with the chanting

and prostrating pilgrims, move on inside the cave. Theres a metal gate before the lingam which, itself, has melted considerably and looks rather sad and lopsided, but I dont really care at all. I come carrying with me all the passion of my co-pilgrims, all the happy wishes and good things in my heart. I say my prayers and make my bows and am summarily shoved aside by the temple minders, and on my way out an Indian Army soldier smiles and gives me an orange scarf adorned with Shiva mantras. The whole thing, which Ive walked days to experience, is over in less than five minutes. Outside the cave, looking down on the steep, narrow valley below, the half-moon shines on the snow, on the peaked roofs of the tents, and the stars are bright as Christmas lights. I feel at once supremely alone here in this distant place and yet equally a part of an ecstatic whole, and I think: there are many experiences here on Earth, but truly none like this. I turn and bow once more, and then head downhill into the dark.

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