Sangla 2

So, I was talking before about Ashok and the Sangla Valley Sustainable Development Society. This is an NGO in partnership with some Swiss Organic Agriculture Institute, and they are big on plans, but they don't have too much accomplished yet. Ashok is a busy bee, though -- he invited me to go with him up to some farm houses high in the valley while he talked to the people living there about what they want to see happen in the valley and how they think they can make it work. They were all speaking Hindi, so I didn't understand much of the conversation, but I did get to look around some households and I enjoyed the experience. A lot of people around here live in very large, multi-storied houses, with the ground level usually housing livestock and the upper ones for living in. The traditional style of architecture is stone and wood in alternating layers, with a high peaked slate roof. Sometimes there are ornately carved wooden beams. It has become the trend rather recently, though, for houses to be built out of concrete with a tin roof. Most of the land is steep, and so is leveled into terraced fields and orchards. People grow apples, barley, walnuts, apricots, and some other stuff that I can't identify. There are footpaths winding up and down the valley.

There is also a lot of trash, in the form of little bits of plastic packaging. This is one of the problems that Sangla grapples with as it grows as a tourist attraction. The state of Himachal Pradesh has banned the use of plastic grocery bags, but there are still plenty of things that the dhabas sell with packaging. Traditionally, people would just throw their garbage into a ditch -- since most of the things they disposed of were organic, this worked fine. But now there is nonbiodegradable plastic waste, and absolutely no infrastructure for collecting and disposing of it. Many people burn trash in order to keep things tidy, but the toxicity of plastic means that's a terrible idea. A large part of the waste is water bottles, so there is some thought to providing filtered water throughout the city so as to cut down on this. It's a nice idea, but I don't know how they will implement it successfully, although I hope they do.