India: From Little Tibet through Little Israel to Delhi

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…

Tsuglagkhang Complex, Dalai Lama's monastery

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.

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…

Traveling illegally in a closed Tibetan area in west Sichuan and our last day in China

We are on our last day in China, actually I’m writing from the Kunming airport at 2 am in the beginning of my 30s birthday waiting the two hours delay to fly the Hump. We are about to do an emblematic flight from the World War II where many planes crashed (but I can already tell that we survive when we finally arrive to India from where I’ll post this).

And today we were transported even further back to the past, when we played as extras in a movie about Yunnan’s bank  Fudian in 1930s. We and a bunch of foreigners, which were offered to work as extras too, were the bad guys, French guys who evilly clapped their hands after a speech that was supposed to celebrate the exploitation of Chinese workers. And the bank somehow saved the workers. But I couldn’t find more information on the internet and I couldn’t get the name of the director. So Chinese friends (or maybe Cheng) can find out more.

But before all that, as I was telling in the last post, on July 11 we were traveling from Qinghai province in China to Serxu in Sichuan province in a brand new 4x4 with a young guy and the lama of the girl we met in Yushu.…

Serxu (or Sershu or Sershul or Dzachuka or Shiqu)

The ride took around 4 hours. During the first hour and a half the lama and the young guy tried to disconnect the alarm that was driving us crazy (until Iohi told them to just press the damn button from the keychain). The rest of the time the lama drank Redbull cans and threw them from the window, well maybe it were only two cans, but we were pretty shocked because we thought that at least Tibetan monks, and even more Tibetan lamas were a little more educated. And of course besides drinking his Redbull we made futile attempts to communicate (in Chinese).

So we arrived at a monastery in Serxu Dzong at 9pm and it was rainy and cold (well, we were still high on the mountains around 4500 m)

The place was amazingly clean and nit (and cheap) and was run by two women who seemed to be in charge of every aspect of the monastery. Everything there was refurbished or it was plainly new. We were so happy to see a clean place after all the dirty holes where we spent the previous week in Qinghai…

On the next morning we understood from a very well-spoken and worldly-wise Chinese young woman that they were preparing the place for huge celebrations in a couple of days and Buddhists from all around the world were expected.  So everything was also fully booked for the next days and even though the place was beautiful we decided just to move on and travel to Ganzi.

Ganzi (or Garze)

We took a minivan with room for seven very small passengers with already six not so small grown-ups and a monk kid, so that we started the drive as eight people. We were crammed like sardines and the fact that most of the passengers (except of the monk kid) smoked, ate chicken feet (yes, chicken feet) and drank alcohol all the way, made it also smell like the inside of a can of sardines.

One hour later, we went through a kind of border control were a police peeked in the van without seeing us. After we passed the control, some people in the van said “something laowai (which were us) something” and then they laughed. We suspected that we weren’t allowed there, but nothing happened, and then we stopped to eat 50 meters from the control (and we were completely paranoid but nothing happened again).

So we continued what it should have been a 7 or maybe an 8 hours ride. However, the dirt road was a big pool of mud because of the non-stopping rain and there was a gigantic truck stuck creating a big traffic jam over a cliff.

This is the situation every time a vehicle is stuck in these parts of China:

MOUNTAIN

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Many many cars à CAR à TRUCK ßMany many cars

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Many many cars àCAR à ß CAR ß Many many cars

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CLIFF

And then Chinese drivers get outside their cars and start shouting and discussing who should pass… for hours.

When this happened, we were stuck several hours, and we had time to recruit a new member for our van who was carrying a huge car battery. Instead of 7 or 8 hours, the drive was 12 hours jumping, feeling like a sardine milkshake. We arrived at the city at 9:00 pm and our first choice for a hotel was full.  So we were led to another place where we got an OK room with bathroom.  And then we understood how come the hotel was filled with mud and pools of water on the floor… there was no running water in all the building! People were carrying water on very shallow bowls from a huge barrel!

Then tired and hungry, we went to eat to a Tibetan restaurant which seemed the only normal place and while eating tasteless momos we saw a nice black rat fleeing from the kitchen… (OK, I know I said in the last post that our luck began to change and this doesn’t seem like that, but just wait).

Anyway, we tried to remain optimistic despite the situation and made a full detailed plan for the next day. The thing is that from the beginning we wanted to stay in a monastery close to Ganzi but it was too late to go when we arrived. So next day Iohi traveled to the monastery (which was 1 hour from the town) to check if there was room for us there, because if it was full I was going to buy bus tickets to leave the town.

