After the Buddhism course let out, we had a couple of days to hang out in McLeod Ganj before the Dalai Lama was scheduled to give a four-day teaching. Our classmates voted to meet up at a bar in the neighboring town of Bhagsu the day after the course finished, so that’s where we went after spending a day readjusting to the noise and clamor of real life outside a meditation center. It’s surprising how much of a shock to the senses even a laid-back town like McLeod Ganj can be when you’ve just spent ten days in near solitude. So going to the party town of Bhagsu was even more of a shock.
Bhagsu is where all the Israeli tourists stayed, because somehow this little mountain town got the honor of being put on their popular travel circuit. Many of the local merchants have embraced it, and now about half of the signs on the main drag are written in Hebrew, while the restaurants serve the familiar comforts of home such as hummus and pita bread. Several of the bars have seized on the young rebellious crowd that rolls through town, so Bob Marley is playing in many of the bars, and the wall decorations are often strange blends of Jamaican colors, Hindu and Buddhist symbols, and the occasional alien and/or pot leaf thrown in. It makes you feel like you are definitely not in any of those locales, and you can just kind of pick what you want the place to be. So we settled down for some hummus, curry, and Indian beer, and tried to talk to our new friends through all the reggae music and pot smoke.
One of our new friends insisted that we try the local dessert, called Bhagsu cake. Rob had been fiending for some chocolate cake since about day 3 of the Buddhism course, since the instructors loved to use chocolate cake as an example when they talked about attachment and happiness. Unfortunately, as a general rule, baked goods in India are terrible. So when we tried some chocolate cake at our hotel on our first day after class, the result was epic failure. We were dubious about the Bhagsu cake, but our friends were insistent, so we tried a piece when they brought a box of it to our table. Epic Win! As far as we could tell, the cake (which is actually more of a Midwest-style “bar”) was built from a layer of crushed Parle-G gluco-biscuits (they’re kind of like a British butter cookie or something), followed by a layer of toffee-caramel deliciousness, and then a layer of hardened chocolate. Awesome! The best part was that this gourmet delicacy came from a little corner store, kind of like an Indian 7-11 or Quickie Mart. We love Bhagsu cake!!!
A few days later, we signed up for the Dalai Lama’s four-day teaching, and apparently there is a certain etiquette to saving seats at the main temple. You go there a day or two before the event starts, and you put down a mat or tape down a piece of cardboard where you are going to sit. But you can’t just sit anywhere. There are whole sections roped off for the sponsors, which in this case was a massive group of Taiwanese who had flown to India to hear the Dalai Lama speak. I’m sure that pissed off the Chinese quite a bit, seeing as how they consider both Tibet and Taiwan to be part of China, and the Dalai Lama is a hated enemy of the Chinese government. But anyways, we showed up two days before the teaching and found some extra mats laying in a pile, so we put one down in the English translation section and taped our names written on cardboard onto the mat.
On the big day, we woke up extra early and went to the main temple around 6:30 to get in line. Of course, there was also a big cow standing in line for no particular reason, except perhaps because the line stretched out onto the road in front of the temple, and cows enjoy being on the roads. It turns out that we got there well before the security guards did, so the line didn’t start moving for about 45 minutes. And then we learned that it’s nice to be a guy at these events, since they broke the line up by gender (due to guards having to frisk everyone), and there were way fewer men than ladies at the teaching. Yeah, women rock! So once they opened the lines up, Rob grabbed both backpacks and went up to the front of the line to go through the male entrance, whereupon he encountered the most comprehensive security we’ve ever seen at a public event (presumably out of fear of the Chinese government trying to assassinate the Dalai Lama). After going through a metal detector, you had to go to a guard waiting to frisk you. After he checked you over and had you empty your pockets, he would go through your jacket, jacket pockets and liner, and then check your bag. After your bag got searched, he would search inside everything inside your bag, so they unscrewed pens, opened radio battery compartments and verified the radios worked, etc. We were very impressed. This also explained why everyone urged us to get in line early, since it took several hours to search the 4,000 or so attendees. Once we got inside, we found our mats and broke out some biscuits (crackers, actually) and peanut butter for breakfast. The Dalai Lama’s main temple complex has a courtyard area with stairs going up one side into an open-air seating area (consisting of bare floors). In the middle of this upper seating area, there are two sanctuary-like inner temples with a walking path around them. The Dalai Lama sits on a big chair in one of them when he gives his teachings, while all the listeners outside of the inner temples have to wear headphones connected to a small personal radio. They also had several large TV screens set up so that everyone could see him talking.
