The Dalai Lama's residence is next door to the temple. He wasn't home: he's currently touring Australia giving a series of talks this week. The Lama has been in exile from Tibet since 1959 and has lived McLeod Ganj for the last 51 years. He turns 76 next week. It's pretty incredible that he still can tour the world speaking at peace conferences. I hope I can at least still play golf at that age.
We all hung out on the balcony at our guesthouse for a while and then went to dinner. Our friends gave us each a scroll with 'om mani padme hum' written in Hindi script. We thanked them, said goodbye, made plans to meet up again in Delhi and boarded our ten hour night bus to Manali.
Manali is another mountain town in Himachal Pradesh, located on the Beas River north of the Kullu valley. It is the unofficial adventure tourism capital of India; here you can ski, trek, raft, mountain climb, paraglide, fish, kayak...even zorb. In case you ever want to roll down a mountain in a giant plastic ball.
The town has a very similar feel to other winter resorts. The streets of Old Manali are lined with ski shops, clothing stores, backpacker cafes and small guesthouses. We spent a lot of time hanging out at Pao, a glorified flophouse that had cool artwork on the walls, amazing food and a ton of pillows.
We relaxed around town for a day. On Friday, my friend Guy, one of my co-extras from back in my Bollywood days, joined us in Manali. We attempted to hike to Solang Nullah, a valley 11 kilometers north of Old Manali. We never made it...somehow we wound up on the wrong side of the mountain in another valley entirely. But after crossing some sketchy terrain we finally came to a huge waterfall high in the mountains that we had spotted from our guesthouse balcony. Sometimes getting lost is the best thing that can happen to you.
Later that night, I innocently snapped a photo of a ram that was walking in the street. An old lady walking next to the ram immediately demanded that I pay her 20 rupees for the photo. Guy speaks Hindi, so he was able to discern that walking the ram is her "business" and that she regularly charges 20 rupees for a photo, citing that the ram is "magical" because it has four horns. After a few seconds she grabbed a firm grasp of my shirt and looked as if she was going to cane me. I guess you could say the lady was a bit crazy. She was getting pretty angry and violence seemed eminent, so Guy made a distraction and we ran down the street as she threw rocks at us. I wish I were making this up. All for a photo of a four-horned ram.
On Sunday morning, we took a taxi toward Kullu and then rafted the rapids of the Beas River. There had been some heavy rainfall the night before, and high water levels meant for more intense rapids. We even took a small jeep a bit further down river to avoid some grade five rapids that had formed along the normal rout. But in spite of this precaution, about ten minutes into the trip, we hit a rapid and suddenly the raft was completely submerged in the water. For a few minutes we were desperately shifting from one side of the raft to the other to avoid flipping. I'm still a bit shocked that we didn't capsize. After a long battle with the rapid we finally broke loose, losing one man and two paddles overboard in the struggle. We ultimately survived the rapids, and then took what turned out to be the longest bus ride of my life: 17 hours from Manali to Delhi. The battery died an hour into the trip and sometime during the night we got a flat tire. We were in the backseat, the only ones on the bus that do not recline...not the most pleasant 17 hours of my life.
But we made it to Delhi, and today we spent the day chilling with Saahil, Deepanshi, Poonam, and Rohan, a few of the friends we made in McLeod Ganj. Most of the day was spent avoiding the heat...I remember why I went to the mountains now. In the afternoon, we saw the new X-Men movie in theaters, which like all other movies in India included a ten minute intermission at the film's halfway point. I also had my introduction to the Delhi metro which is one of the more crowded I've been inside of but thankfully air-conditioned. That's all for now, here's to enjoying my last few days in Asia...
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