So now I am in Manali, the once unspoilt village in Kullu valley, now packed with Israeli adventure seekers, local honeymooners and Tibetan refugees after their soul trips to McLeod Ganj.

The trip from Dharamshala to Manali was a pain in the neck as always. The zigzag road from McLeod all the way up and down at midnight, my stomach was stirring and whirring at every corner the bus made a turn. All the trips I had with dad and mum when I was very young came out from memory, the local bus with dusty windows, shaking doors with sharp noice whenever the runout tires hit a tiny stone.

Accompanying the wave of arriving Israelis, Manali has been the inevitable increase in cafes playing techno in a bid to attract custom. Less party oriented tourists have been heading for the peace and quiet of the village periphery, fleeing the distinctly unshanti mess that the area around Dragon guest house becomes when a party is due; perhaps showing their age, or maybe a belief that the Kulu Valley is not simply an outdoor branch of some Tel Aviv nightclub. With only 2 nights staying here, I decided to keep my rusty room above the Manaslu Bridge, feeding my roommating 2 Himalayan lizards with mosquittos and other insects. Obviously my job was great, both of them have been fattened in less than 48 hours since I met them under my harder-than-rock bed.

The local police has publicly declared war on the “drug menace” in the valley. One of the casualties have been the famed parties, seen as they are as the epicentre of antisocial druggie behaviour. Under the new director’s direction the cops have been especially zealous in ensuring that outdoor fun for tourists is strictly limited to more wholesome activities such as trekking and white water rafting, with parties only technically legal if they are held indoors and dont involve drugs. This has caused more than a little friction with the local business people in Old Manali who realise that frequent parties and copious charas consumption are the best way to get bums on seats in their guest houses and restaurants; in particular Israelis, although they are seen as something of a double edged sword, coming as they do with plenty of cash and an equal amount of verbal, the latter to the extent that these days the mere mention of the word “baba” can induce a nasty nervous twitch in some of the local people who work with tourists.

To escape from the nirvana scene in Old Manali I took my last day here to Solang for paragliding, where I bump into a Kaika mela; the dance of the Gods in a hill village around five kms before the taking off spot for para. Himachal is much more developped in terms of tourism compare to Ladakh, even in this small Himalayan village with fairly more than a hundred people, a few stalls selling toys and pakora, and a fairly quiet atmosphere.

On the mela ground in front of a government tourist office for the association of para pilots, people were milling around and not much was happening. The Gods sat in a small area closed in on three sides by low walls, covered by a red and yellow canopy held up by four poles. There were seven statues seated, with shining metal fabric covering the bodies. Something familiar in the fabric: same as those in Benares before the dead boies are burnt in the burning ghat, the last jouney in the born-and-dear karma as human being.

Some of the finest views in the Kulu Valley are to be had on the east bank of the Beas (known locally as the left bank), in the midde of the Monsoon, the rice plants are a particularly vibrant green, and during the growing season, the terraced paddies shine out from among the surrounding fruit orchards.

The rice grown locally is known as red rice, a reddish brown variety with a rich taste far nicer than the usual kind local people eat on a daily basis. There was once far more of it grown, but fewer people take the trouble these days, turning their fields over to more profitable apple crops that wouldn’t survive in the flooded rice fields. Ram, my little pilot from a village on the right bank of Manaslu river said that his family stopped growing rice years ago, as the trees in neighbouring fields were overshadowing the paddies too much.

Once get off the road, after the Tibetan collony and a beautiful old style temple in the middle of the village and plenty of wonky old wood and stone houses, a stiff moto road climbs up the hill to the majestic view of the surrounding area.

Flying off from 4200m to 2000m high in 30 minutes, the freedom as a bird was overwhelming, I need more time to digest and put it into English, a language I started to think with. Power cut again in Old Manali, the pc I am working on is getting extremely slow, same as the buses I have taken in all over Himachal, time for a chai.

So I’m in Dharamshala, staying in a gorgeous guesthouse with fantastic mountain view among apple orchards, pine trees and rainbows from time to time during Monsoon break and hill station sunshine. Had a very relaxing day, the teaching has finished, straying out only for a casual walk along the river in the nearby forest.

There’s been almost constant rain since my first night – relentless, heavy rain, with lightning that seems somehow to cause power cuts.

