We jumped on a bus in Amritsar which finally took us among the hills of the Himalayas. First we aimed at Dharamsala and the nearby village McLeod Ganj. This is the place where lots of turists comes for two reasons: 1. the Dalai Lama and the Tiberian government in refuge stays here, 2. it's beautiful place with a wonderful atmosphere.
A little bit less cool during the monsoon period because this time it rains all the time. When reaching Dharamsala after a looong bus ride, it was pouring. We hurried under the roof us the bus station where about 300 people were waiting together with us for the rain to stop and/or for their bus to arrive. When the McLeod Ganj bus pulled in, 100 of the 300 people waiting stormed to the bus. Around 80 percent of them squeezed themselves in in a moment, we had zero chance with our huge bags. We just acquisenced having to wait for the next bus when suddenly the rain stopped and the people started getting off the bus. We didn't understand what was happening, we asked if there is a problem with the bus, and they said no problem, it will leave in a couple minutes. Se we quickly got on the bus. I made fast friends with some local kids, I asked them what happened, why all the people got off the bus. It turned out that just because the rain stopped half of the people got on the roof of the bus instead of the inside, I guess because of the crowdedness or for a cheaper trip. At first I was just surprised at this, but then I started pitying them when our bus had left and the rain started dripping more and more heavily.
McLeod Ganj is a small village packed with tourists, cute little hotels, beautiful and ludicrously cheap Nepali clothes shops, restaurants offering Italian, Chinese, Thai, Israeli, Tibetian and Indian dishes, and a lot of cows. This was the first place where we experienced that the cows wandering all around India is not just an urban legend, they actually do wander around everywhere We purchased various stuff for ourselves: some trousers, Judit bought a knit hat and a raincoat, and I got a new small backpack instead of my old dirty-shitty one:
The free food in Amritsar and the like made my stomach grumpy, so one day I took my cool poncho and went to the doctor's who gave me some antibiotics for a few cents, which, together with the delicious Italian food fixed my stomach in a couple days. But the way to the doctor, you should have seen it... Full street wide, ~20cm deep creeks streamed down, small temporary waterfalls at places, and the whole thing was brown, muddy. I think this was the wildest picture I got from the monsoon. Of course I couldn't take and photos of it, I was happy that the creek didn't take me :)
To provide you with some multimedia, I cut the crap here and let our pictures tell you a tale. With love (in Hungarian and English):
And a video (only in Hungarian, sorry, but there's not much talking in it anyway) about us crossing a huge traffic jam in one of the three streets of McLeod Ganj:
