Dharamshala trip: Namaskar!
Reaching Dharamshala!... Right from there we take bus to McLeodganj, the station we’d be staying at… 1800 m above the sea level….
The trip gave me all the reasons to dethrone Lonely Planet and alike (Footprints, I am using)…
“There is an obvious Tibetan influence in McLeodganj”, my Footprint says… Yep…. if not mentioning the fact that the whole place is nothing about a shelter for the Tibetan refugees. Before coming here I thought of Dharamshala as just one of the hill stations in Himalaya. Only after coming here I realized its special status of Tibetan refugees’ settlement.
In fact, McLeodganj was established by British (here the name comes) between 1815 and 1947, but it did not become major destination before the Dalai Lama settled here after the Chinese invasion to Tibet. In 1959 He re-established the Tibetan government in exile known as the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA) of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. It serves as a continuation of the government of independent Tibet. The flow of refugees from Tibet continues nowadays and there are about 130 000 Tibetans living in exile, of with 85 150 live in India. The latter has 35 formal Tibetan settlements with Dharamshala being one of them (source – Tibetan Women. The status of exiled Tibetan women in India. 2005).
Some more to kill Lonely Planet – list of eateries is very disappointing. As the choice of the majority of our mates was….Clean place some were looking for… I do not like clean places in India, because I do not believe in their existence in this country, ok? But, yes, pathetic and price places claiming to be clean are there… Anya and me were searching for something rather more authentic and not that pricy too.. And found…. This amazing place “Tibetan memory” where was no single foreigner but us. Not even mentioned in the guidebook – what a shame, dear authors….
The trip gave me all the reasons to dethrone Lonely Planet and alike (Footprints, I am using)…
“There is an obvious Tibetan influence in McLeodganj”, my Footprint says… Yep…. if not mentioning the fact that the whole place is nothing about a shelter for the Tibetan refugees. Before coming here I thought of Dharamshala as just one of the hill stations in Himalaya. Only after coming here I realized its special status of Tibetan refugees’ settlement.
In fact, McLeodganj was established by British (here the name comes) between 1815 and 1947, but it did not become major destination before the Dalai Lama settled here after the Chinese invasion to Tibet. In 1959 He re-established the Tibetan government in exile known as the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA) of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. It serves as a continuation of the government of independent Tibet. The flow of refugees from Tibet continues nowadays and there are about 130 000 Tibetans living in exile, of with 85 150 live in India. The latter has 35 formal Tibetan settlements with Dharamshala being one of them (source – Tibetan Women. The status of exiled Tibetan women in India. 2005).
Some more to kill Lonely Planet – list of eateries is very disappointing. As the choice of the majority of our mates was….Clean place some were looking for… I do not like clean places in India, because I do not believe in their existence in this country, ok? But, yes, pathetic and price places claiming to be clean are there… Anya and me were searching for something rather more authentic and not that pricy too.. And found…. This amazing place “Tibetan memory” where was no single foreigner but us. Not even mentioned in the guidebook – what a shame, dear authors….
posted by Olga Tikhonova | 8:14 pm
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