Along the narrow streets of McLeod Ganj are three ‘cinemas’. Equipped with DVD players and massive projection or flat-screen TVs, they show 4 or 5 different films daily. For 30-45 rupees (40-60p) you can just about always catch a showing of topical classics like Kundun, Himalaya or Gandhi or recent big releases like Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Samsala or Millionaire Babe.

The main street is best avoided, truly a North Indian Costa del Sol for Israelis. It’s not the Israeliness I have a problem with, but rather the synthetic atmosphere. Have the feeling that it’s easier to perceive God/Being/Now in the country than the city because modern urban life is designed to cater for desires. So too with tourism. It’s observer’s paradox. We come looking for authenticity and our very presence prevents it. All the restaurant and shop signs are in Hebrew and trance music blares from every interior. Everywhere from Leh to Mcleodganj and Manali.

Hereafter is the Thoughts of an Israeli after returning from retreat

1. Silence is invaluable. When you make the commitment not to speak, you stop trying to impress. In most conversations there’s the desire to project an image of the self. Out in the real world, we fear silence because we’re not comfortable with the unadulterated moment. It comes from an ingrained sense of our own inadequacy.

2. Giving up on communicating with peers can force us to really confront and engage with things. We tend too much to rely on other peoples’ opinions, and this stops us from developing. Of course we can trust the wisdom, intelligence and experience of others, but only to a certain point – then you have to take over. Those people are not you. They have a different set of issues, circumstances and understandings. Two people can speak the same language and use the same words but still talk at complete cross-purposes. Progress – in anything – has to come from personal work. That’s why you can’t really change anyone. They have to want to change and the best you can do is give them the tools.

3. There isn’t very much to know, it’s just really hard to know it. Knowing something intellectually is a world away from grasping it deep down. That’s why, for me, studying the truth isn’t enough. It needs to be accompanied by meditation and practice.

4. Meditation is meant to reinforce truths but also to wipe clean the lens of our perceptions. Without our false beliefs and the confusing assumption that we need something to be happy and whole (a self-fulfilling prophecy), those truths are already there.

5. There are doctrinal differences between various religions and spiritual philosophies, but mainly the differences are in approach. An example: Yeshayahu Leibowitz contrasts Christianity’s crucifiction story with the Old Testament akedah, the near-sacrifice of Isaac. Abraham was required to overcome his personal desires, emotions and ethics to kill his son for God. In the crucifiction, God allows his own son to die for the sake of humanity. The difference seems massive. But both are stories of human completeness in God. The Christian myth requires its adherents to trust and know that God’s love is real. It exists. We don’t need anything. The Abraham-Isaac model is a call to let go of the things we think we need, of the need to need, and to discover that God’s love is real.

6. Leibowitz says that nothing in this world is inherently holy. The bread isn’t sacred until you say the blessing. He’s right. Our experience of the divine, which I understand as virtually identical to unsullied awareness, can’t occur in any external object. It can only take place at the site of our consciousness. That’s why the bread is only holy when we deliberately act to bear witness. The link between observation and observance is more than linguistic.

7. Shabbat is a taste of the world to come. What do I mean by the world to come? The state of knowing peaceful completeness. Not attaining but knowing. Shabbat is rest, rest is this realisation. There’s a danger for someone who hates their job and feels they need shabbat in order to escape and become themselves. Their shabbat rest can’t be perfect because they believe that without it they’re incomplete. Instead, we should try to take that realisation of our own completeness and bring it into our awareness throughout the rest of the week. Shabbat is not a thing acting as an addition to ourselves. It is rather the space to see ourselves.

Astonished by his thinking. Meditation retreat. Did the same when I was in Varanasi. Didn’t speak for days. A lot of things made sense. But I had difficulty to be silent and focus on thought. Application is a lot more difficult. I’m not sure I was getting there. Thirty-six pink white roses in the garden out of the ashram I stayed, I was not allowed to watch them and count them unless I was meditating on the roses, how can you be empty in mind when you are facing such a nice creation. The day I was back to the world was a BIG relief for me, as if I came back from the other side of the world.

Drinks and meals on the hillside rooftops, shopping in the clothes stores, where everything’s a bargain even by my standards as Chinese. Whatever you need is here. A bit of yoga, to balance the body and mind, some cooking lessons, to bring home those exotic tastes, a souvenir of the trip to create and recreate when you’ve reabsorbed yourself into routine life back home, meditation, Reiki, music, Tibetan, Hindi, massage, belly dance, what else would you expect.

The poverty and misfortune around in town is disturbing, what to do? Maybe give a few rupees to a beggar. He won’t recognise you tomorrow. He’ll probably ask you again in an hour. A lot of them have leprosy. Most of them can be cured but they’re able to earn a better living on the streets.

Western tourists, all consumers of the exotic here, dissatisfied with their lives and romanticizing the east. Here is where they are going to find, a bit of enlightenment, and it’s on the cheap. Get a course, get a teacher. You walk through the market and view the fruit and veg. On the wall above the stalls, are the notices of the other market. Reiki, crystals, vipassana, dream interpretation, drumming lessons, tabla. What about your own culture? You’d probably find as much inner peace doing ballet lessons in Paris. All you have here are a couple weeks and the projections of your wishful thinking?

Well, this place isn’t Thailand – there aren’t bars with TVs or restaurants where football fans can be sure of catching any game that’s on. Yes, there are foreigners’ haunts, but most tourists here dress in loose flowing robes and start the day with two hours of yoga rather than a hangover. No, McLeod Ganj is dead by 10.

Killing my last hours in the main bazaar of McLeod before my overnight bus to Manali. All the Taiwanese and Southeast Asian Chinese are living tonight back to where they came from, the teaching is finished, no point for them to stay in town. Chinese don’t travel as backpacker, you should all wear the same color of caps and follow the flags held by the tour guide, my tent mate in Ladakh once told me, half jokingly, but I know he meant it, and he knew I knew he meant it. Missing my Jewish buddies during the long tough trek in Markha Valley, the Israeli jokes, which always start with “When I was
in Israeli army…”

Downpour stopped outside, time to go to OM Guest House for the last sunset I will enjoy in McLeod.

Thunderstorm outside while I am typing in this 24×7 Cyber Café, rather rare for Monsoon season. Only a few persistent rays pierce through the thick darkness and raindrops, rebelling against night setting in.

Walking down the streets, through the alleys and lanes of McLeod Ganj… The usual mélange of nationalities, Israelis in Hebrew, Italian hippies with coated hair, Japanese shining fair skin and New Zealanders wrapping a cigarette. Glasses of butter tea or chai dangling from their fingers passionately, discussing world politics with a bit of newly gained spiritual understanding and philosophy.

Monasteries to offer prayers and donations… T-Shirts and bumper stickers screaming Free Tibet… Street vendors selling prayer flags, praying wheels, tangkhas and cymbals… Buddhist knifes and tantric tools… restaurants serving pastas and paronthas… Everywhere I go, McLeod Ganj is a conglomeration of spiritualism, fight for recognition and pure business-minded pursuit of wealth. This mirrors itself mostly clearly in the economy of the small township. Every store educates the traveler more of another land – Tibet. One only remembers that the place is in India because of the over familiar presence of Kashmiri and Rajasthani artifact stores found in foreigner frequented places in India.

The crashing loneliness is back into the deepest corner of my bone, the tiresomeness of being in a very deep heart of India, with Tibetan refugees, Lamas, Chomos and tourists from all over, recently hundreds of Taiwanese and overseas Chinese for His Holiness Dalai Lama’s teaching so Mandarin, Hakka and Cantonese are spoken very often in the bazaar and lanes, but I am still the only Mainlander, the foreigner.

Signed up for the teaching of His Holiness (the path to enlightenment with Tsongkaba) as requested by the Taiwan Group at the Main Temple in McLeod Ganj. Thousands of Lamas, Chomos from the major three Tibetan monasteries in the south of India and other places, together with audience from all over the world crowded in the temple, sitting on the ground, sipping butter tea and listening to his teaching with interpreters from radio in Hebrew, English, Japanese, Spanish, Italian. The class rose to its feet and bowed, hands joined, and as I crambled to keep pace, the assembly dropped to its knees and touched its forhead to the ground, up and down, up and down, up and down, three times.

I was about to describe the audience as foreigners, but this was a relative term. Who was foreigner in Dharamshala? The sole Indian in a Tibetan community? The Tibetan community in India? And if all these visitors from the west had gathered to study Buddhism, then isn’t the foreigner the one who isn’t actually studying Buddhism?

