A bit more from the Himalayas

10.04.2010 40 °C

Hey dudes!

I've managed to upload some more photos from the Himalayas for you guys. Here are some of our favourites...

These photos are from a place called the Norbulinka institute in Dharamshala, close to the Tibetan Border. It's a charity that helps Tibetans and it specialises in crafts and hand made artefacts. Below you'll see some of the processes involved in making a huge Buddha statue...

Lovely flowers and ting....

These photos were taken about 15 minutes walk from our cottage in Palampur. I was certainly not expecting anything like this when the owner casually said "there's a stream over there somewhere...."

I found this river snake lurking...

And a lizard doing a funky dance...

Walking back up I was lucky to get the opportunity to take some amazing photos...

Some more amazing vistas...

While we were there we visted Mcleod Ganj, home of the Dalai Lama. It's a really funky little town, full of hippies and some great markets. It did hit home how sad the Tibetan story is when you see photos stuck to trees of political prisoners taken recently by the chinese communist government...

Remember these from the Golden Child!!!! I-I-I-I-I-I want the knife.....

The sacred cross dagger of Ajantii (another Golden Child reference mainly for the benefit of Jasen, Andy and Pete!)

And this one solely for the benefit of Jasen... GUTTED!!!!

Tibetan kids are SO CUTE...

More photos from Mcleod Ganj and Tibetan Monasterys....

These are some of the photos we missed off from the last blog update, some nice views, temples, pottery pics...
You'll notice one photo of what looks like hundreds of flags hanging in the forest. These are everywhere as you climb the mountain pass up to Sherabling Monastery, there are thousands and thousands of them. Each flag is filled with bhuddist mantras that the tibetans believed are carried off into the wind...

This is Karan's 1926 Model T Ford, he owns the cottages we stayed at in the himalayas...

On the way from Amritsar (Punjab) to Himachal Pradesh we smelled something funny, not unlike a student common room. Turns out weed grows EVERYWHERE in this region...