Day 2: Dharamsala

Not much was planned for today other than walking around the narrow roads of Mcleod Ganj. Mcleod Ganj is about 10 km from Dharamsala. The whole place is covered in less than 2 km radius. The highlight is of course the temple, monastery and the office of His Holiness.

The traffic along the street is hopeless. It has hardly the width of a car and all the tourists coming with their fat SUV’s makes the place too crowded even to walk. To add to that are the drivers honking all the time. There are basically 2 roads running parallel from the main square towards the temple. One is called the temple road. Both roads are one way roads. All the craft shops are situated in these two roads

We just walked around the roads in the day time. The hotel owner suggested that we should do the ‘Khora walk’ in the evening. The walk is around 2 km circling the temple and the monastery. The Buddhist monks do it in the evening in the clockwise direction. For them it is a prayer walk circling the temple and H.H. We also did it in the evening. It was an absolutely beautiful walk along the narrow paths through the woods lined with Tibetan prayer flags, mani stones and prayer wheels. The absolute silence, the beautiful view of the snow-capped mountains and the spiritual atmosphere helped to calm my mind from the madness in the last days. At the end of the walk we visited the temple where a large statue of Buddha could be seen. Afterwards we had a dinner in one of the roof top restaurants. I didn’t enjoy it much as it was noisy being on the side of the street. In addition the staffs were greedy and unfriendly.