Namaste. We are back from the mountains.
We stayed at Jagatram Niwas, a guesthouse in the hills outside Dharamsala. The proprietor, Bavinder Singh, grew up here in the village of Heini.
Bavinder joined the Indian foreign service and worked for a few years in Pakistan before returning home to build the guesthouse with his brother. Their father still lives next door. Violet spent some fun evenings with Ansika, Bavinder's six-year-old niece. Here's a video of the girls playing cricket with a basketball. The colorful structures you see in the background are shrines dedicated to the goddesses Durga and Kali. Bavinder's son is lighting the shrines in anticipation of the evening puja.
Almost exactly a year ago we were in Yosemite for another long weekend, and I could not help comparing the two destinations in my mind. Both are spectacularly beautiful. However, like Indian yoga teachers (who are both more and less spiritual than their American counterparts), Indian mountain retreats are both more and less inspiring than American national parks. To begin with the "more," let's just say that I love the Sierra Nevadas, but they are hills compared to the Himalayas. I read the other day that the highest mountain outside Asia is a 6900-meter peak in the Andes; the Himalayas have over 100 peaks higher than that. So this is the world's center of mountain-ness. But it is also the center of the world's population. Which means that even after an hours-long trek through pristine wilderness, you are likely to end up at a cafe selling carbonated sugar water, and chances are you will have to share the triumph of the climb with a bunch of Punjabi guys smoking hash in their underwear and daring one another to jump in the freezing pool.
Then again, you might be alone. But there will be a cafe.
Can you believe I've made it several paragraphs into a post about Dharamsala without mentioning the town's most famous resident, the Dalai Lama? Well, His Holiness was out of town (in California, ironically) but we made a trip to the Norbulingka Institute, a center H.H. established for the preservation of Tibetan arts and culture. The gardens are meant to resemble the original Norbulingka complex in Lhasa, Tibet--now part of the People's Republic of China. Walking around the magnificent gardens at Norbulingka, you can't help but feel the sadness tied up in it. The Dalai Lama has not seen the real Norbulingka since 1959 and likely never will again, since he is prohibited from entering Tibet.
It started raining while we were inside the temple, meditating.
Finally I want to tell you what happened on our way back from one of the waterfalls pictured above. Rounding a bend, Jessica heard a noise in the trees. Her mind scrolled quickly through the most likely sources of the noise: a cougar, a tiger, a man-eating yeti, a very lost and confused member of the Taliban... I assured her it was just another hiker. But she didn't believe me, and she turned out to be right: the noise was coming from a herd of ... goats!
The goats were followed by a shepherd and his trusty dog, who kept an eye on the herd while the shepherd visited the cafe. He needed a pack of cigarettes. Tell me, where could a shepherd buy cigarettes in Yosemite?
Jai Hind!
