We spent our “bonus” day with Kasper doing what else but eating banana pancakes, chow mein and momos and playing chess! Best of all, Kasper and Ray snuck one more game in just minutes before his Jeep came to pick him up and…Kasper won!

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And then he was gone again, this time for real.

…It’s 11:40pm on Sunday night, 6 hours since he left and I’m sitting here marveling at how it’s possible to miss someone that you have only known for a week and a half as much as I (and Ray) miss Kasper.

Travel is an amazing thing for innumerable reasons, not least of which is the type and degree of connection you can forge with the people you meet. There is something different about life when you travel. It may be possible to happen on a “vacation”. But for me, there has always been a very distinct difference in my experiences between the times that I know I am going on a trip as a vacation or a fun-trip, and the times I have gone out knowing this was a different kind of journey. When you go out on that different kind of journey, there is a sort of relinquishing yourself – mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and certainly physically – to the powers that be; the things that are much greater than yourself and that you cannot control…and do not want to. You are much more open to the elements, to the things that happen to you when you travel – you have to be. When you let go of that insistence upon control, you open yourself up, completely. The person who can do this without trepidation, and can enjoy the ride that comes – for better and worse, the ups and downs, the goods and bads in turn – is a very rich and free person indeed. The ride leaves you exposed and raw for all that comes at you, and it’s an incredible experience.

I think about Kasper sitting out in the garden of our hotel the past few days; his smile and jokes and happiness from across the chess set at our various restaurant tables; the wretchedly uncomfortable overnight bus trip to Manali from Mcleod Ganj; eating dinner on the rooftop restaurant with him and our other new friend David after canyoning in Manali; the simply insane two-day bus journey through the Himalayas, around hairpin curves, along sheer cliff drop-offs on our way to Leh; contemplating our mortality at 16,500 feet if we decided to stay and risk Acute Mountain Sickness with no possibility of descent when our bus lost its transmission in the middle of the deserted Himalayan mountains; and suffering together over the bone-jarring bumps and potholes in the road for eight of the longest and most miserable lurching hours of our lives when we chose to go on and had no place but the very back of the locals’ bus. He told us about the monk debates at the temple in Mcleod that we enjoyed so much; we went whitewater rafting together; we moo’d at the cows in the streets, warded off the insistent Indian shopkeepers, greeted the insistently friendly ones; we sat in an open-air coffee shop and got some of the best chocolate chip cookies in the world straight out of the oven; we got our pictures taken on a yak. We got up together at 5:30 on a Tuesday morning to go and get front seats and sit cross-legged together on the ground for hours in a field outside to see the Dalai Lama in person.

Every day is new and different and big here, and every day we are vulnerable and uncertain of the most banal things – not knowing what you can or can’t do, not knowing what they’re saying or how to say what we want to say, can we brush our teeth with tap water, can we eat this safely, is 247 kilometers in that direction maybe too far into disputed territory to really risk venturing, if we sleep at this altitude and we already have bad headaches is the small possibility of actual death in fact big enough to endure 6 more hours of misery? Our senses are heightened, our eyes are wide, and cheesy as it may sound, our lives and hearts are completely open to take what life gives us every day, because they have to be. We learn what we can, endure what we must, face the temporality of all of it, and enjoy every second of it.

So between all that we have been through together and as pure and (whether we want to be or not) child-like and of open mind and heart as we are here, I suppose it is understandable that the one and a half weeks that Ray and I have been friends with Kasper have been as bonding as they were, and that he has come to mean as much to us as he does.

7 hours since he’s left now. I am very glad we got the extra day with him, it was definitely like an extra bonus day we snuck in there like maybe God wasn’t looking for a moment and we got away with something sneaky but fun. The problem is now I keep feeling like he’s going to come back again, and I have to keep telling myself he’s not going to. And writing that, I have to keep getting up to go blow my nose, in the dark with these silly power outages, and glad that Ray’s asleep. I’d feel ridiculous for the tears if I didn’t know Ray felt the same way; though we both avoided eye contact with each other when we waved off Kasper’s jeep today for the second time, I thought he did look like he wanted to tear up. But it’s one of those things that comes with this trip, this experience, the goods and the bads; there are a lot of things in life you can control and a lot of things that just have their natural course to run.

