A holiday with His Holiness – part 2

We can't wait to get through the TIPA gate

“My students tell me they aren’t coming to class tomorrow because His Holiness is opening the new TIPA building,” Cathy discloses over mushroom pizza at the Om Hotel café.

It’s a scoop. We can’t miss this. The Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts (TIPA) is just up the road from Kailwood Guest House, where Cathy – who is teaching pre-intermediate English to a disparate group of Tibetans, Bhutanese and a Lao monk with an inappropriate nickname – and Leonie and I are staying in McLeod Ganj.

The next morning I race back up the hill from depositing a bag of malas to be blessed at the main temple [see part 1], and Leonie and I step off the bottom of the Kailwood stairs into a swift river of people heading up the road to TIPA.

“Do you think they know too?” jokes Leonie as we are swept up by the well-dressed crowd, striding with purpose up the hill. 

A holiday with His Holiness – part 1

The snow lion flag of Free Tibet and the barred flag for united Tibetan Buddhism hang together, showing how
intertwined are the country, the people and the faith.

Clip-clop, clip-clop.

Behind me on the dawn-quiet street in the middle of McLeod Ganj, two mules, no mule driver, dodge the ever-present shaggy street dogs and trot past intent on their own business.

I am intent on my pre-dawn business too:  if I can get down the steep hill to the reception of His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s office near the main temple before seven am, and deposit the small bag of malas (rosaries) and little statues from me and my Buddhist friends, there’s a chance HHDL will bless these items if he has an audience scheduled.

Tibetan grandma, mother and grandson
wear their finest to see the Dalai Lama

And later this morning, eighty-five-year-old HHDL will open the newly renovated hall at the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts back up the hill, so if I want to go to that event, and then onto work (two kilometres further down the hill – it’s a mountain town after all), I’m going to have to get a wriggle on.