Before the teachings started, some monkeys noticed us sitting near the edge of the upper seating area with our tasty treats. One of them climbed onto a nearby tree branch right behind Rob, so he turned around and tried to shoo him away. Well, the monkey wasn’t too impressed, so he jumped onto the railing that Rob was leaning against, reached through, and then slapped Rob on the arm before jumping back into the tree! He got monkey slapped!!! So Rob stood up, turned around, and started growling at him to scare him off. This just seemed to piss off the monkey even more, as he bared his teeth and started to growl back. Luckily, one of our friends handed Rob an umbrella with a metal pointy end before things escalated any further, and this seemed to trigger a memory in the monkey. As soon as he saw Rob with the long pointy umbrella, he leapt down the tree, onto the roof of a nearby building, and quickly scampered out of sight. Little bastard! Rob’s arm was slightly bleeding from the monkey slap, so he rubbed some Purell into it and hoped that he wouldn’t get rabies.
After that flash of anger and attempted violence, we all settled back down for the Dalai Lama to show up. "Ommmmmmmm." We were sittting about fifty feet back from the walkway he used to enter and exit the inner temple, and we had a terrific view through the temple windows to see the chair he would be sitting upon. When we finally got to see him, he was ambling along the walkway, grinning like a kid, greeting the crowd. And once he started talking, he smiled and laughed for a good hour while he gave some introductory remarks on Buddhism in relation to the rest of the world. It was pretty uplifting to see someone who was so genuinely happy. Since the sponsors of the teaching were Taiwanese, the Dalai Lama spoke in Tibetan for several minutes, then paused while several translators spoke into their respective radio transmitters -- you could tune in anywhere in town to hear His Holiness in Tibetan and the translators in English, Chinese, Spanish, or German, depending on what radio frequency you dialed in. A group of us from the Tushita course all sat together, and we were pretty pumped because we actually understood a good chunk of what he was talking about. With no previous training, it would have gone right over our heads. We were told that most of the people who attend the teachings have no idea what he’s talking about once he gets past the introductory remarks, but that people enjoy simply being in the same place as the Dalai Lama. Now we understand why. He’s a very unique person, and he seems to radiate peace and happiness. With him starting to get so old, we were worried that this might be our last chance to see him, but apparently he has decided to keep on until he turns 90, at which point he will re-visit the question of whether to step down or not. Rumor has it that if he lives out his natural life, he’ll live to be 114. So don’t despair! You can still book a trip to Dharamsala and see him teach in person for many more years.
We stuck around for the afternoon session of the teaching, and then decided to forgo the remaining three days. It is extremely hard to pay attention to what’s going on when he talks in Tibetan for ten minutes straight, then you get a five minute translation, followed by another ten minutes of Tibetan. Your mind starts to wander, and you kind of lose track of what he was talking about. Given that the topic was “emptiness,” it wasn’t exactly a simple lecture. So on the remaining days, we decided to explore around the mountains near McLeod Ganj. We decided to hit up the clinic near our hotel to just check on Rob’s rabies, and that was quite interesting. It turns out that it was a Tibetan herbal medicine clinic, not a Western medical clinic, but we figured the doctors would know if we should go to the hospital 8 km down the road. Rob showed the doctor his monkey scratch, and she didn’t seem too concerned about the rabies part. Instead, she prescribed a set of 5 Tibetan herbal pills that would “help eliminate any poisons in the blood.” Well, that wasn’t exactly what we were worried about, but we figured she would know if Rob was beyond her help or in danger in any way. After all, there were a lot of monkeys in these parts. “So how often do I take these pills?” he asked her. “Take one today, another one a week from now, and then one every full moon until you run out.” Ooookay. It was only about three dollars for the visit and the pills, so we decided to go ahead and give it a try. If Rob started having any rabies symptoms (not that we knew what any of them are), we would go to the hospital. Not our smartest moment, but apparently it worked out okay, since Rob didn’t get rabies. We encountered a friend of ours from the Tushita course at the clinic on our way out, and she was seeing the doctor for a nasty infection that was spreading up her foot from an open laceration on her foot. Her sandals weren’t doing a terribly good job of keeping out the dirt and feces from the road, so I wasn’t surprised to see it getting so infected. We told her good luck, and then made our way up the mountain road to go on a nice hike in the Himalayas.
It’s amazing how the weather changes up there at cloud level. You don’t really see any clouds above you when it starts to get cloudy, so much as clouds coming right at you. That’s when it’s time to get the hell off the trail and find some shelter. So we tried to do that when it started getting rain-cloudy, but we soon found ourselves quite a ways away from either of two towns that we were in between. Fearing a flash flood coming down the rocky mountain trail we were following, we booked it down to the village of Upper Dharamkot. We lucked out and avoided getting drenched, but as we followed a stone staircase down the side of the mountain valley, Amy spaced out for a minute and lost her footing, then fall face-down onto the stairs and prickly weeds below her. Lucky yet again, she just tore up her knee and got some nasty pricks on her arm without breaking any bones. We busted out our dinky little bag of band-aids and tried to stem the bleeding, and then she limped the rest of the way down the hillside back to our hotel. The path we took went down through Bhagsu, so of course, we had to stop to eat some more Bhagsu cake to lift our broken spirits. It was a rough day.
Later that night, the Tushita group was meeting up again, so after Amy rested awhile at the hotel, we made our way back out. It now took us twice as long to go anywhere because Amy couldn't bend her knee or put much weight on it. At the bar/restaurant/club (the place we met up was incredibly confusing - fancy tables for dining, with a huge dance floor and bar, and blaring hip hop music, with all the lights on - it was just weird enough to not work at all), we saw our friend from earlier, with the foot infection, and it had already started healing and all the redness was gone. Guess the Tibetan medicine worked for her, so we felt a lot more confident that Rob wouldn't end up like one of those creatures in "I Am Legend".
Then it was already time for us to head out to the next city on our list. We really loved our experience here and would definitely come back again. When people ask what the best part of our trip was, we have to say it was the Buddhist course, Dalai Lama teachings, and the city of McLeod Ganj.
Our next stop...Amritsar! Home of the Sikhs.
Bhagsu is where all the Israeli tourists stayed, because somehow this little mountain town got the honor of being put on their popular travel circuit. Many of the local merchants have embraced it, and now about half of the signs on the main drag are written in Hebrew, while the restaurants serve the familiar comforts of home such as hummus and pita bread. Several of the bars have seized on the young rebellious crowd that rolls through town, so Bob Marley is playing in many of the bars, and the wall decorations are often strange blends of Jamaican colors, Hindu and Buddhist symbols, and the occasional alien and/or pot leaf thrown in. It makes you feel like you are definitely not in any of those locales, and you can just kind of pick what you want the place to be. So we settled down for some hummus, curry, and Indian beer, and tried to talk to our new friends through all the reggae music and pot smoke.
One of our new friends insisted that we try the local dessert, called Bhagsu cake. Rob had been fiending for some chocolate cake since about day 3 of the Buddhism course, since the instructors loved to use chocolate cake as an example when they talked about attachment and happiness. Unfortunately, as a general rule, baked goods in India are terrible. So when we tried some chocolate cake at our hotel on our first day after class, the result was epic failure. We were dubious about the Bhagsu cake, but our friends were insistent, so we tried a piece when they brought a box of it to our table. Epic Win! As far as we could tell, the cake (which is actually more of a Midwest-style “bar”) was built from a layer of crushed Parle-G gluco-biscuits (they’re kind of like a British butter cookie or something), followed by a layer of toffee-caramel deliciousness, and then a layer of hardened chocolate. Awesome! The best part was that this gourmet delicacy came from a little corner store, kind of like an Indian 7-11 or Quickie Mart. We love Bhagsu cake!!!
