Day 24 - Dharamsala

A lot to recap. First off, Laura and I have made it safely to Dharamsala, a community in the foothills of the Himalayas that has a large Tibetan refugee population. We are situated and excited to explore. On Wednesday we said goodbye to the Grewal family and departed Sirsa for Chandigar. We did this for two reasons. One, the Grewal's said that Chandigar is beautiful and the most well-planned city in India. Two, it cut the trip to Dharamsala into two 6-8 hour bus rides instead of one painfully long stretch.

Chandigar was indeed a very beautifully city and so well planned that even I could figure it out in a day. We arrived late on Wednesday, found or hotel and proceeded to sleep in for the first time in a while. We only had one full day in the city, so Laura and I wandered around and found a market area where we proceeded to eat pizza and veggie burger, drink coke, browse shops and peruse the many street vendors. We decided that we deserved to splurge after the isolation of the farm and that we definitely needed some variety in our diets. Food at the Grewal's was most often delicious, but also most often the same.

Friday morning we packed up, checked out and, with a surprising amount of stress, managed to get on a bus to Dharamsala. The road to Dharamsala is of legend, but I have to admit that it fell short of my expectations. It is steeply uphill with hairpin turns and narrow roads, but it is hardly the cliffs-edge road that I was made to picture. There's only a few moments where you get a really amazing view of the lushly green valley around you. For the most part it's just another mountain road, except for the stretch that was lined with hundreds and hundreds of monkeys. I'm not just toning it down to ease my mother's worried mind. Frankly, I was kind of disappointed that all the horror stories I heard proved false.

We arrived after dark, and without going into detail, getting to our guest house was stressful and tense, but we made it like the pro's we have become. After settling, we headed out in search of food. We found a quaint little cafe where I had the best soup I've ever had, spinach and tofu, and Laura had some amazing veggie momos in soup. I'm excited to explore today. There's a ton of vendors and cafes and tourists. It's the most foreigners we've seen since arriving in India. In Sirsa and Chandigar we were pretty much the only non-Indians (especially in Sirsa). Here, we're among a very diverse community of travelers and residents. The Dalai Lama lives here and is actually here this week doing some teachings, which probably explains the influx of tourists. We're hoping to see him teach at least one day, but we're not holding our breath.

Stay tuned for juicy details of Dharamsala.