Lessons from the tealeaves

In a global grocery economy, it’s easy to overlook how our food arrives from farm to fork. Don’t get me wrong, I love treating myself to Chilean raspberries in land-locked Chicago during the winter or, for that matter, out-of-season guavas in Delhi during the summer. But I do I like contemplating where my food comes from. (Plus, I’m a dorky management consultant who’s borderline aroused by discussions of sourcing.)

Let’s start with chai—or tea, as non-India-dwellers and non-Starbucks-addicts call it. I visited Munnar, a former British hill station in south India, to walk through its emerald tea plantations. For miles, the landscape is a sea of stubby, lush shrubs packed so closely together they look like one giant specimen. They reminded me a bit of vineyards, but without the pretentiousness. Tea pickers there work for $3 a day. It's a decent wage in India, especially when combined with subsidized housing and schooling provided by plantation owners. After all, 400 million people in this country still earn less than $1.25 per day.

So the next time you’re drinking chai, think about where it came from. The tea in your cup may very well have come from green Munnar.

Snow leopard sighting!

Only ~500 Westerners have seen a snow leopard in the wild, according to experts at Snow Leopard Trails. By way of comparison, that’s roughly the number of Westerners who see a tiger each day in India. Two friends and I recently added ourselves to the snow leopard list.

Ladakh in northern India boasts the highest airport in the world—more than 11,000 feet—and is the jumping off point for a concentrated snow leopard population. However, setting the expectation to see a snow leopard can be a recipe for disappointment. It’s called the “grey ghost” for a reason. It often disappears over a ridge the moment it’s seen. Getting even a glimpse is often a pipe dream. One group had just finished 19 days of intensive searching in Ladakh. They saw nothing. Jon, a man on our trip had been searching for a snow leopard for almost a decade. He had gone to Mongolia three times, Bhutan twice, Nepal twice, and had hired a hunter-tracker to find the animal two months before he arrived in Kyrgyzstan. No sightings.

A view from my plane seat on our way from Delhi to Ladakh. 

Like finding a needle in a haystack. Make that 100 haystacks. The snow leopard's spotted fur pattern blends in perfectly with the rocky landscape.

My friend, searching for the leopard from a lookout spot.

We used the spotting scope to scan hillsides.

The blue sheep on top of this rock better watch out! A snow leopard could be stalking it.

On the first full day of our week-long search, we rose at 6:00 am. We hiked to a lookout spot and began scanning the rocky landscape for any signs of movement, usually from blue sheep, which are the snow leopard’s primary diet. Suddenly, one of our guides spotted two thick tails wagging in the distance. It was a rare mating pair. But the grey ghosts disappeared before anyone else could see them. We immediately began sprinting towards where they had been, eventually identifying their footprints and scurrying up mountainside after mountainside in hot pursuit. We followed the prints for almost 5 hours over some of the most difficult, steep, and (frankly) scary terrain I’ve ever attempted. By 1 pm, I was so hungry and exhausted that I was “making mistakes,” such as losing my footing or placing a hiking pole on an unsecured rock. We had to turn back. I remember being excited by the pursuit but disappointed by how close we had come.

The mountain we climbed on the first morning of our search. We started on the left side of this image and made it to the distant peak in the upper right corner. The terrain was frightening.

Snow leopard tracks!  

The rocks are so dangerously sharp here that even the snow leopards cut their feet. Check out the blood on this footprint (upper right).

In the middle of our much-needed lunch, I heard the sighting call—“Aaaoooo, aaaoooo!”—echoing down the valley. The sound is distinctive. It is yelled by a searcher only if a snow leopard is sighted. Not missing a beat, I threw my plate on the ground and joined the exodus of all 10 searchers and our guides running towards the origins of the call. I can only imagine that excitement that Jon must have felt on that run. A decade-long search was coming to fruition.

Given the strenuousness of my morning (not to mention our ~13,000-foot elevation), the approximately mile-long trek to the site seemed like an eternity. Winded, I fell behind the pack. By the time I arrived, a small group of people was cheering, poised in front of our spotting scopes. The view was breathtaking. A large adult male, approximately 800 meters away, was moving up the nearby ridgeline, stealthily following a pack of blue sheep. Though the 60x-magnification spotting scope, we could see the its foggy hot breath and thick bushy tail. The sighting lasted for almost an hour before the animal ambled over the crest of the mountain at sunset.

Our group eyeing the leopard.

Can you spot the grey ghost in the center of this photo? If not, see a zoomed-in version in the next image.

There it is!

I was super hopeful that we'd see a snow leopard (and know that I often am lucky!), but never did I think we'd actually spot one. Such a peak life experience—and one of the rarest wildlife sightings in the world. YAY! A friend (she is in the picture below) wrote an amazing account of our snow leopard trip. Check it out here.

Taken just after the sighting. (I grew the beard to help keep warm. It was near 0°F every night, and we slept in thin plastic tents. Wowzers, it was cold.)

RIDONK Shiva festival

Shiva, I thought you were a woman. I'm sorry. I was wrong. It turns out that you're the Hindu god of destruction, capable of annihilating all negative forces, including ignorance, suffering, and evil. But you have to admit that you kind of look like a gentle woman. Come on.

I attended a Shiva festival in Kerala. Wowzers. Fire, continually lit by applications of ghee, whipped through the air on gothic candleabra in front of seven bull elephants. Men stood on the elephants with the rage of Shiva smeared on their faces, the stony power of Earth’s largest land creature beneath them. From my vantage point in the crowd, it was hard not to feel the strength of Shiva. And he ain't no gentle woman.
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Another look at your spice cabinet

I visited a spice plantation in south India and learned some awesome facts. Here are the top 5:

5. Huge purple flowers hang from on-the-vine bananas.

4. Nutmeg is made from grinding single large seeds from bulbous pear-like fruits.

3. Vanilla beans sprout from orchids that must be painstakingly pollinated by hand (only in Madagascar do birds have beaks long enough to pollinate orchids without human intervention).

2. Peppercorns grow in dangling bunches on bushes. Who knew?

1. Cloves are actually tree buds. OMG. They’re plucked young and then dried in the sun.

Cloves—still on the tree!

Tree frog chilling in a nutmeg tree.

Vanilla bean plant. The long green tubules are baby beans. 

By-hand pollination of a vanilla orchid. 

Flower hanging from a banana plant. 

Bird in the spice garden. 

Field of thick coriander stalks.

Grind the overgrown seed in this fruit, and you'll get nutmeg.

Dangling peppercorns.

India’s Win at the Cricket World Cup

After India pulled an upset at the Cricket World Cup yesterday, hundreds of thousands of Indians shouted, “Bharat mata ki jai!” They were saying, “Glory for mother India!”

If watching the game with a group of singing dancing totally-out-of-control Indians in front of a large outdoor screen was fun, the celebration that followed the victory was epic. A substantial portion of Delhi showed up at India Gate, an Arc-de-Triomphe-like structure honoring India’s fallen soldiers. Pandemonium broke loose. On the road passing by India Gate, screaming fans with huge Indian flags climbed on top of their cars. At least thirty fans also climbed on any passing-by truck or bus. (The drivers didn’t seem to mind—they, too, were excited for the win!) People lit fireworks in the street as massive crowds danced to Bollywood music booming from nearby vehicles.

While flipping through my photos of the celebration, I found myself getting a bit emotional. (Disclaimer: It could be that having violent food poisoning twice in the past five days has left me fragile.) Indian pride was infectious last night, even for an American.