Rain, Rain, Go Away...

After one solid week of rain here in Dharamsala, (The Home of the Tibetan Govt. in Exile) we're over it!!! It's been coming down pretty much all day, every day. Our shoes + socks are soaked. Nothing dries and everything smells of mildew. We sleep under a damp, clammy blanket over an equally damp, smelly mattress :( And there is nothing to do about it! There are constant power outages too to add to the overall dreariness. Even His Holiness, grateful as he is to the Indian Govt. for giving them this refuge, complains about the cold + damp and says how he misses the dry, Tibetan climate.

At the beginning it didn't seem so bad - There was cheap internet to catch up on, good bookstores, several cinemas + yoga. All this has become part of our daily routine to spend the majority of our time indoors. So far we've seen a movie a night - Walk the Line (J. Cash Docu.), Samsara (Set in Ladakh), Mountain Patrol (Docu. about endangered Tibetan antelope), Mt. Kailash Documentary, Kundun, Pirates of the Carribean 2, Tibetan Book of the Dead, What the Bleep do We Know? and Down in the Valley (Wow, Intense!). We were also lucky to find a nice, big room with large windows on two sides looking out to a pine forest. It's kinda like staying in a cabin in Muir Woods (SF, California) with the mist-shrouded greenery. There are several friendly, long-term guests there too who even hosted a lively party last night.

We've decided to tough it out a few more days to attend a 2-Day Intro to Meditation course at the Tushita Institute, which has come highly recommended by several travellers we've met. Then we go back down to Delhi, where it won't be rain free, but it's not one of the wettest places in the World either! The monsoons typically end around mid-Sept., but they've been unusually heavy this year causing major flooding + landslides, and people predict they may go longer. We've been really lucky so far as our route has been right ahead of or around the rain, so this is really our first true taste. Maybe we need to take this quote to heart...

The best thing one can do when it's raining is to let it rain. ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow