Delhi-McLeod Ganj-Dharamkot

So now 4 or 5 days in and have mostly started to catch up with sleep after about 4 sleepless nights either side of leaving the UK. We’re still semi-narcoleptic - with T ready to nap every hour and a half, a bit like a 6ft newborn, bless him -  but have started to ease into things in Dharamkot, a village just above McLeod Ganj at Dharamsala in Himachal Pradesh, northern India. Things are pretty peaceful for the most part and I’m glad to have picked it for our initial 10 days of chilling out, to shake off work and pre-travel stresses and generally ease into India, where we’ll be spending the next 3 months. Having hit the plane already shattered, the long flight via Doha got us into Delhi at around 4am on Friday morning and it was almost 6am when we reached Wongdhen House, a guesthouse I’d booked in Majnu ka Tilla, the Tibetan colony in the north of the city. Never having stayed in this area before, I picked it to simplify getting tickets for the Friday overnight bus to Dharamsala, as they leave fairly regularly.

I love the taxi ride through Delhi at night. This is only my third such arrival but as there’s been a gap of first 10 years and then 4 years, between my trips here, it’s been as exciting every time: first as my initial, slightly bewildering glimpse into the sountry as an 18 year old and the last twice as a reminder of that, re-kindling my excitement and jogging my memory for all the things you forget about a place between visits. The smells, the heat even before dawn. Weird, suddenly familiar banalities like the height and style of a pavement and kerb, the route through town from the airport, skimming Connaught Place and up alongside the back of the Red Fort. Dozens of people asleep at the roadsides: cycle-rickshaw drivers sleeping in their carts, others stretched out forgotten and exposed on kerbsides and in tunnels, perhaps ahead of a day's work, perhaps not; just as jarring and shocking to European eyes as the first time you see it.

Wongdhen House, to be honest, was more rundown than I’d expected for the price, though I’m out of practice and easing back into this. In the sense of re-acclimatising to the balance to be struck between seeking value for money even in basic accommodation and Not Being an Arse about Haggling Over Every Rupee. (And the staggering scale of the latter among (relatively) wealthy foreigners travelling through India can only be experienced to be believed.) Basic never bothers me in rooms, within reason, but rudimentary cleanliness increasingly does compared to when I was younger – as does basic security, privacy and sound-proofing, as an intermittent insomniac. On the latter points I’m definitely more of a stickler now. But the value for money thing is more of an issue too and I’m not entirely sure Wongdhen House delivered there, though will be able to tell better when we’ve spent some more time in Delhi.

So after a humid, pretty squalid 4 hours semi-sleep there (and hoping I hadn’t already appalled T too much as an India-newbie) we headed out to hit Delhi for a few hours before the night bus. We spent a few hours padding the streets of Old Delhi, including the stunning - and really quite serene despite its crowds - Jama Masjid mosque near the Fort which I’d never visited before and was really struck by. Even if it did bring my first few rounds of guerilla Blonde-Tourist-Lady photography (never my favourite India game but generally well-meaning and, for the most part, curiosity rather than lasciviously-led).  

As shattered as we were it was all a bit of a blur, wandering from bazaar to bazaar, thali to cola stop, with our first couple of rickshaw trips – the second of which was a rather manic dash in several wrong directions, with intricate 3-point turns across one-way highways, in the charge of a driver guessing his way. Dropping us off triumphantly, we’d paid up and crossed before realising it was entirely the wrong place. So the usual glorious jumble - which anywhere else might feel like wrong starts but here works out as all in a day’s ramble.

The bus stand for overnight Dharamsala departures is a track round to the side of the main Majnu ka Tilla strip, with a mix of tourists and locals returning home, many of who were Tibetans returning from recent protests in Delhi where a number of monks are currently on hunger strike and others had been jailed, we were told by an English expat who had made her home in Dharamsala 25 years ago after a literary sabbatical that never ended. Only an hour later, due to construction work blocking the bus access route, which required the tour operators and drivers to pay off the police, we pulled out and on our way. We’d ended up on the back row, after some deliberation; notoriously terrible seats on bumpy routes, we were reluctant to delay the journey by holding out.

And it wasn’t so very bad, as our first overnighter - though after several sleepless nights and barely 15 hours into India (still hoping the exhausted boy wasn’t regretting getting himself into this), the 10 hours of springing up and down over every lurch under a leaking air-con unit were still a little tough going and it was pretty great to finally pull into McLeod Ganj – pouring rain, swirling mist and beautiful mountain-scapes – at 7.30am. 

A brief taxi up the hill and we arrived in the little hamlet of Dharamkot, a thigh-strengthening 20 min walk up the winding road: one of India’s many Little Israels, making for great hummus and brilliant travel infrastructure amidst the regular ebb and flow of Indian/Tibetan life – if a bit too much 2am chatter requiring some sturdy earphones for old codgers like us...

And after a few chais, a mammoth sleep and one guesthouse move, these have been our views since Sunday morning. A long way from Leyton...