The last days were just crazy, finally we arrived in Dharamkot, a village a bit up from McLeondGanj, also known as Upper Dharamsala. Yes that’s the place were the Dalai Lama resides.
Let’s start from the beginning … last time I we were sitting in the Ragdhani Express from Mumbai to New Dehli and I started breading out what I call an aircon-cold. The nasty thing in hot countries is, that you come from a sauna like atmosphere to a 15 degree ice cold fridge to have dinner inside. The train itself is very recommendable, if you are not coming “cold” to New Dehli. We thought ourself to be on the save side, as we had tickets for that afternoon train to Haridwar. So we were a bit hanging around, leaving our backpacks in a tourist office and visiting some shops. Around noon we came back to the station and were told the train to Haridwar is delayed for at least 9 hours … so we had to reconsider and the guy from the station sent us to the Government Tourist Office. There we booked a hotel for overnight and took next day a taxi, which is still much cheaper than an airticket to Dharamsala.
The hotel Karat87 is not really recommendable. Stuff is not really friendly and our room was directly above the hotel bar and they played amplified tabla there… urrrrsai….
In any case, NewDehli is a big city and people living there told us all the time, the city just makes you sick.
McLeondGanj is called little Lhasa by the Tibetans and we buzzing through the city a bit today. People here are quite different, they don’t run after you and push you to sell you something, on the other side negotiating a better price is more difficult. I will post some photos the next days. I still didn’t recover fully from that aircon-cold.
Thank you, I have recently been searching for information about this topic for ages and yours is the best I have discovered so far.