The bus to Dharamsala was a rickety skeleton of a bus. The bus was completely full, and our luggage lined the aisle of the bus. These buses make local stops while traveling long distances, so we were never at a realy full-throttle pace. However, our bus seemed to take longer than usual, and our 4-hour trip on the bus ended up taking 6 hours uphill. The ticket man on the bus was obnoxious and always yelling at someone. I found it very funny when the bus driver tried abandoning the ticket man on the side of the street at one of the stops we made.
I napped as we craweled up the Himalayas to upper Dharamsala. We ended our bus at Mcleod Ganj, and owner of the hotel we were staying at, Javid from Pink House, met us and led us through the town to drop off our bags and rest.
Mcleod Ganj is absolutely amazing! We are at the top of a large chain of mountains and can see the clouds hanging on top of the mountain tips. Hawks sway around the hotels in our area (which are all on the slopes of the mountains). The air is fresh and cool. The actual town is very, very clean (even on American standards). There are Tibetan monks roaming everywhere on the streets. Did I mention that there are Aryvedic-Yoga-Massage-Reiki-Healing centers every 2 feet here? And with that comes a whole lot of white people and tourists; most of the people here are either Tibetan or yogi/New Age/hippy/backpackers seeking refuge in the tops of the Himalayas. A lot of little shops sell hippy outfits and Buddhist books and organic/healthy restaurants crowd the 3 main streets here. It's actually really easy to forget completely that this is actually a place in India, to be honest. We have been joking constantly that we are in the middle of some chasm of the world, not clinging to any specific country identity. We are in the middle of monsoon season here, so it rains at least once a day, and the fog rolls in over the mountains all of the time.
After getting our nice rooms set up for our stay here, and a cup of Kashmiri green tea with Javid, we went to Nick's Italian Restaurant for a large lunch. We hadn't eaten dinner or breakfast because of the travel, so we were all pretty ravaged by the time we got here. Entering this clean shop, we noticed that most of the people here were tourists (aka non-Indians), which is a complete turn around from the last few weeks in India. But we ate, and we ate a lot. Lots of food, and that means 5 desserts. We have been filling ourselves silly while we have been staying in this utopian town. We really like the momos here, which are basically simple dumplings. We eat them daily.
We shopped around in the cute shops and green markets a bit in the main roads before heading over to the town "club", Xcite, for some aperitifs. This place was hilarious....they only had 2 things: one type of beer, and one type of fruit wine. Both of which were really awful, particularly the plum wine I ordered. And they didn't do alcohol by the glass, but rather by the bottle, meaning that we were stuck with large jugs of bad wine and beer. The place was very sticky and the menus had bad English and bad humor rolled together, making our whole experience hilarious and very enjoyable.
We ate a Tibetan dinner at Mount View, which was not great. At every restaurant we have gone to, they don't have half of what we try to order, which makes our experiences even more enjoyable and humorous. Really it doesn't bother us, but it always brings us a bunch of laughs.
We ended the night joking around and playing Uno in the hotel rooms until later in the evening.
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