The teaching is about Tsongkapa’s belief in the system of self-disciple, enlightenment. It is not just a faith, it is some cosmos law, like you need to breathe to stay alive, a law you need to apply to in daily life.

Walked out of the class and crowd during lunch break, I walked to south with the view of the valleys of the plains titled and rolled, shaded blue-grey with the monsoon mist, painted with water and a dash of color. Etched against this, the familiar eagles circled in the blue sky. Suddenly felt a flash of what a bird might see, a great nothingness below it. Form is emptiness.

Still have Geshe, the 22 years boy from Qinghai in mind. Walked 2 months to Kathemantu then Dharamshala some four years ago, the only boy of the farmer family just wanted to meet His Holiness. So here he is, in the some town with the exile government and Dalai Lama. The night we had beer together at Mclo Café, tears in eyes, he mixed broken Mandarin and English trying to tell me how lost, homesick and tired he is, not know what to do, not possible to go back to China, no money to learn computer and no chance to continue his study in Mandarin any longer, he wish I was his elder sister who used to share all his secrets, tears and laughter before he left home at 18 years old.

The Thunderbolt beer is strong by any standard, finished at 11:30pm, on way running back to my guesthouse before the door closed, I had the headache, and a heart ache. For the Tibetans, for Dharamshala, for China, and for me as a Chinese.

Don’t remember how many similar stories have I heard. Most of them were told in a tone of almost detached, as though all these had happened to somebody else. They related the stories without bitterness, or anger.

Always at some point in their tales, I couldn’t help crying. I could never bear it, to hear all these sadness.

I stifle a sigh again while I am typing this blog.

I don’t want to talk about the Boycott of Olympics and No Made-in-China scene here. I am tired of politics after Kashmir.

On the shared Tata Sumo from Srinagar to Jammu, I had an interesting discuss with Kumar, the only Indian backpacker I have met since I arrived the subcontinent, about Kashmir, Muslim and the Solution. The hillsides rose dark and steep, the sky yield the day with regret, and Kargil’s slim moon has fattened by the time I reached Jammu at midnight. When I checked in the almost modest guest house by the bus station and fell asleep, acutely aware of the surprise question mark in the receptionist’s eyes. Nice Asian girls do not check into modest guest house by bus stations in small Punjabi and Kashmiri towns I guess. That too, alone. Still, I smiled and entered my Shanghai address in the register at the counter, asked if there was hot water, pretending that it was the most thing for me to be doing. But it was so out of the norm that the round eyes of the Punjabi receptionist got rounder when he put my nationality and passport details in the greasy notepad. Who am I, where do I live, what do I do, am I married, do I have children, and what the hell am I doing here in Jammu at midnight? I could read all the questions from his eyes. Well, buddy, am exhausted and frustrated and starving and sleepy so I have to throw myself and the backpack into your tiny room for a nap and get up the next morning to reach the bus station before 5am for a possible bus to Dharamshala or Amritsar or Manali or whatever the buses will take me to out of Kashmir.

As luck would have it, there was a local bus from Jammu, the summer capital of Kashmir to Himachal, which has a stop at Dharamshala, after three and half hours hanging around the bus station from chai stands to paratha shops, I am able to reach the foothills of the Himalayas again. As a local bus run between Kashmir, Punjab and Himachal, it stops to let on and off an endless stream of villagers, their hill complexions tinged with fresh air. Each one smiles as they step on, such pleasure, such triumph to get on the bus. Kashmiri school kids in green chunis, Punjabi in shorts and turban, Himachal girls have hair in pigtails and tied with white butterfly knots.

There comes the sense of familiarity in the way the mountains rose, to the north-west are the peaks and passes powdered with snow, which surrounded me for 2 weeks in Ladakh. Kashmir is still painful, a piece of fishbone stuck in my throat. But now I am in Dharamshala, the seat of His Holiness Dalai Lama, and another sort of pain punched me without any alarm, as I am Made in China, which is almost banned here in the heart of Himalaya, the used-to-be summer hill station of the British, now packed with tourists, volunteers, Lamas and Tibetan refugees.

Still need time to settle down my running stomach and shocked mind before next chapter about Dharamshala.

Om Mani Padma Hum

Kashmir. Having much better things to do in Srinagar than go online! Like buying saffron and shawls from bearded merchants, gazing out over the lakes and mountains from the cozy houseboat in the north end of the subcontinent, and listening Titanic from the hosts’ children.

