Mystic Mountain – Mc Leod Ganj

Narrow winding roads through tea gardens, deep gorges with establishments in clutter in the distance, a bustling market when you reach the top of the hill where you can have fruit wines and Tibetan massage. Could there be a better getaway from the scorching city where you feel like breaking the red lights where you get baked? McLeod Gunj is now just two hours away with flights operating between Delhi and Kangra. From Kangra, you can take a cab for five hundred rupees that’ll take you to McLeod Gunj.

The place is quite crowded now in general, and this time of the year makes it even more crowded, there are long jams at times. The jams, however, do not take away from the charm, you can just walk it and enjoy the view while your cab trudges along. On top of the hill is Bhagsunag, where there’s a temple and a waterfall. This is the best place to stay as it’s less crowded than McLeod Gunj, and just fifteen minutes walk from there. One has to trek for half an hour to reach the falls; you can either walk along the path or walk through the rocks through which the river flows. People generally laze around on the rocks, couples lost in themselves, some taking a nap, or washing clothes, or drinking and dancing. Near the fall is a sheltered spot where people have painted graffiti on stones. The grafitti are beautiful – paintings, messages of peace and love. An elderly couple came and folded their hands at the spot. The wife asked, “Whose temple is this?” and the husband replied, “Yeh jal devta ka mandir hai.” At the fall, the water is so chilled that they cool their cold drink crates in that. The shower of the fall is blissful, and you can just hang around for hours there, and have refreshments as well at the two stalls nearby.

Downhill, the McLeod Gunj market bustles with activity. There are pamphlets advertising Tibetan massage for men and women- you can get massaged, you can learn it; you can learn astrology, feng-shui, languages, and hordes of things. The book shops are amazing, with unique books about Tibet, Tibetan astrology and odd second hand books which foreigners sell off. You’ll find many books in Hebrew too. For, the Israeli population is overwhelming, the market is full of Israelis shopping and biking around. A large number of foreigners ensures a tremendous variety of food in the restaurants. At Bhagsunag, the German bakery has Israeli, Tibetan, German and Indian foods, and priced very reasonably. You get fruit wines in McLeod Gunj as well, from rhododendron to apple to plum. One can also get a lot of jazzy and ethnic Tibetan costumes as well.

The main attraction of McLeod Gunj is the Dalai Lama monastery. There are several monasteries in the area. The one next to the market is an imposing structure with a series of good-luck wheels around it, and a numbers of monks chanting their mantras inside it. A little away is the Dal Lake, which is considered very holy. When you go boating, you have to take your shoes off at the bank. The lake is small and depleting, and needs a lot of maintenance. Do not confuse the hounds for dogs and try to shoo them here. They are real hounds! Down the hill from Dal Lake are a couple of resorts where you can chill out with a swim, massage, and beer. You have to go uphill again to reach the sunset point where you see little kids on horses going back to their international boarding school. The view from here is amazing, the telescope-wallas charge you ten bucks to show snow capped mountains.

There are hordes of places one can go to here, there are the tea gardens, monastries, endless number of temples. Our pick of the lot, however, is “St John’s Church in the Wilderness”. As you enter the place, a dog will bark at you and you’ll be freaked out, but it’s locked in a cage so you needn’t run away. It is really in the wilderness and very beautiful. It’s not an amazing piece of architecture aesthetically speaking, but its settings make it out-wordly with dense greenery at the edge of a deep valley, and the cemetery which has a thousand stories engraved on the graves. Here lies Lord Elgin, as well Lord Mc Leod himself. There’s a grave of a man who was killed by a bear, another grave of a soldier who died a day before his marriage. The church is in tatters and needs serious attempts at restoration.

At night, you can party in any of the hundreds of pubs around and eat and drink world cuisines and not empty your pockets. There are a couple of discs also, which play a lot of Punjabi music, they are the makeshift variety, and are great fun. You can watch movies in mini theatres where they play movies on DVDs.