Shimla, a Himalayan town created by the British when their white asses couldn’t stand the Indian heat, is all about honeymooners or rich Indian vacationers. Despite the mirrors on the hotel ceilings, I loved this town so much so that I ditched several other plans and stayed ten days.
First because it’s in the Himalayas! I mean, who gets to wake up in the Himalayas for ten days? When I first learned of the ridges who own the highest peak in the world some time in the eighties, they seemed so mythical and far away. And then, after a painful journey of 7 hours in a local bus squeezed between a sweaty man with big thighs in a pink shirt and a skinny man with hairy ears drinking brown water, I was IN THE HIMALAYAS! I felt so cool. I just wanted to call someone and say, “Hey, what are you up to? Oh you just got out of work? That’s cool. So… where are you? Oh, you’re at the supermarket buying eggs? That sounds nice. Oh, where am I? I’m… actually I’m IN THE HIMALAYAS.” But I didn’t make any calls because that would have been rude.
I loved to sit on a hillside and watch the porters. They can carry 5 grizzly bears up a mountain all at once. Or two refrigerators and ten horse jockeys in the fetal position (small ones). Or twenty bars of pure gold and fifty satchels of satchels of fish tank marbles. They carry these loads up and down THE HIMALAYAS! And they’re all so skinny. It must be in their Kashmiri blood.
Kashmir, in case you didn’t know, is not just the fuzzy sweater Aunt Charlotte always wears. It’s a piece of land that must hold some buried treasures because everybody wants it. India, Pakistan and even China have divided it up, but neither are satisfied. I say they draw straws, but instead they fight and fight over it. You can even go to the Indo-Pak border and watch the patrolmen make faces at each other. They say it’s safe, but there’s a lot of patrolling by the police and the army. And the police and the army get so sick of policing and arming that they rape young girls (at least they did while I was here.) Anyway, many Kashmiris booked it to Shimla, a few mountain tops away, to lug grizzly bears up hills! And they do it with a smile and a wink from their Kashmiri blue eyes. I watched them from a bench every morning since I was not about to go walking up and down all day. Those hills are really steep, and the porters refused to carry me after a few days. They hated that I kept saying, ‘Oh my god! We’re in the himalayas.’ I guess porters don’t like repitition. Whatever.
A porter carrying six bottlenose dolphins, three panini makers, and several button collections. 
THE HIMALAYAS!
Aaahhh…ceiling mirrors! My backpack and I had a wild time. 
A true mountain woman. You think her scarf is from Prada?
How cute is this place? It looks like a movie set. Hey… am I on a TV show and everyone knows who I am and soon I will drive a boat into a paper sky?