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. 

Medical benefits - the traditional Tibetan way

My beautiful friend in the Men-Tsee-Khang waiting room

“You’ve got sore knees,” says the Tibetan traditional doctor.

“How did you know that?” I ask amazed.

I had literally taken just one confident step into the consulting room – how could he diagnose that I’ve had newly and unusually swollen and sore knees starting 10 days ago, just the week before I left for India?