India (part 1)

View from my guesthouse in McLeod Ganj

So I went to India but it wasn’t really like India – sort of India-lite. I took the easy(er) option and flew from Singapore to my final destination in India due to a lack of time and also wanting to avoid too much hassle at the end of my trip. I flew Singapore – Mumbai (overnight at the airport) – Delhi – Dharamsala. Fortunately, Kingfisher Airlines, who are the only airline that flies to Dharamsala was still in business and hadn’t cancelled this route, despite financial problems leading to route cancellations!

So why did I go to Dharamsala and not to more famous sites like the Taj Mahal? Because in May most of India is baking hot with temperatures of 40 degrees or more! So I took the advice of a wise French lady in Thailand and headed north. The Dharamsala area appealed because it is home of the Tibetan Government in Exile and there are various places to study yoga and meditation.

I managed to share a taxi from the airport to McLeod Ganj with three film-makers making a documentary about Israeli travellers in India. They’d arrived from Goa and had been dying in the heat so the relative coolness and green landscape of Dharamsala were like heaven for them. I got dropped off in the main square and within five minutes a helpful Western Tibetan nun offered to help me find the guesthouse I was looking for on the map. The guesthouse was full but of course there was a helpful Indian/Kashmiri man to offer me a room in his guesthouse. This turned out to be ok but after 8 days of walking up and down the steep stairs I’d kind of had enough. I had to keep telling myself it was good exercise before the yoga course started!

Making wallets from old tetra packs

Me at the foot of the Himalayas (at the top of Triund)

On my second day I went to a free workshop to learn how to make recycled wallets from old tetra packs. The ideas of the workshop was to teach a skill that people could then use to run their own workshops wherever or whenever they wanted. It was a lot of fun and great to see how ‘rubbish’ could be used creatively to make something useful. It was also amazing to see how the local kids took to this with such enthusiasm! At the workshop I met Julia (working as a volunteer at Lha) who was nice enough to let me tag along on the hike to Triund that she was doing the next day with her friend Sammy.

The hike to Triund was awesome and we were really lucky with the weather. We could feel it getting colder the higher we climbed and eventually had to pass over some snow-covered rocks at one point. The views at the top were amazing and we stayed a while to watch the clouds move in and out to reveal the Moon Peak from time to time. We also ate a yummy thali at one of the make-shift chai shops (in tents) before heading back down to McLeod Ganj. The walk back down was slightly easier and no less spectacular. We were accompanied by some local dogs that would run ahead and then wait for us to catch up. They then blocked our path as they played/fought on the snow-covered pass. On the way up and down we also took the opportunity to have chai with a great view at the chai shops along the way. We went up and down in one day (you can stay overnight and also trek up to the snow-line of the mountains) and I think it took us about 3.5 hours to go up and 2.5 hours to come back down. As you can imagine, by the end we were totally creamy crackered!

Cooking lessons in Sangye’s kitchen

McLeod Ganj is full of amazing places to eat all sorts of food but my favourites were Tibetan and Indian food. Most of my favourite places to eat are listed here under the FOOD section.

As well as eating I also took some Tibetan cooking classes, where I learnt to cook momos, bread, and noodle dishes. Here is a list of some traditional Tibetan foods:

Momos– dumplings filled with meat or vegetables, steamed or fried
Thukpa– a hearty noodle soup with veggies or meat
Thenthuk – thukpa with handmade noodles
Pocha – salty tea churned with butter, a Tibetan staple (but it tastes disgusting!)

Our teacher, Sangye, was an excellent teacher and also let us ask whatever questions we wanted to about Tibetan life and culture. In the momo making class, Sangye has me and Noni practically in tears as he explained how he had escaped from Tibet to India 15 years ago and what that journey was like for him and the others in his group. The journey that Tibetan refugees have to make to escape to Nepal and India is long, hard and dangerous. You can read more about it here. [add link]

Thali at 2,827 metres above sea level

A glimpse of Moon Peak

As well as learning to cook I also found time to learn how to make macrame jewellery incorporating stones and crystals, how to make dream catchers, I read more books than I had done in ages, did a two-week yoga course at the Himalayan Iyengar Yoga Centre and a 10 day silent meditation, and Buddhist studies retreat at Tushita Meditation Centre. More about all of this in Part Two of my India post…