T-Bud Himachal Pradesh

... that is held on most week days with my landlords daughter and some other local kids. My other class is a slightly more formal class held on weekends with the chef from Deer Park and a monk who is staying at Deer Park. Tonight however I decided to combine the two classes and see how it goes. The purpose of the class was to learn the song 'Hey Jude’ and expose them to English in the process. The class went really well, we went ...

... with mud and then wrapped in plastic. My sheet was confiscated and I was told to get into a small metal container when I would sit on a stool and be closed in with old my head sticking out a hole. Once I was in the container warmed up and the steam bath began, the woman sat on a stool in front of me and when the steam got to hot I told her and she would switch it off for a few seconds and then back on. We did this for about 20 minutes and then I was taken back to ...

... that my body needed it and I felt a lot better after a few days of rest and relaxation.

By mum's birthday on October 7 I wasn't fully recovered but felt well enough to walk down the street to the hair dressers. I had been thinking about getting my hair cut pretty much as long as I had been planning to come to India so with a small audience of mum's friends I sat in the barbers chair and told him to cut it all off. He looked slightly confused ...

... why 3 of us missed the turnoff, we were riding independently, so we didn’t follow each other, another rider told me that the intersection was blocked by a truck, in which case we may not have seen the other road or the sign, regardless of this it caused a delay and some angst for the tour organizers.

The second mistake was in trying to hard to recover some of the lost time, I llost control of the bike on a dirt ...

... an effeminate and unbelievabley friendly boy named Sagaa. He spoke some very broken English but was very patient and did not seem put off when we didn't understand what he was saying. Our guide was Nepali as well, but spoke perfect English and had a much too upbeat and progressive attitude for the intense, 13 hour uphill trek that we were about to undertake. Immediatley after leaving the restaurant in the morning we had to climb a seemingly endless flight of stairs just to ...

The title comes from the words that were printed on the bus that I took to my next destination, Kasol.

But let me backtrack a moment.

My last day in Mcleod Gange I spent much like the previous two. I did go for one last conversation lesson. It had a strange mix, a few monks, one sorta ******** guy and his two friends. One of the younger monks was wearing aviator sunglasses (hence his nickname, aviator monk) and didn't act like a monk at ...

... living way up in the mountain, and especially us foreigners. It's been a great experience to live on our own, cook for ourselves, spent time practicing and writing music, and just relaxing in this amazing atmosphere. In our last days here up in McLeodGanj we spent our time searching through the shops one last time and taking our last hike up to the highest peak that lays just before the snowy mountains. We started at about 1am and hiked, or more like climbed rocks and ...

... Pradesh province, so that we are officially out of "Little Tibet" and back in "India". This actually holds true for the most part; people are suddenly greeting us with "Namaste" (Indian), rather than the Tibetan "Juley!". There's one more high pass; Barlacha La, at 16,200 ft. A long day of winding up through a mess of Talus - I have no idea how the road engineers ever managed to build a road through this mess. A surprise tent city 10k before the top provides a ...

... our camp at another shepherds camp, this time occupied. We got some entertainment watching the the shepherds chase goats up and down the cliffs. The goats and sheep got some entertainment watching us and nibbling on our tents. Unfortunately, during the night, one of the goats thought he might like to sharpen his horn on Lloyd's tent, and put a 6 inch gash in the rain fly. Nate hung out with the the cook, the ...

... the hotel took advantage of the fact we had prepaid by putting us into their much cheaper economy room (which looks just like our room on the hotel's website). Fortunately, Indian standards hotels are not that expensive by western standards. We decided the best solution was to move, even if that meant losing the money we paid. We stayed in the dumpy room for one night and then moved to a wonderful hotel near by. We now have a huge room and a ...