Dalai Lama

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After morning coffee at our accommodation we wandered down to the main road and had aloo paratha for breakfast.

We then caught the bus up the hill to Dharamshala town.  There were some lovely views along the way.  We saw the sign for the famous cricket pitch, which featured in the recent cricket world cup with the amazing backdrop of the snowcapped Himalayas.


We arrived in Dharamshala and waited for the next bus to McLoud Ganj, the actual home of the Dalai Lama temple.  This journey was much more windy.  Just down the road from the bus station the traffic came to a halt...it appeared the car park next to the bus station was full. Everyone was queuing down the road, which was only really wide enough for one car, so no room for passing.  As we could see the traffic was going nowhere, we jumped out and walked up the hill.  We followed the signs to 'the Temple'.  It didn't quite look like the images we have seen however there were some lovely views of the mountains and birds of prey gliding over head..sadly there was no sign of His Holiness the Dalai Lama.


Next we headed to the Tibetan museum, which we had read was really informative.  Unfortunately, it seemed it was being renovated,as we stood and watched men knocking down walls!

We then stopped for a bite to eat before heading down to some other temples we had seen on the map. We followed a pretty walkways lined with prayer flags.  We passed a couple of smaller temples on the way to a slightly larger one, which had the most amazing view of the snowcapped mountains.  We also discovered that next to this temple was the Tibet Museum!  We can only assume the original one, which looked quite small, had been moved and improved...we went in but sadly it was 15 minutes before closing.  We had a quick look around and decided we would have to come back again as there was so much to see and we would clearly a good amount of time for this.


Rather than walk down the road, our map showed a 'shortcut' path.  It appeared to be behind the Tibetan Home for the Elderly. We could not find it at first and eventually found ourselves within the grounds of the home itself.  A nice man spotted us and pointed us in the right direction ..we were obviously not the first people to enter the grounds and look confused! 


We cut down to the road and eventually back to the bus stop where we caught the bus back to Fatepur (where our accommodation is).  Back in town we had some food before heading back to our temporary home.  Today we were joined by a girl from France who has hitch hiked all the way from France to India. We spent the evening sharing travel stories and listening to high mountain, snow storm, helicopter evacuation stories!

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