A few days later, we signed up for the Dalai Lama’s four-day teaching, and apparently there is a certain etiquette to saving seats at the main temple. You go there a day or two before the event starts, and you put down a mat or tape down a piece of cardboard where you are going to sit. But you can’t just sit anywhere. There are whole sections roped off for the sponsors, which in this case was a massive group of Taiwanese who had flown to India to hear the Dalai Lama speak. I’m sure that pissed off the Chinese quite a bit, seeing as how they consider both Tibet and Taiwan to be part of China, and the Dalai Lama is a hated enemy of the Chinese government. But anyways, we showed up two days before the teaching and found some extra mats laying in a pile, so we put one down in the English translation section and taped our names written on cardboard onto the mat.
On the big day, we woke up extra early and went to the main temple around 6:30 to get in line. Of course, there was also a big cow standing in line for no particular reason, except perhaps because the line stretched out onto the road in front of the temple, and cows enjoy being on the roads. It turns out that we got there well before the security guards did, so the line didn’t start moving for about 45 minutes. And then we learned that it’s nice to be a guy at these events, since they broke the line up by gender (due to guards having to frisk everyone), and there were way fewer men than ladies at the teaching. Yeah, women rock! So once they opened the lines up, Rob grabbed both backpacks and went up to the front of the line to go through the male entrance, whereupon he encountered the most comprehensive security we’ve ever seen at a public event (presumably out of fear of the Chinese government trying to assassinate the Dalai Lama). After going through a metal detector, you had to go to a guard waiting to frisk you. After he checked you over and had you empty your pockets, he would go through your jacket, jacket pockets and liner, and then check your bag. After your bag got searched, he would search inside everything inside your bag, so they unscrewed pens, opened radio battery compartments and verified the radios worked, etc. We were very impressed. This also explained why everyone urged us to get in line early, since it took several hours to search the 4,000 or so attendees. Once we got inside, we found our mats and broke out some biscuits (crackers, actually) and peanut butter for breakfast. The Dalai Lama’s main temple complex has a courtyard area with stairs going up one side into an open-air seating area (consisting of bare floors). In the middle of this upper seating area, there are two sanctuary-like inner temples with a walking path around them. The Dalai Lama sits on a big chair in one of them when he gives his teachings, while all the listeners outside of the inner temples have to wear headphones connected to a small personal radio. They also had several large TV screens set up so that everyone could see him talking.
Before the teachings started, some monkeys noticed us sitting near the edge of the upper seating area with our tasty treats. One of them climbed onto a nearby tree branch right behind Rob, so he turned around and tried to shoo him away. Well, the monkey wasn’t too impressed, so he jumped onto the railing that Rob was leaning against, reached through, and then slapped Rob on the arm before jumping back into the tree! He got monkey slapped!!! So Rob stood up, turned around, and started growling at him to scare him off. This just seemed to piss off the monkey even more, as he bared his teeth and started to growl back. Luckily, one of our friends handed Rob an umbrella with a metal pointy end before things escalated any further, and this seemed to trigger a memory in the monkey. As soon as he saw Rob with the long pointy umbrella, he leapt down the tree, onto the roof of a nearby building, and quickly scampered out of sight. Little bastard! Rob’s arm was slightly bleeding from the monkey slap, so he rubbed some Purell into it and hoped that he wouldn’t get rabies.
After that flash of anger and attempted violence, we all settled back down for the Dalai Lama to show up. "Ommmmmmmm." We were sittting about fifty feet back from the walkway he used to enter and exit the inner temple, and we had a terrific view through the temple windows to see the chair he would be sitting upon. When we finally got to see him, he was ambling along the walkway, grinning like a kid, greeting the crowd. And once he started talking, he smiled and laughed for a good hour while he gave some introductory remarks on Buddhism in relation to the rest of the world. It was pretty uplifting to see someone who was so genuinely happy. Since the sponsors of the teaching were Taiwanese, the Dalai Lama spoke in Tibetan for several minutes, then paused while several translators spoke into their respective radio transmitters -- you could tune in anywhere in town to hear His Holiness in Tibetan and the translators in English, Chinese, Spanish, or German, depending on what radio frequency you dialed in. A group of us from the Tushita course all sat together, and we were pretty pumped because we actually understood a good chunk of what he was talking about. With no previous training, it would have gone right over our heads. We were told that most of the people who attend the teachings have no idea what he’s talking about once he gets past the introductory remarks, but that people enjoy simply being in the same place as the Dalai Lama. Now we understand why. He’s a very unique person, and he seems to radiate peace and happiness. With him starting to get so old, we were worried that this might be our last chance to see him, but apparently he has decided to keep on until he turns 90, at which point he will re-visit the question of whether to step down or not. Rumor has it that if he lives out his natural life, he’ll live to be 114. So don’t despair! You can still book a trip to Dharamsala and see him teach in person for many more years.
