Normal India travel update: Chandigarh, Dalia Lama, McLeod Ganj, Triund

Don’t worry Lucas, just a normal travel update this time. From Mandi I went south to visit Chandigarh. A strange city, planned a la Canberra and Milton Keynes, but seemed to have kept some sort of soul to it. And strange in India for being distinctly middle class. Air conditioned shops, western brands, slick bars, disposable income galore. Whatever “the real India” is, this ain’t it. Or maybe the truth is that the real India is so complicated, with endless cultures, languages, religions mixed into one, that Chandigarh forms a valid part of it, just as the slums of Delhi? I don’t know, but it was a good place to visit. It was also the first time I used couchsurfing in India and staying with Ashish and his family was fantastic. It wasn’t so different from home in a lot of ways, teenage daughter glued to TV soaps etc, but was also a rare way to actually live with an Indian family for a couple of days. Thank you. These photos are from Chandigarh’s rock garden or junk garden, in which everything is made from waste products.

Next bus trip jolted me back up into the hills to Daramsala and McLeod Ganj. This is where the Dalai Lama lives and the Tibetan government in exile, and many Tibetan refugees. It is a good place to learn about what has happened and continues to happen there in Tibet, and speaking to all the people who walked over the Himalayas at risk of imprisonment, torture, death, for the chance to freely practise their own culture is inspiring. I’ve started volunteering here and will remain for most of my time in India. Will write more later.

I originally came to attend the teachings of the Dalai Lama. He regularly gives public teachings which everyone is free to attend. Check out www.dalailama.com for dates and details. Even for interested non-Buddhists it is a great experience to hear him speak and even to see him close up. He is very intelligent, well-read, humble, and a powerful person, but also funny. He makes a surprising amount of (good) jokes. He speaks sometimes in English, sometimes in Tibetan, but you can buy an FM radio and there is a live translation into English all the time, and other languages like Chinese, Korean too.

McLeod Ganj is a very touristy town but with nice walks nearby and views down the hazy valleys and up into the cloudy mountains. And there is a church there! St. John of the Wilderness. A temptingly tasty looking cow was lounging in front of it and I was trying to decide if it was still sacred there or not…

(may all sentient beings achieve happiness):

From McLeod I teamed up with my friend Ajax for an overnight hike up to Triund and beyond to a glacier. I met him when he was hosted by the same fantastic couchsurfers as me and he taught me Mexican slang over the two days. Here I am at Triund:

There are small tea-tents there from which you can buy food and hire tents, making for a pretty light backpack. Next morning we got up before sunrise and walked up to find the glacier. We met this nice shepard who offered a cup of chai. When we accepted he made it then milked a goat in front of us and poured it straight in the tea, still warm! A lot of the men in Himachal Pradesh wear hats similar to his, very colourful.

The “glacier” looked like this. Invisible. A small disappointment but still a nice walk and nice views everywhere.

Lastly a spot of meta-tourism, these Thai monks were also at Triund:

Brighton

At the beach

Brighton pavillion

Local shop. World’s best t-shirt.

Local grafitti.

Our noisy neighbours.

At Sussex vs Durham. Mustaq Ahmed!

Our street.

Rambling nearby

In front of the beach, Hove.

This is the day’s 3rd post after this and this.

I’ve moved house – to Brighton! Brighton is lovely, a really nice place. We live in the North Laine, in my humble opinion the coolest part of the coolest city in the UK (that I know of) (and even despite me living there). Come visit. I still have my same job, I travel to London some days and work from home some days. If I was planning on staying in the UK it would definitely be here… but…

we’ll only be here till the end of July, then the world awaits…

And to start the summer’s travels, on August 8th I’m going to participate in European Hitch-hiking day. If you’re around, maybe you should too. Let’s race to Paris!

Montreal

(ye olde 1)

(!)

(ye olde 2)

(marmot!)

(graffiti)

(advertising!)

(squirrel)

(white squirrel!)

(Rue St-Denis)

(Val and Louise-Phillipe picnic atop Mont-Royal)

Montreal is a cool city. In the funky – cosmopolitan – young people – good graffiti – arty – lots going on – kind of way.

London -> Stockholm -> London -> Canterbury -> London -> Gent -> Brussels -> London

Well folks, it’s been a while between blog posts, but that doesn’t mean that I’ve been idle. In fact the last month has been very busy with travels and I’m going to cram trips to Stockholm, Canterbury and Belgium into this post. This obviously doesn’t do justice to the destinations, but then neither does spending just a weekend in them.

