Dar to Dharamshala

A couple of months ago I sat down at my favourite coffee shop and thought, what next?  Absentmindedly I started looking up yoga teaching training programs, thinking ‘wouldn’t it be great if one day…’  And then it struck me, why not now?  And so began another journey, one that has found me sitting in the absolute centre of a wonderful coffee shop overlooking the hills and valleys of Himachal Pradesh.  A journey from Dar to Dharamshala.

Returning to India is a homecoming of sorts.  It is where I set out for in 2010, when I decided to finally see the land of my dreams.  In a happy twist of fate, that trip led me to a land I had never dreamt of but whose colours and landscapes now make up the shape and texture of my dreams.  My parting thought in the Dar airport was ‘not yet’.  Luckily, as I will be returning in June, it isn’t. 

After a five hour layover and a fitful night’s sleep, I landed in a steamy Delhi.  At thirty-seven degrees it felt like Dar, absent the relief of the smooth beaches of the Indian Ocean.  Not ready to engage with the madness of the city, I escaped to an afternoon at my hotel.  The hotel was right next to a mall – so while I mulled over whether to see Titanic 3-D, I slathered body shop products on my already well hydrated skin – affirming that no matter where you go, many realities await you.  Back in the mall for dinner, I ate at a small coffee shop, watching the middle class enjoy their Saturday evening.  Skimming the extensive menu, I came across poutine.  Poutine! Of all things! The description went something like this ‘A Canadian specialty of cheese and gravy on chips, pronounced Fou-tan’.  Foutan, noted.  As much as I miss home, I decided not to have a meal that would leave me both disappointed and with clogged arteries.

The next day I waded out into Delhi, in search of my night bus to Dharamshala.  A painless metro ride was followed by an auto rickshaw ride involving several stops to try to find someone who spoke English while my driver careened aimlessly in search of a location he had not understood.  Luckily I had built in an extra hour for this task.  This meant when I finally made it to the Tibetan colony in Delhi, I still had time to spend a couple hours in the ‘Hard Yak Café’, eating chow mein and talking to the proprietor, whose wife was hoping to get a job working in Canada.  He questioned whether life was actually better in the West, with the high cost of living combined with little concept of relaxation or governing one’s own time and I couldn’t give him a conclusive answer.  After a chat about the merits of freedom, community and modest living, he guided me towards the bus stand – a dusty expanse behind a derelict building and beneath an incomplete highway overpass.  I would have had no idea that there was a bus stop there if it weren’t for a couple perplexed looking people with travel bags.  Immediately a svelte Indian boy who looked about sixteen asked to see my ticket and said I was on his bus.  I hoped he wasn’t the one driving it.  When the bus eventually arrived, they began loading the luggage compartments beneath the bus one at a time.  We all got a start when they opened the middle compartment and there was a body in it – after some yelling and swatting, a groggy young man got up from beneath some blankets.  The sixteen year old suddenly looked like a better prospect.  When we departed, I made a point of not checking who ended up at the wheel.

Dharamshala is the home of the exiled Tibetan community.  The Dalai Lama’s residence is here in McLeod Ganj, where I too will call home for the next month.  The streets are filled with a mix of Tibetan, Kashmiri, Indian and Western faces – a diverse group living at the edge of the Himalayan Mountain Range amid misty rolling hills and valleys.  Monks of all nationalities draped in orange, maroon and grays are ubiquitous - clutching wooden prayer beads and walking along the streets, heading to and from temples, chuckling over meals in restaurants, checking out cell phones in the shop where I bought my sim card today and occasionally handing pamphlets about the plight of Tibet.  Dirty Indian women clutching sickly babies beg along the narrow streets, filtering through crowds of travelers with blankets over baggy pants and bandanas tied over dreadlocks.  On the weekends, the cool mountain air attracts Indians from around the country, seeking reprieve from the heat at an altitude of 2000m.  Tucked along a hillside, I am regularly treated to spectacular vistas – that is, after the clouds deposit the rain that has besieged the town almost every day since I’ve arrived (the perils of arriving at the transition of seasons).  And of course, it wouldn’t be India without cows.  Cows eating garbage, that is.  Today I witnessed a huge (bull?) climbing up the steep stairs up the hillside my guesthouse is on.  Owing to its tremendous size, the fact that school children were keeping a distance and throwing rocks at it to prod it up the hill and that it seemed to be shitting every two steps, I kept a safe distance and took the stairs slowly.  Later in the day I saw the same cow nosing its way towards a cake stand in the centre of town.  I almost bought it a piece of cake for its tremendous feat but thought better of setting that kind of precedent with a thousand pound free-roaming animal.

My teacher training course is jammed packed and I’ll save details on it for my next post.  Needless to say, there is little time for anything other than yoga and eating, with the exception of today, Sunday, our one day off.  Taking advantage of my free time, I decided to wander down the hillside to the main temple and residence of the Dalai Lama.  True to the rumours, he was in Himachal Pradesh around the time I arrived, but has since traveled to the US.  So, contrary to my boasting on Facebook, it appears that we won’t be having dinner during my time here! Needless to say, as I climbed the stairs to the temple, set on the ridge of a hill, high above a green valley filled with trees that look like the evergreen cousins of the acacias of the savannah, I thought about the symbolism of the location.  I cannot profess to be religious, but climbing the stairs I thought of the loftiness of human aspirations.  Here is the temple of a community in exile, longing for freedom against an unwilling government.  They have settled in another country, much like many of the other faces I’ve seen on the streets of McLeod Ganj.  As monks solemnly chant mantras, people of all faiths prostrate before images of the Buddha, children run around their parents’ legs shrieking in delight and curious onlookers like myself stand timidly at the edges of the inner chambers.  Candles flicker in smaller temples, those praying oblivious to the Indian tourists striking poses against the scenic backdrop.  A decrepit bicycle wrapped in packing tape sits alongside boxes of things that look meant for the inside of a temple – a reminder of the coexistence of beauty and disrepair, even in this holy space.  As I walked down the stairs to exit, it occurred to me that part of the draw of this place might be that there seems to be space for everyone and everything.  As if to affirm this, a stray dog trotted past me and down the stairs.  Further down, an elderly monk chastised the dog, waving his prayer beads in an effort to shoo him out of the temple.  I smiled – well, maybe not everyone.