McLeod Ganj - Dharamsala - Fresh Air

This is the view from our room. Where we stay in McLeod Ganj is quiet and only a few minutes walk from a bustling main street with a great choice of excellent restaurants and all the tourist crap one might be looking for. The Dalai Lama's residence is here but if you want to read more about it you can go on Wikipedia. 3G Internet works just fine here so life is beautiful :)

Snowy peak that's visible in the parts of the day when clouds don't cover it.

Our back yard :)

So many birds everywhere here but it's much harder to zoom in on the falcons.

Rural South India

One of the advantages of nomadic living is that you can change the weather and so I'm now up north in India in Dharamsala and the weather is nice and cool. We have a mountain side room with beautiful mountain view and some snowy peak in the background. To get up north I went on a CouchSurfing road which started over a month ago and lasted for two weeks. Here below you can see a few pictures from my rural CS experience. I started writing a blog post about it but didn't publish it:

"

I'm now writing this from a nameless village. Well, it does a name that people use. It's called "Shrigonda sugar factory". The sugar factory has been built here and then some people made houses near the road and now that's how the village is called. On Google Maps it stays nameless though.

I'm CouchSurfing here with the lovely doctor and his family. His wife is a doctor as well and running the clinic downstairs and their child is a very smart 11 year old who speak English fluently.

 "

I was probably the only foreigner the village denizens have seen in the last 3 years since my host hosted the last time.

Drinking tea in hot regions of India. You pour the tea from the cup to the plate and drink from the plate.

Bulls carry sugar canes meant to be processed in the sugar factory. The whole village wreaks of rotting molasses and chemicals for a few hours every evening.

Cow dung cakes - don't eat! They're used for cooking and quite popular throughout India.

Pet snake. This guy saw the alien foreigner that is me and decided to show me his pet snake. Frognector enjoyed.

Weekly market in the village is the highlight of the week for most village dwellers.