The land of Tibet in exile and home to the Dali Lama.
We’d arrived here after a bus ride with a change at some place in the middle of nowhere, it had taken a good few hours but the ride up was pleasant, going through Dharmasala, up and down the mountains, and every now and then a glimpse of a distant snow covered peak. Past a couple of hillside barbers and we’d reached McLeod Ganj…
It was dark when we arrived, and like normal the instant we stepped off the bus we were pounced on by the local hotel touts. Within about a minute we had three business cards of local places to stay. Most times we had previously booked somewhere to stay when arriving in the dark but this time we hadn’t so we were secretly glad. 
We had a couple of places we wanted to check out first as we had a rough idea of prices, so we headed up the hill to the main square. We soon realised the map that we were following wasn’t that brilliant with scale so we had soon reached both hotels that were recommended in the guide book. Unfortunately they didn’t have any rooms for the prices that we wanted so we turned back to the square and bumped into one of the original touts. We decided to let him show us the room, only 5 minutes away apparently… About 20 minutes later of walking through side streets, down some steep steps, and weaving through balconies of other hotels we finally got to his place, The Freedom Palace. The room wasn’t too bad, kind of what we were used to at that point, a bed, wonky mirror and a shower that just about worked (slosh bucket included). He’d originally said 500INR for the room per night but we managed to easily get him down to 400INR (~£4) in the end. A good price considering the centre of town was about a km away, there wasn’t any wifi in the room (as he’d said) and the shower was more or less a sprinkle – nothing we weren’t used to!
This was the view from the balcony of the hotel. Not bad, and we’ve at least seen a mountain!
The next day we decided to relax a little and just have a wander round the town. Basically consisting of three main roads it’s very easy to navigate! The town itself is very much as the guide books describe it; a mini Kathmandu. It had the cooler air, masses of stalls selling tourist gear, loads of tourists and cobbled streets, that said, it was lacking the rickshaws and traffic of the busy streets in Kathmandu. Overall it really felt like it was trying to be Kathmandu, but not quite everything was there…
As we’d seen most of the stuff before (and better) in (the actual) Kathmandu, we quickly went round it all, and that was pretty much the town done! At this point of aimless wandering I realised we’d seen a couple of street side barbers and I was heavy with beard so I decided to tick one of the To do’s off my list: Get a cheap (but good) shave from a street side barber.
The pictures below tell most of the story, but in short, a really good close shave with an open blade, head massage, followed by a scrub with a massive block of salt, which felt very very soft, all for the price of a bag of crisps, 50INR (~50p)! Best shave I’d had in a while!
Next day we decided to visit the main reason we came to McLeod, the Tsuglagkhang complex. This is a small area of Dharmasala that the Tibetians in Excile now call home. After being turfed from Tibet they now live in this small part of India.
A little walk South out of the main streets and we found the main entrace. We knew from the guide book that we wouldn’t be allowed cameras in the complex but it was literally any type of electronics that they were asking to be held behind the counter before entering. This included my MP3 player, head torch and batteries…! After a quick frisk, airport security style we were in and free to wander where we wanted.
We were mainly looking for the clapping ceremony (as I called it), it was basically a meeting that the Monks held every so often to discuss various things and when each point of the agenda was affirmed they all clapped and moved on the next point. We heard a bit of clapping going on from the floor below but sadly we didn’t manage to find it but we did find a daily ceremony taking place in which the Monks we chanting rhythmically in deep voices. We didn’t have a clue what the chanting was about but it was nice to listen to so we stayed for a while next to a lady of about 60 who was a little more into it than we were… Every now and then there was a jingle of the bells and blows on a massive conch shell that woke you up!
Once we realised that they had an awful lot more chanting to do (they were all following small paper sheets like prompt cards, about 200 pages we think) we woke ourselves and carried on wandering around. We eventually stumbled upon the gates to the official residence of the Dali Lama, we’d previously checked to see if he was in, but alas he was visiting Germany that week!
Content that we’d seen every square inch of what we were allowed of the complex we headed out and headed to the next point that we had seen in the guide book, the Tibet museum. On our way we passed a couple of posters showing portraits of people and a date below, what we soon discovered was that these posters were a memorial to those who died from self immortalisation, something that we discovered the next day at the museum.
A little down the road we found the museum, it was closed that day but there was a special event tomorrow in which you could enter for free, National Museum day (good timing me thinks). So we headed back to the hotel to get ready to find some grub.
Rested up we headed back down to the museum, now buzzing with people. The museum was quite small, and not much of a museum, mainly a collection of texts, pictures and quotes surround the topic of freedom within Tibet. It seems that the West certainly don’t get the coverage it should have topics in and surrounding China, something that is probably all too common. But basically the museum described the Tibetan side of its story as an independent country, or lack of it, describing how they are basically being turfed off of their own land, by mass in numbers. There was a large description about protests being severely limited and because of this people felt they had to make a statement another way, thus self immortalisation. The museum definitely gave us something to think about for the rest of the day, and the countries we were next visiting!
We ended our trip to McLeod with some food from a traditional Tibetan restaurant, the name of which escapes me now (writing this about a month on!). Basically Mo:Mo/Momos with a super spicy soup thing! Tasted great, but bloody hot!
With souvenirs bought (Heather, silver Om pendant, and a couple of matching travellers bracelets) and the sound of Om Mani Padme Um on repeat from the market streets, we set off to Rishikesh on the bus once again, our time to relax!
Over and Om
