cooking | trying to travel light

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…

Julia and Sammy enjoying the view

Dogs blocking our path on the way back down

One of the main streets in McLeod Ganj

First street food - green papaya salad - yummy and spicy!

After my flight was delayed leaving Sydney I ended up arriving in Bangkok in the early hours of the morning. Fortunately, getting a taxi wasn’t any hassle (or a rip-off) and I got to the Smile Society hostel ok (what a cute name for a hostel).

Rebecca also arrived without any trouble (and with a little help from a lovely Thai person) and it was so great to see a friendly and familiar face again. I was immediately laughing at all of Rebecca’s jokes and sarcastic comments and I could tell we were going to have a fun time in Thailand!

Coolest bag ever!

The same day we met Anoushka (from Jamaica) in the same dorm room and all headed out to the weekend market. Going shopping on the first day of the trip probably wasn’t the smartest idea but the market was a lot of fun! It was HUGE sold everything but mainly clothes and accessories for ridiculously cheap prices. I dived straight into eating some street food to test my stomach of steel and had a green papaya salad and vegetable spring rolls, later washed down with a fresh coconut – yum! For dessert we shared a typical roti, which is a pancake with egg and banana in the middle with condensed milk poured over the top – also yum!

First fresh coconut with Anoushka and Becky

After the market we found a little street bar and enjoyed some beers and good music (mainly Belle & Sebastian) and made friends with a Thai lady called Jenny and her friend Wai. To get out of the bar we had to climb over the market gates and then we went to the Saxophone Bar to see some live blues and jazz music. It was a pretty fun and crazy start to our trip and it was great to meet some lovely Thai people, even though Jenny told us not to trust Thai people every five minutes (s0 why we trusted her is anyone’s guess?!).

We spent the next few days in Bangkok visiting temples, the grand palace, the famous Kao San road, getting a foot massage, going to more markets and taking a cooking class.

Me and Becky spent half a day at May Kaidee Vegetarian Cooking School learning how to make various typical Thai dishes. First we went to the market to buy ingredients, to taste some street food and to see how the rice paper rolls are made. Our cooking teacher Ms Om was super enthusiastic and energetic so we had a lot of fun singing, dancing and taking photos while we were cooking and eating. The food was super delicious and I realised that the right, fresh ingredients are the key because the actual cooking part was quick and easy for each dish.

Miss On our cookery teacher

Cooking Thai food with Miss On

Me and Becky also went to Monk Bowl Village to see traditional alms bowls for the temples being made. These bowls are typically machine spun these days and only a few families in this neighbourhood in Bangkok are making them by hand. It was a treat to see the bowls being made but the families live in relative poverty, which is why the Bangkok municipality is trying to encourage tourists to visit this area and buy the handmade bowls. We bought a couple of bowls but not after much hilarity when I tried to explain that I needed to use a toilet to get my money to pay (my money was in my money belt under my dress, so I couldn’t get to it without lifting up my dress to waist height). They thought I needed to go to an ATM so a lady got some keys and indicated for me to hop on the back of the scooter with her (no helmet, of course) and it was only after we drove off and I asked again about the toilet that she realised the misunderstanding. Of course, everyone thought this was hilarious, me included, so we all had a good laugh and I got to use the toilet inside someone’s home.

We visited a various temples and the grand palace and I’ve never seen so much gold, gold leaf and gold paint in my entire life! At Wat Pho we made a donation and wrote a message on a tile that would be later placed on the new roof of the temple. We also saw loads of buddhas (mainly gold but also some emerald) and enjoyed the peace and quiet as we sat in the main temple spaces, which are all still active temples today.

The bar in the market

Our next stop was Chiang Mai in the north of Thailand so we decided to catch the overnight train. We managed to get beds in the second class sleeper carriage (no air-con but fans and windows that opened). It might have been the pale green interior but Becky decided that the train looked like a prison train and took the bottom bunk with the window and I got the top bunk. I’ve never taken a sleeper train before but this one was pretty cool, I thought. Miraculously the train left 5 minutes early but this gave us false hope because we arrived the next day in Chiang Mai about 3.5 hours later than schedule. It didn’t matter though because we passed the time enjoying the view as the train passed through lush green scenery and little towns.

You can see more photos on my Flickr page here.