But most memorable was the crazy trip both ways from Leh in Ladakh to Srinagar – along one of the most treacherous mountain roads I have imagined and passed through, as tough as, if not more than the road from Gelmut to Lhasa… always entertained by the desperate road signs – “better Mr. late than late Mr.” “this is not a race or rally- enjoy Kashmir valley” and the most favorite; “be gentle on my curves”. These didn’t stop our jeep driver going it 75 km/h on the tightest bends outside Formula 1, overtaking 3 abreast when there was only space for 1; and honking almost continuously whenever he saw someone “enjoying the valley”…

Sharing the Tata Sumo 4×4 with other six Indian males (women here never travel to places out of reach from her home toilet as all the Pubic Convenient Places in the world biggest democracy are only for males), I insisted to sit in the front of the jeep right next to the driver. What an experience it was!

More than 2/3 of the 430 km route from Leh to Srinagar was occupied by Indian army, filled with bunkers and armed men. The tiny dusty town of Kargil, the Central Asian looking Srinagar, the laidback holy village of Lamayuru, and the chaotic Kangan where we stopped for a chai at 5 am waiting for military fleet of trucks passing by, everywhere is thick with knots of armymen with Kalashnikovs slung over their shoulders. The square of flak jackets pushed out of the cloth of uniforms, allover the happy valley. Downtown Srinagar and on the way to the airfield in the control of the Indian Air Force, there are bunkers of fighter jets, barbed-wired fences on the rollers that could be pulled across a runway, armed security men with rifles nestling on their laps everywhere in the city, from the chawk to ATM spots.

Srinagar itself turned to be a surprise. Outside of the town is surrounded by rice paddles and terraced fields as green as south of China (eh, I am trying to compare again, I know, bad habit). There are the smooth solid trunks of chinar trees, the trees planted by homesick Central Asians during the Mugual time. Late spring or early summer it is, due to high altitude, the leaves of chinar, apple and walnut trees are all in shining green, in the wide sky above the Jhalun river, eagles churned and circled. If I was in Lhasa, I could have guessed something has died, but I am here in the valley of Kashmir and Jammu, where I am still too foreign to judge anything.

This is the place where the great monk of Tang dynasty, Xuanzang, or Tangseng, had stayed for two years, following the sage and guru Sanghayasas, learnt Sanskrit, translated the Abhidharmakosa and the Indian logic. All gone now, the greatest gompa with 5000 priest when Xuanzang was here. The wandering Turkistani had converted the Tibetern king of Kashmir to Islam in the 14th century. Tens of thousands in the Valley converted to Islam following their king’s example. Well, it is a strange kind of Islam, blended perhaps with Lamastic Buddhism and, here, interlaced too with Hinduism.

Militants in the region destroyed government property, burned cars and blasted bridges during the past 15 years. Everyone is talking to the solution for the valley, from the taxi driver and auto rickshaw rider to houseboat owner and restaurant runner, not to mention the newspaper from Greater Kashmir who has readers across the border both in Pakistan and India and the kinda extreme Muslim Digest, but NOBODY has the solution after all, everyone, from the sharp-nosed Kashmiri to the few Hindus still staying in the valley, to me as a tourist just passing through, everyone is trapped in the puzzle since the partition.

Have been grey days since I arrived, a gun-mental sky that hung low after a morning sun flashed and then hid. Raining from time to time, as everywhere in India, people just walking in rain without ponchos or umbrellas, so am I, being wet and grey, walking pass the armymen and sandbags indifferently. Several women in black burkhas walked by a wall next to the Lal Chowk, state holiday, most of the shops are closed, eagles still wheeling through the dusk sky—must be something has died. Perhaps it is the city.

Some words of Charles De Gaulle came to my mind all in a sudden: when a colony becomes more of a burden than a benefit, let it go. But where can Kashmir and Jammu go? And then where is the future of Ladakh? With 80% of Islam in Kashmir, 60% of Hindu in Jammu and 55% of Buddhist in Ladakh, is for the best of the Valley to be kept together between China Tibet, Pakistan and India? Je ne sais pas.

Moving to Jammu tomorrow, another Tata Sumo and another 10 hours on road, time to be light, not heavy.