We could control the choices we made that got us here to get to meet Kasper, to become friends, to get to ride some crazy bus rides with him, to get to walk through Manali with him, to get to see the Dalai Lama with him, to get to play chess with him, to come to really care about him. But we can’t control the inevitable goodbye at the end of a time that passes much too soon. It could have been a week, two weeks, two years, twenty years. It will always pass too soon. One thing I’ve learned and that I know Ray has learned too, is how to appreciate life and the time we have. We know that no matter how long you get, it will never be enough. We also know how much life can be lived in a short amount of time, how much love and connection can be built and be just as strong and true and bonding and lasting as those forged over years and years. “Just” a week and a half means nothing; just a week and a half means everything.

Before he left, Ray and I took a look at the tires on the jeep they were taking this time. The tread was not just thin, but stripping away from the tire. I turned to him and put my hand on his shoulder and jokingly said in a deadpan, fatalistic tone, “Kasper, I love you.” He looked back at me and now that I think about it I’m not sure if he knew/thought I was joking because of the tire, but he said in a matching tone, “I love you too.” Lol. But whether or not he thought I was joking, and now that I think about it, whether I was or not, now having some time (8 hours now since he’s left) to think about all that has transpired and how it’s possible a person could actually come to mean THAT much to Ray and I in that ludicrously short amount of time, I think it’s plain to see that in fact I DO love our friend Kasper, and in a way that no one else will ever quite be what he was to us – 40,000 other people were there to see the Dalai Lama that morning, but not a single other one was with us; 18 others on the broken down bus, not a one that we’ll see off to their next destination and mope around about after they’re gone – and in a way that will last forever, because it can, and because it should.

It’s a staunch and unexpectedly early, acute, and fantastic reminder for me as to why after New Zealand I had to stop this lifestyle for awhile – and also why I had to come back to it. There is no substitute for this kind of heightened awareness, this sort of elevated appreciation for the simplest and most profound things around us in life. With this trip, I have felt like the gears have been starting to turn, the cogs starting to find their grooves, our trip has started to become ours and we have begun to find our sense of place in it.

Tonight, thinking back about Kasper and the unexpected and definitive jolt he gave to kick-start our trip, his appearance, participation, and departure from our stage encapsulates everything that is wonderful, wretched, and magical about travel and life. It is all so brief, and fleeting, and temporal; and yet it is all so resonant, enduring, and eternal. Only 8 hours from the time that we had him face to face, able to play chess, to talk, to laugh, to look each other in the eye, and yet now we face the uncertain future, Ray and I left back here wondering if he’ll even make it to his destination with that tread peeled back from the tire, completely unknowing if we will in fact see him in two years for a snowboarding adventure in New Zealand, or never again?

It’s Sjoerd all over again, it’s Matt all over again, it’s Arnaud and 7 years passed, and we’ll do it again and again and again on the road, and then we’ll go home and it’ll go on again and again there too, because that’s life. It’s enough to make you crazy, jaded, and embittered – or it’s enough to make you laugh and appreciate life and the people that come into it for however long and in whatever capacity you have them in, and love big, and love hard, and keep that in you for a lifetime. These are the parts of life you CAN control, and if you spend your time on those things, I have found that there’s scarce room left for worrying or fretting about the things that you can’t, or for any feelings of malice, ill will or vindictiveness.

So Kasper, oh Dutch friend traveling out there in some dodgy jeep tonight, though I wish you could have stayed with us, I know you can’t. But you are very missed in Leh and in our lives, and you are very appreciated. And though I said it jokingly earlier, I know now that I meant it sincerely as well – I love you! Thanks for the best week and a half yet of our trip, and a lot of memories that will last a lifetime.

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Here’s an album of some of the misc Leh-zy days we enjoyed when Kasper was still around.