After the beautiful isolation of the Spiti Valley, I feel like we’ve fallen down the rabbit hole into Alice’s parallel universe. (That would be an angora rabbit hole.) Manali, the tourist center of the Kullu Valley, is tourist central with Italian restaurants, video nights at the local cafes, tourist shops and travel agents on every corner, activity centers, paragliding, rafting, repelling, and zorbing Continue…

Spiti is a gem – a real discovery. We have been here for weeks enjoying the tremendous landscape and fantastic festivals. Few of the areas we have visited in the last year have such a raw beauty and rough-edged appeal. Such an unexpected discovery deserves a full pictorial. Click here to view the pictorial.

The picture shows the 9-year-old Yishi Dolma taking care of her baby cousin Tenzin Yundum during our homestay in Lhalung in Spiti Valley. Yishi is expected to care for her cousin all day while her family works in the fields. It’s quite a responsibility for such a young girl, but real life in this part of the world begins early.

We climbed through the roof-top entrance down into the interior of our hill-side mud Spitian guesthouse to take a look around. Glancing up at the roof-door admiring the fact that the only entry to the house appeared to be the one in the ceiling above us, we noticed a scratching-clicking sound coming from beneath a piece of wood lying on the floor next to us.

All of a sudden, without any warning, the piece of wood flew up into the air and woman’s head popped up out of “the floor”. She was bringing up canisters of water from a water source further downhill below the house. This amazing Spitian house had two doors: one in the ceiling and one in the floor. Now, that’s some creative architecture.

Sometimes, you just wake up on the wrong side of the stall.