So, ive just got back to Delhi after a while up near the Inidan Himalayas. I think it was almost 2 weeks, but its hard to know really?
i spent a bit over a week in a little town called Vashist, near Manali, in the foothills of the Himalayas. We found an awesome hotel which looked out over the valley & Beas river below and it had a little bench-swing just outside my room :) all for NZ$6 per nite! not bad i reckon!!
It was a really beautiful area - lots of places to go exploring, through forests and streams, waterfalls & caves to find, or not find in one case, and lots of delicious food to be tasted. and i found some cool americans to hang out with too ;)
There were a few different ancient temples & shrines to visit - one of which entailed riding horseback for over an hour in the pouring rain! tourists are so silly ay!! But when we got there, there was a spectacular sight of a normally tame waterfall raging down right next to the shrine and the entire valley was veiled in mist, making it all rather surreal.
but all good things have to end, so i left Manali & moved on to Dharamsala, which is a pretty special place for the large Tibetan community, as it is the 'temporary' home of the Dalai Lama (since the 1950s!). i visited the local Buddhist temple complex & museum about Chinese occupation of Tibet - over a million Tibetans killed in the past few decades! all despite an ancient truce between the Tibetans and Chinese which was literally set in stone.
I also did a day walk up to Triund (almost 3000m high), which is supposed to provide a spectacular view over the surrounding area & up to the neighbouring summits. But since its now the monsoon season, i found myself in the midst of a thunderstorm, complete with genuine surround sound, super-bass thunder! The increasing rain also made our descent a bit tricky, as the gentle streams had grown into angry young waterfalls, sweeping straight across the path. It didnt take long for my boots to get soaked through, but they did their job at holding firm to the earth when i needed it :) The few locals that we'd seen with their goats and cows on our way up that morning had very sensibly removed to more sheltered locations. Once again, silly tourist walking round in the pouring rain!!
But adventures arent supposed to be easy are they ;)
