Dharmkot, the pizza place...

They had these awesome painted posters inside the cafe in Dharmkot...

Cafe in McLeodganj... had the most amazing jacket potatoes with ham there!! Found absolutely nowhere else!!

Kareri Lodge, Mcleodganj- 11th June, 2005 - 1700 hrs, AB

First morning in Mcleodganj. It was compfortable in the night, not too cold not too hot… far warmer than Dalhousie. We didn’t need to wear any woolens at all! Breakfast was at the same place where we had tea yesterday – Snow Lion Restaurant, I had come here five years back with my parents and frantically searched it out again, the food I remembered was absoloutely awesome. We were not disappointed at all. We had French Toast and Honey Pancake, the French Toast were really nice, the pancake, more like a thin soft cake, don’t know how they make it like that, it was nice, but kinda heavy. The restaurant is a haunt of all the young Tibetan girls and boys, and is usually full of them. The girls prefer having huge bowls of fruits, probably that is the secret of their slim figures. Yesterday as well as today a tiny puppy wandered in … he did not seem like a pet coz he was quite scrawny – but nobody seemed to mind his presence there. The restaurant has this small terrace looking out into the backs of the other buildings there. Quite a pleasant place to sit, but the tables are always full there.

I got bitten by a dog back in Bombay and today I have to get the last dose of my rabies vaccine, I have been worried all this time that I will not be able to find the vaccine in this small hill town, but I do, and also find a nice Doc who gives me an amazing painless shot, he almost jabs it into my but, like you see in the movies, and I did not even feel a pin-prick! Terribly relieved to have found my vaccine!

Dharmkot is the next destination, about 3 kms up from Mcleodganj. Ideally we should have walked it, but we are lazy bums, so take the Qualis.

Vipasana Centre, Dharmkot

Last time I came I remember seeing a sign for a pizza place, I was with my parents and you know how parents can be, when they don’t wana go somewhere they just don’t. So, I had made promises to come back right there some other time and spend all the time that I wanted to spend there. And here I was again, retracing my path. I did find it. It was this really quaint little joint, overlooking the valley and the snow capped Dhauladhar peak in the distance, which keeps playing hide and seek all the time. There are mostly foreigners there, and one odd Indian family, who came searching for the “Pizza Place” mentioned in their travel book. The son actually had the cheek to ask the guy if it was the same place – I think the guy just got bugged and said it wasn’t, there was another place in the town!

The pizza – hmm… quite amazing. We had chicken, garlic and olive pizza. It was better than any i’d had anywhere else, maybe I had better ones in Aurolville, but then they were cooked probably by Italians themselves! The entire pizza disappeared in less then ten minutes!

We have rested a bit now. Mutton momos are beckoning. The show today at 2115 hrs is “The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”. Strangely enough, you find it where you are least looking for it. The Sarvodaya Library at Pali Hill is always claiming it has gone out. i am pretty sure its not gonna be a disappointing film! Could it be that we also get to see “Motorcycle Diaries” tomorrow or are we expecting too much now??!!

11:45 pm –

Alright – saw the film – and the mind is in a tizzy right now! The “theatre” was small, warm and kinda suffocating, the seats were bad too, they were too narrow, so u really could not do much with it, could not put your feet up, could not even lean back and put your whole but on the seat! But the movie was so gripping that you just had to sit through! And it was fun – the whole experience and I think given the chance I would do it again. Tried deconstructing the movie, putting it into a linear narrative, maybe we cracked it maybe we didn’t. Don’t really know! Sometimes you deconstruct so deep that some flaws of the script mislead you. And most of these movies that mess with the memory and the mind have one or two minor flaws somewhere that completely sets you off into the wrong direction.

We rushed dinner as much as we could, Aj had a bowl of fruit, obviously inspired by the young Tibetan girls he is so much in love with, I had this huge bowl of chicken curry with Tingmo, which is steamed bread. Very nice but I didn’t have too much of an appetite and I was hurrying for the movie! Saw the tiny scrawny puppy again, today noone paid any attention to it, it just roamed around aimlessly around the place.

(These are parts of a travelogue me and Ajay wrote while going through some parts of Himachal... writing it all together will be too boring... so I am gonna keep adding bits and pieces once in a while from the travelogue)