Mcleod Ganj

I'm staying in a guest house opposite the school until I find more permanent accommodation. The school is half-way up the hill between Dharamsala and Mcleod Ganj, a place called 'Gangyi'. If anyone's ever been to Manchester, Gangyi is a miniature equivalent of Levenshulme - a noisy main road, with a few houses and shops clustered around it.

Monday was the first day at school. I met my new classmates - 6 boys and 15 girls. 3 of the boys are married and another is a monk. Oh yeah! Today was an informal school-day and after lunch I got a taxi up the hill into Mcleod Ganj. I went with my new classmate, venerable Drolkar, who is an Australian nun. She gave me a tongue-in-cheek tour of Mcleod Ganj and then we spent ages in Mcllo Restaurant drinking tea.

Mcleod Ganj, I understand, was nothing more than a hill station set up by the British during their occupation of India. After the Chinese entered Tibet in the 1950's, many Tibetans fled the country by hiking over the Himalayas into India or Nepal. Those who entered India, including HH Dalai Lama, chose to settle in Mcleod Ganj.

Nowadays, Mcleod Ganj has become a backpacking hippy hotspot, and consequently, it has been overtaken by Indians cashing in on gullible, spiritual middle-class white tourists. Talking to veterans, only 5 or 10 years ago, "it was all just forest here". Now it's a circus of shabbily-erected concrete buildings, jeeps, internet cafes, insanely-driven vans, restaurants, motorbikes, convenience stores and Indian women begging for money by showing off their mutated limbs and week-old babies.