Another night train saw us arrive in Pathenkot in North of Delhi and a rather fast 3 hr taxi ride to McLeod Ganj, home of the Dalhai Lama. We have been staying at around 1770m in the foothills of the Himalayas proving to be a great place to revocer from the old Delhi belly (only now to exchange it for a cold!). Respite arrived at perfect timing with the end of my luxury soft toilet paper brought from home so now it's back to the old shcool tracing paper again.

We couldn't have got the timing to visit this pace better if we tried. We had heard that the Dalhai Lama would be around to give a teaching around the 7th but to our suprise we arrived to discover that it would be his birthday as well on the 6th! We have been exploring this place by foot most days walking to nearby villages and waterfalls. We had met a Punjabi tourist staying locally with his aunt and have spent a couple of evenings with him playing pool, drinking, and cooking us some of his 'infamous' chicken curry. Generally the people are really freindly and generous but it's extremely difficult to distinguish between the genuine people and 'friends' that want to ultimately sell you things.

We attended the birthday celbrataions of His Holliness on Friday and the his rather crowded teaching the following day. I'm sorry to say that most of what he said (of course translated to English by another monk) went well over my head. Probably due to the lack of my knowledge of the Buddhist faith, practices and beliefs but was a once in a life time experience. Especially when we were bundled out of the way rapidly for a quick getaway for security reasons. Everyone was frisked going in creating long queues way out of the temple. This place is definately hippy central as you may well expect, some surprisingly old, life-long hippies here too.

We have been trying to get a long day walk in around the surrounding mountains but each free day there are problems. This morning and last night were marred by thunder storms preventing us from going up as the route accends some 1100 metres. I am espically dubious given the map we bought from the official Mountaineering Centre here is best described as a twelve year old's painting with dotted lines for paths and solid lines for ridges. I presume this is to encourage the use of guides of long treks. We will try again tomorow however we leave on the night bus for a new place...

One thing we have noticed so far is that India seems to be a Mecca for Western Redheads. They are all here, ginger, midnight ginger, tuscany sunset, strawberry blonde, pain bright red. We were going to start a ginger count on here but we have already lost count!