And while I was buying some food in the market, the streets got suddenly extremely crowded. Then a sea of policemen and soldiers flooded the same street. There were police and military cars everywhere, and I realized that the town was also filled with a sort of portable police tin houses. Nothing happened, no clash, no shouts, no demonstrations, just lots and lots of people outside.

Police and soldiers were seeing me all time but they didn’t seem to be interested in me, until a very polite policeman dressed as civil approached me. He told me that the place wasn’t safe for me and asked me to leave the town as soon as possible, preferably the same day. I told him I was leaving the next day to Kanding and I went to buy the bus tickets… 5 minutes later, Iohi sent me a text message asking me to join her in the monastery Darjey Gompa. There were other laowais there, and they said it was ok and safe. So after a frenetic text message swap, I returned the tickets and got completely ripped off by the only Tibetan guy who agreed to drive me to Darjey Gompa.

There I met Iohi in a heavenly guesthouse between mountains and rivers and snowy peaks everywhere over the horizon. The foreigners were a bunch (actually half a bunch) of Buddhist Germans who got there following their lama and were doing everything to get the other half of their group to pass the foreigner-proof border. They were thrilled and a bit jealous that we managed to get to this closed sector, without even being sure that we were doing that. In the meanwhile, half of their group was bouncing in the other side of the closed area between Kanding and Ganzi.

So we had an amazing time there in a simple room that felt for us 5-star with a view to the garden and having two Tibetan nuns who cooked for us (and told us off every time for not finishing our meals). Strangely enough, the food they made was Chinese and Chinese breakfast is usually not our cup of tea (by the way, they don’t drink tea on the breakfast either). Most of the breakfast stuff is not sweet or salty or spicy or anything, it’s just plain. A typical example is rice in hot water with no salt or sugar or anything at all. So eventually we got sick of that, we tried to ask for scrambled eggs which we end up doing by ourselves. They were pretty happy with the arrangement until I burnt the wok because I didn’t use enough oil! They did like the scrambled eggs, though….

Our room!

We passed some days either seeing the rain from the window of the nicest room ever or walking around. We also had a natural hot spring close were Tibetans girls washed their cloth and then bath naked! That was when Tibetan guys weren’t washing their motorbikes! The only issue was that the hot spring was across an old wooden bridge which seemed a little too fragile on a fast and furious river, but that didn’t stop us.

The hot spring

And this is the way to the hot spring

We walked a lot across fields waving back hello hello to the locals and we entered to the basic house complexes that were spread around some kilometers from the guesthouse. On one occasion, first we were invited by some monks for tea and sweets; 2 km from there, we were invited again, this time by nuns. They showed us see their plants and insisted that we stayed to have more tea and some bread!

After some days we decided to go back to the town, Ganzi, to take a bus to Kanding. We made our minds to take bus no matter what, swearing that we would never take a minivan in our lives. And of course the buses were full and we took a minivan. And of course the 8 hours drive lasted 13 hours bumping on the mud.

We drove down and down and down between the mountains inside the fog and we finally arrived in Kanding exhausted with migraine and at night…as always. But this time we traveled with a family and no smokers and they even invited us to eat with them during the lunch stop (and didn’t let us pay anything).

Kanding

Kanding is a small city nested in a valley surrounded by impressively huge mountains. It’s funny when you see the city from above that it has no place to grow but up. It’s the middle point between Tibetan and Chinese-Sichuanese culture, with the spirituality of the Tibetan Buddhism and the spiciness of Sichuan. We had there our first experience with Sichuan peppercorn , that mixed with red chili is called málà: "numbing and spicy". It has a very special and nice taste but until we got more or less used we had the strange feeling of not being able to feel our mouths and feel fire in them at the same time.

Kanding

Kanding's spicy food

  And even though we thought the city was open to foreigners it was filled with police, army and blinded trucks with massive guns. It was a little scary but we weren’t kicked out from there this time but in Chengdu we learnt that we could have been. The whole Ganzi prefecture, which includes Kanding, was closed at that time and police kicked out foreigners every time an English speaker policeman was available. As I was telling in previous posts, the police was afraid that the Tibetan demonstrations that started in Aba would spread to the whole prefecture. We had the chance and the luck to travel through that beautiful area only because we arrived from a less usual place, our damn Qinghai.

So we walked around far from the downtown and the army until we met Chris, the American owner of the hostel Zhulim. His hostel seemed really great and we heard later that people go to Kanding only to stay at his place. But it was completely empty, obviously because he’s a main attraction for foreigners but not so much for Chinese people that were the only tourists around. We had a bad coffee but got a lot of good advices like how to get to Yunnan (since almost every short way was closed to foreigners) and advices regarding traveling to Chengdu via Moxi since the main road was being repaired.

And the following day we actually left the forbidden area and we headed to Moxi with a really nice excursion.