We’re now almost leaving India
and in our last days in Bombai. We traveled south through the beautiful desert
areas of Rajasthan and Gujarat, where we felt, after more than a month
traveling in India, that we finally arrived in India. But first we had to get
there through places that were imagined abroad and brought ready-made to India…
Upper Dharamshala, also known as McLeod Ganj, also known as Little Lhasa and also known as
where the Dalai Lama lives…
I knew that the ride from Manali was going to be tough, up and down and
round and round. And this time I took some motion-sickness pills. So I got
completely stoned and slept the whole way.
Quickly after we arrived in McLeod Ganj, we found Iohi’s sister with her
friend on the main street of the town.
McLeod Ganj is the paradise of bored Europeans or people from the US that want to save the Tibet. You have where
the Dalai Lama lives and his monastery,and there are many activities
and volunteering related to Tibet;
and of course the “Save the Tibet” and Dalai Lama memorabilia. If you check the
wiki travel page of the
Dharamshala, you have a whole section with excruciating details explaining
how to force a meeting with the Dalai Lama, “the dream of a lifetime for many
people”. I have nothing against Tibetans or Tibetan Buddhist, but it’s a bit
over the top. It’s just fashionable to “Save the Tibet”, when in fact they are
not having such a bad time in India.
If you go to Calcutta or many places in the West
Bengal and Bihar states, you’ll see poverty
beyond your imagination, Indian people without food, living and dying on the
streets. But I guess they are in a really tough situation and it’s nicer to
volunteer with healthy people and in a place with nice view.
And it has nothing to do with Tibetan’s autonomy, it’s true, they deserve
an autonomous country, and they have been oppressed by the Chinese government.
But who in China
hasn’t been oppressed, intellectuals, artists, Falung Gong, ethnic minorities, homosexuals,
you name it, it has been oppressed. And I haven’t meet Europeans trying to save
the Uighurs and give autonomy to China's Xinjiang Region, and they
deserve it as much as Tibetans. Well, of course, Buddhism is still more
fashionable than Islam…
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| Tsuglagkhang Complex, Dalai Lama's monastery |
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| At the Dalai Lama's monastery |
From McLeod Ganj we moved to a quieter and smaller town just above it,
Daramkot. It’s a backpackers bubble without all the Tibetan paraphernalia, but not
so different from Manali:
lots of Israelis, charas and tourist food, on the brighter side it’s less
crowded with shops and people, and you can see the green mountains from the whole
town.
On our last day we walked from Daramkot to McLeod Ganj through another
backpacker town: Bagsu. Bagsu is pretty much Little Israel. If you take South
Tel Aviv neighborhoods and you put them in a slope you’ll get Bagsu. You have
signs in Hebrew, falafel, Israeli shanty-hippy style clothes, people selling
and making stuff completely unrelated to India but that the Israeli
shanty-hippy community loves such as Australian didgeridoos and Jamaican dreadlocks.
And of course you’ll find people that got stuck there for weeks and can think that
Tibet is in Goa, complain
that they can’t find the traditional chai as they drank it in Israel or look
at a trash bin and say “this is magical”. This is India
as Israelis want India
to be, just as they imagined it from home, and Indians built it for them.
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| If you're shocked, read what the swastika really means |
And the thing is I love Tel Aviv and specially the artsy South Tel Aviv
neighborhoods, I also like very much falafels and I even find didgeridoos quite
cool (and I have nothing against dreadlocks). But I love South Tel Aviv inside
Tel Aviv inside Israel, not
its bizarre image in India
(and by the way I plainly think it’s quite stupid to travel to India to learn
how to make a didgeridoo, especially when you have to carry the rest of the
trip an excessively large and heavy piece of wood)
While we waited to aboard the bus back to Delhi
we talked with a Hindu girl from Delhi
who traveled to Tushita (near Dharamshala) to do some kind of retire with a Buddhism
workshop. She told us that half of the people also there were Israeli and she even
told us the well-known joke about Israelis in India:
An Indian guy asks an Israeli tourist how many people are in Israel. The
Israeli answers 6 millions. The Indian guy replies: “No, not how many Israelis
are in India, how many in Israel!?”
Delhi
After a smooth bus travel we woke up again in Delhi. We stayed in the same place as last
time on the extremely noisy Main Bazaar
street. We spent only one day there and most of it
went by trying to get information about how the hell we travel to Shekhawati
region in Rajasthan. Shekhawati region is at the northern part of Rajasthan state
and Rajasthan is at the south of Delhi.
So we supposed it should be easy to get there. However, it’s a bit out of the
beaten track and most of the transportation goes to more famous spots like
Jaipur, Jodhpur, Udaipur, etc.
We went to the Governmental Tourist Information, to a private travel agency
and to the Rajasthan Tourism Development Corp. and they kept saying that they
don’t know or gave us information that proved it wrong. After a whole day
walking and riding autorickshaws from station to station we almost gave up.
We went back to the hotel and I did what I know how to do: I looked in
Internet. I think that by this point I should get a degree in Internet Searching.
Anyway, I found a strange combination taking reserved seats in the AC three
tier coach of the train to Loharu. Then we had to wait for 40 minutes and take
unreserved seats in a local smaller train to Nawalgarh. It was quite easy and a
nice ride; and even locals from Shekhawati were a bit shocked that we managed
to arrive from Delhi
(and not from Jaipur) but that’s another story.
When we finally sorted out the transportation issue, it was already
evening. We decided to at least take a quick glimpse at Old Delhi. We managed
only to see the Red Fort from outside and we started to walk through the open market
just before it began to close. It was a complete chaos and there was a traffic
jam, a bike congestion and even a people congestion. If you’ve ever been to an
open market on the closing time, you know it’s pretty busy. But this was as if
on top of the closing market, some shops had decided suddenly to swap places,
and then also most of the neighbors from the buildings over the market decided
it was their moving-day. And to that, you can add maybe two demonstrations going
into opposite directions. Ah, of course add many cows to the picture. But this
wasn’t the case, it just looked as if all this was happening, and actually it was
the regular closing time of the market…
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