The World’s Highest Post Office
The Hikkim post office in Himachal Pradesh, India
The light was leaving when we reached Hikkim, a desolate high spot in the Himachali mountains in Spiti in northern India. A tiny village with dispersed dwellings lay on a lower slope. On the expanse over the subsequent rise, in the open, stood a kiosk; a level above, on a circular plinth, stood a tiny post office painted patent red, built in the shape of a letter box.
They are bare mountains, a blue-brown world with rushing white clouds pushed by strong winds.
The post office was firmly shut. A harsh, cold wind beat about it and constantly kept open the face of a tiny Indian tricolour mounted on a lean post near it. I would have liked to see much-mentioned Rinchen Chhering, the postmaster since the founding of this post office in 1983. How old was he then? How fit is he now? Hasn’t he passed retirement age?
Tourist literature and varied blogs say the mailbag is carried by foot to Kaza town, 46 kilometres away. I saw tyre marks before the post office; things must’ve changed lately.
The kiosk was open, selling postcards, stamps, fridge magnets and other trinkets on a couple of tables. A plastic pen could be borrowed to write, and tea brewed to help with writing and against wind chill. A wizened old man with tousled grey hair and layers of loose clothing under a windcheater manned the kiosk. You picked what you wanted from his modest range; he told you the price and all the rest was your job: You told him the total payable, the change due, and you counted both ends of the transaction. The man’s age and frail mind and body had forced an honour system in the frontier point.
Apart from a couple of young couples, we were just us at the kiosk — five novice photographers, a well-regarded “mentor,” and the tour organiser. It was the last day of the “Photo Tour of Spiti and Lahaul” that we were on. The mentor had freed us this moment, allowing his charges to spend the closing moments as plain tourists. We took regular snapshots, bought postcards and postage stamps, and wrote home.
There ought to have been more customers at the kiosk, but rains, floods, and landslides had brought down buildings and killed hundreds of people, so tourists had cancelled bookings en masse. The crisis had begun to abate, and we were the early ones coming in, driving on empty roads, lodging at hotels running vacant, experiencing travel as in times before over-tourism.
Done writing, we went up to the letterbox-shaped post office with no postmaster in it and dropped our postcards (my first in decades) in the generous slot out front. And, shivering in the gathering cold, took selfies before the board there, which claimed for this little red thing at 14,567 feet high the exalted status of the Highest Post Office in the World.
Eighteen days have since passed. That postcard should’ve descended some distance toward my home in Bangalore in southern India.