One Friday night shortly after my return from Egypt, Tony and I headed out to the airport and another low-cost flight, this time to Stockholm. Or rather, as is the low-cost want, to a small town > 100km from Stockholm. (For those concerned, like myself, about all this climate-change malacky, I have recently bought carbon credits for all the flights I took since leaving NZ. Whether this is truly worthwhile or just contributing to the retirement fund of someone clever enough to take advantage of well-meaning middle-class trying-to-be-eco-concious travellers, I’m not sure. Anyway, I did. And decided in the coming months to avoid planes a little more than I have been so far.) Our Chilean-Swedish host, Jose`, showed the overwhelming hospitality of couchsurfing, and wouldn’t let us sleep during the weekend because there was too much that we had to do. It is a very nice city, built on a series of islands and rivers, with a nice old quarter of church steeples and cobblestones. The Nobel Prize museum and the modern art gallery were excellent. It is hard to get a feeling for anywhere in so short a time, and I think even harder to understand Sweden by seeing only its cosmopolitan capital, and even harder from the generally reserved attitude of the natives. But it was a nice city, and would probably be a lot nicer in spring when things start to defrost, literally and otherwise.

Tony searching for the meaning of life (and finding only fishing ships)

We arrived back in London late on the sunday night, saw a fox (my first) snooping outside our flat as we arrived, and crashed straight to sleep. But there’s no rest for the wicked, and next weekend…

… we were back on the road. This time just down the road in fact, to Canterbury. It shares its name with my home province. Older for one. Much bigger and nicer cathedral for another.

The real Canterbury Cathedral

It is a very nice town and was the first place in England I’d really been. (London is definitely not England. It is the world.) Instead of endless fried chicken and kebabs there were cups of tea and warm ales.

Ye olde Canterbury

It was very nice. And the cathedral was amazing… someone had told me that it is the same as the one in Christchurch, but they obviously haven’t been there. It is very much older, wiser, and more ornate. It’s the home of the Church in England… Christianity was brought to the UK – before there was a UK – by the local king marrying someone from France, who brought the religion with her and the pagan masses of England were saved by the benevolent church. Hooray! The town really is like I picture England, and I liked it very much.

Chillaxed in London the next weekend, but did the tourist thing a bit too…

London

Last friday night at 630 met Tony and Lucas at Kings Cross – St Pancras station. Less than two hours later we were in the centre of Brussels. High speed rail is awesome. We then changed trains and headed out to Gent, where we stayed with a Belgian-Italian couple we’d hosted a few weeks earlier. I don’t know your preconceptions of Belgium, but mine were of a fairly dull, orderly country full of mussels and fried potatos. Which just reinforces a line from my favourite poem, which says that ‘the more one travels, the less one knows’. Once more I was reminded how wrong I was; Gent was full of artsy grafitti, funky bars, and had a very youthful vibe.

Old building in Gent

Crossword grafitti

And a mean castle. We then returned to Brussels and visited (amongst other things) a very large molecule and a statue of a boy urinating, and it was monday morning already and time for the train back to London. A really good weekend that seemed that much longer for being able to stay three nights instead of two, and visiting a couple of different places.

Lucas avec Atomium

Atomium avec Bruxelles

Good craic in Belfast

The last weekend before the xmas break me, Tony, and my girlfriend (!) Valerie decided to start riding the lowcost pony and jetsetted over to Belfast. It was a fun weekend in a very interesting city. All that stuff I used to not pay attention to on the news is very visible, though ‘the troubles’ are happily over. Look at the peace wall that still divides the city. They lock its gates at night too.Either side of the peace wall the streets are covered in political murals. They’re very well done and often very graphically violent. The feel on either side of the line is quite different: Protestant or Catholic churches, Irish language bilingual roadsigns or not, Union Jacks or Republic of Ireland flags, etc.
But the people on both sides are remarkably friendly. Look at this guy: He saw our cameras out the pub window and came over for a chat and a photo… and his friend was nice enough not to punch me when I referred to ‘The Republic of Ireland’… a bit of a faux pas when on the Catholic side of things. ‘The South’ would have been the more appropriate appellation.
As well as political tourism we found plenty of time to visit the local pubs and parties and were once again overwhelmed by the hospitality of our couchsurfing host. And after a large Irish Fry on the sunday morning wandered out of town in search of this hill… apparently constructed as part of a (Norman?) fort many years before any human had even laid eyes on New Zealand. After London, it was refreshing to be able to walk from the city to the countryside.