Hotel Natraj McLeod Ganj

... the lights, sidewalks are designed for walking, and cleanliness and organization are the culture. Many complain of Chandigarh's sterility but to be honest we did not get to experience the city very much. We took the deluxe night bus there and then just kicked in the hotel. We ate some great Punjabi food there...Fantastic sweets and meals.

So there is supposed to be a deluxe bus which goes from Chandigarh to Dharmasalla, in Himachal Pradesh state. And we were operating under ...

... person nuclear powers, the Tibetean question, old colonial claims (as usual it was the British who drew the disputed border). Stopping in one of the coffee shops we saw a talk by a Tibetan activist, and saw a screening of the Indian equivalent to question time given over to Tibet and China / India relations - on which he was a panellist.

Many sad stories in McLeod-Ganj - we took a Tibetan cookery lesson ...

... really pretty.

I spent all day Saturday at the Norbulinka institute, which is a fantastic place about 14k downhill from here. It's dedicated to preserving ancient Tibetan arts such as applique, wood carving etc. They have workshops where refugees can train, and it can take up to 6 months to make one Thanka (religious wall hanging). Some of the stuff in the shop is phenomenal. My friend Dipti has been staying at the guesthouse there so we spent the ...

... between different schools of Buddhism, etc etc. A far cry from the "how many brothers and sisters do you have" which I was expecting!! It's really rewarding, and interesting, and you get a whole different perspective on things rather than just being a tourist. One of the monks told me that him & some of the others like playing football & basketball, they have a secret clearing somewhere in the hills where they go to have a kickabout in their robes ...

This morning was our first day of helping out with the little Tibetan kids. As soon as we walked in they ran to us for hugs. No shyness at all. Incredibly cute too, although still not cute enough for me to want any of my own.

It was absolute chaos sometimes. Kids running around eating things, throwing things, trying to make mass breaks from the centre, refusing to put their pants back on, peeing on the floor and pouring their food over themselves. Great fun though.
McLeod Ganj, Himachal Pradesh, India julschong

... t quite figured out what it is about me that looks so Israeli, I've been asking but it's like a conspiracy. No one wants to tell me. I've had like a thousand people ask me if I'm Israeli around here. I even spoke to a shopkeeper in my perfect Canadian English and he responded in Hebrew. Gaaaaaa! It's not that I mind, I just don't get what it is!




Anyway, the village is lovely, I'm practicing reading Hebrew because everything ...

... road, and the road crew spends 4 months a year trying desperately to keep them open. In places, like this one, the scree is like snow; there are scree-banks by the side of the road, and the back-hoe is about as wide as the banks. We (stupidly) push/carry one bike around, and finish that as the road crew decides to start moving again - in reverse, along with several trucks, us sitting perched on top of the scree bank with our bikes and bags scattered around trying to ...

... they met for the first time at a Mumbai McDonald's (she's vegetarian) and were married a few months later. Shock of the year for me - cell phones have come to Spiti Valley since I was there last year. I thought it was one of the last outposts of civilization.There is a signal only in 2 towns and Lara has to walk 4 km from his village to get a signal. On our jeep safari, both Lara and Lama were often on their phones, which is somewhat disconcerting on the narrow, curvy roads. In ...

... the road, we hit our last significant hurdle to the hot food and warm beds of the village of Mudh. It became clear why there were no vehicles on the road we had walked. The road was severed at a stream crossing. The crossing was battered and unusable. There was an 'easy way' to get across that our guide was adamant about; a six foot jump across the concentrated flow of the stream - a raging torrent from the rain ...

... booked rooms at once place and set off to check it out. Two porters and one guy kept walking with us and wouldn't leave us alone. They said they would walk with us to our first hotel and then if we were not happy they could take us other places. All of us were so exhausted that we just let them follow and made a nearly 1.5 Km hike through the hills with our bags to the first place. As we all kind of expected we were disappointed with the hotel as it wasn't clean ...