We stuck around for the afternoon session of the teaching, and then decided to forgo the remaining three days. It is extremely hard to pay attention to what’s going on when he talks in Tibetan for ten minutes straight, then you get a five minute translation, followed by another ten minutes of Tibetan. Your mind starts to wander, and you kind of lose track of what he was talking about. Given that the topic was “emptiness,” it wasn’t exactly a simple lecture. So on the remaining days, we decided to explore around the mountains near McLeod Ganj. We decided to hit up the clinic near our hotel to just check on Rob’s rabies, and that was quite interesting. It turns out that it was a Tibetan herbal medicine clinic, not a Western medical clinic, but we figured the doctors would know if we should go to the hospital 8 km down the road. Rob showed the doctor his monkey scratch, and she didn’t seem too concerned about the rabies part. Instead, she prescribed a set of 5 Tibetan herbal pills that would “help eliminate any poisons in the blood.” Well, that wasn’t exactly what we were worried about, but we figured she would know if Rob was beyond her help or in danger in any way. After all, there were a lot of monkeys in these parts. “So how often do I take these pills?” he asked her. “Take one today, another one a week from now, and then one every full moon until you run out.” Ooookay. It was only about three dollars for the visit and the pills, so we decided to go ahead and give it a try. If Rob started having any rabies symptoms (not that we knew what any of them are), we would go to the hospital. Not our smartest moment, but apparently it worked out okay, since Rob didn’t get rabies. We encountered a friend of ours from the Tushita course at the clinic on our way out, and she was seeing the doctor for a nasty infection that was spreading up her foot from an open laceration on her foot. Her sandals weren’t doing a terribly good job of keeping out the dirt and feces from the road, so I wasn’t surprised to see it getting so infected. We told her good luck, and then made our way up the mountain road to go on a nice hike in the Himalayas.
It’s amazing how the weather changes up there at cloud level. You don’t really see any clouds above you when it starts to get cloudy, so much as clouds coming right at you. That’s when it’s time to get the hell off the trail and find some shelter. So we tried to do that when it started getting rain-cloudy, but we soon found ourselves quite a ways away from either of two towns that we were in between. Fearing a flash flood coming down the rocky mountain trail we were following, we booked it down to the village of Upper Dharamkot. We lucked out and avoided getting drenched, but as we followed a stone staircase down the side of the mountain valley, Amy spaced out for a minute and lost her footing, then fall face-down onto the stairs and prickly weeds below her. Lucky yet again, she just tore up her knee and got some nasty pricks on her arm without breaking any bones. We busted out our dinky little bag of band-aids and tried to stem the bleeding, and then she limped the rest of the way down the hillside back to our hotel. The path we took went down through Bhagsu, so of course, we had to stop to eat some more Bhagsu cake to lift our broken spirits. It was a rough day.
Later that night, the Tushita group was meeting up again, so after Amy rested awhile at the hotel, we made our way back out. It now took us twice as long to go anywhere because Amy couldn't bend her knee or put much weight on it. At the bar/restaurant/club (the place we met up was incredibly confusing - fancy tables for dining, with a huge dance floor and bar, and blaring hip hop music, with all the lights on - it was just weird enough to not work at all), we saw our friend from earlier, with the foot infection, and it had already started healing and all the redness was gone. Guess the Tibetan medicine worked for her, so we felt a lot more confident that Rob wouldn't end up like one of those creatures in "I Am Legend".
Then it was already time for us to head out to the next city on our list. We really loved our experience here and would definitely come back again. When people ask what the best part of our trip was, we have to say it was the Buddhist course, Dalai Lama teachings, and the city of McLeod Ganj.
Our next stop...Amritsar! Home of the Sikhs.
