My Camera's Super Drowning Skills

The last thing my camera saw before plummeting to its watery doom.

Can you see a delicate, almost invisible orb web strung right over the pristine water in the photograph? That's what I was trying to snap. It's simply mind-boggling how a spider managed to suspend the blessed thing just inches above the running stream from the odd bits of stream rocks which jutted out of the water surface. I had to balance myself precariously on two slick boulders about 4 feet apart, and lean right over the web to take it.

Not one of my better ideas, this.

Murphy's Law got the jump on me right after I hit the clicker. My left foot slipped a couple of inches and the brief panic of almost-falling loosened my grip on my camera, and it fell like a bitch.

Now, it is the most expensive memory card reader in the world.

Bye Cam. It's been swell hanging out with you, buddy. And fret not, for you shall be replaced by someone cooler and better than you.



P.S. This happened at the Bhagsu waterfall in Dharamsala. It's as if my camera went 'I've seen everything there is to see - so I shall go die now'. The pictures in the remainder of my North Indian travelogues will come from the cameras of my travel mates - a lot of which was also taken by me anyway.

The Chinese are Evil

"Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral."

Paolo Freire

The reason I have delayed in the posting of this particular write-up... well, it isn't just a singular 'reason' per se. It's a multi-headed hydra of 'excuses' really and it had taken me the better part of the month lopping off and cauterizing each neck stump of the beast decisively. Chief of these pernicious hydra heads told me repeatedly that I simply don't know enough to speak with any authority on the subject, told me that I have not seen both sides of the arguments to make a moral choice of it and told and told and told me that however loud I shout here on my little soapbox, nobody would really give a shit. I don't want to mar my own credibility. I don't want to look like some clueless lunatic screaming at the top of his hoarse voice in favour of some populist propaganda. See? The heads just bloody keep growing.

I spent hours reading innumerable articles in order to be better equipped to speak but more importantly, I need to affirm to myself that the stance I've chosen to take on this issue is in perfect alignment with my own conscience. I don't think I am wrong in saying that a lot of Malaysian bloggers merely pick an issue and then pick a side which has the coolest people in it, and then proceed to parrot their adopted sentiments as if they have arrived at them by the strength of their own reasons (a birth defect in the democratic machinery of Malaysia, but that's another post).

Before I launch into my spiel on the debate I got on my hand here, there's just three more things I want to say.

Firstly, this post isn't about our beloved negara, or whatever social ills we all know about which still prevails (so if you want to bail out of reading, now's a good time).

Secondly, I want everyone to remember that my blog has always been nothing more than a glorified diary and notebook, and I am entitled to be as passionate and as biased as I please (I'm not a newspaper, though the impartiality of said medium in our country is a matter up for debate, really).

And thirdly, the Chinese are fucking bastards.

A Beijing Olympics 2008 countdown board I saw in McLeod Ganj, Dharamsala.

I have been aware of the Tibetan issue for quite awhile now, even before I visited the Tibetan government-in-exile in Dharamsala in the north of India. What got me informed about it was an episode of The Simpsons where they show the people of the Chinatown district in Springfield beating up Tibetans in Tibettown. I still remembered what Lisa said about that,

"I love Chinatown, but I wish they'd stop picking on Tibettown"

The know-it-all in me was immediately compelled to find anything available on the internet to read on the subject. After arming myself with a pedestrian knowledge of the Free Tibet movement, I filed the whole thing in this dinky little shelf at the back of my head for future reference. I am not a big fan of international politics and my interest in human rights is limited only to those which are mine.

But actually being there in McLeod Ganj, Dharamsala, where the Dalai Lama and the thousands of Tibetan refugees which were forced to run away from their homeland because of the illegitimate military occupation of Tibet by China - which is heckuva lot of bullshit euphemism saying "China invaded Tibet unprovoked and killed 600,000 nice Tibetan people" - totally affected me in a way I did not expect it to. It begs the question of when China is going to start looking at other tiny countries around it and suddenly decide that they too belong to their big happy Communist family. Malaysia isn't that far off, both geographically and historically, by the way.

More fundamentally, it begs the question of the whereabouts of true justice, when all the countries in the world stood by and let it happen without actually doing anything substantial to fix it. It's like everyone's watching a playground bully beating a defenseless shrimp of a kid bloody, and all they are doing is fucking looking on disapprovingly at the act. Big fucking help.

My mind was made up when I saw a documentary in the Tibet Museum in Dharamsala which showed clips of Chinese soldiers beating unarmed, peaceful Buddhist monks into bloody pulps. Those were the most powerful images I have ever seen in my life. The world shouldn't suffer such horrifying injustices.

One of the many Free Tibet posters pasted everywhere in Dharamsala. That's a real bug, by the way.

The crimes which the Chinese perpetrated on the poor Tibetan people are just too numerous to list here and if you truly give a damn, I'm sure it wouldn't be hard at all for anyone to poke around the web for it. They admitted to kidnapping and holding the Panchen Lama, the second highest spiritual leader of Tibet and the world's youngest political prisoner, and installed a propagandist puppet in his place. They opened fire right into a demonstration consisting of monks and nuns which supported the Dalai Lama. They captured innocent Tibetans for keeping pictures of the Dalai Lama, tried them for treason and imprisoned them without evidence. They demolished countless temples, some centuries old in an effort to oust the spiritual heart of the Tibetan people. They are practically performing a cultural genocide of Tibetan heritage, destroying their freedom to religion, to speak and to a life that all human beings deserve.

I won't elaborate on all that, but just let me draw your attention to just one more facet of this big ugly reality which disturbed me immensely - the crass destruction of the natural beauty of Tibet which is like no other in the world by the People's Fucking Republic of Fucking China.

The environment in Tibet is a fragile thing which flourished over the slow millions of years in the Tibetan Plateau and considering the altitude and dryness of the land, the insult to its balance can cripple it for good. Major rivers which originate from Tibet feed into South Asia, affecting the millions of lives which depend on them as a water source. The Tibetan Plateau also influences atmospheric circulation and jet stream wind patterns over Asia and, according to scientists, may be related to the destabilisation of weather patterns over the northern hemisphere. And what are the pig-headed, under-educated, money-pinching Chinese industrialists pricks doing about all this? They continue rape-mining and deforesting these virgin lands at an unprecedented rate.

To top it off, they are dumping an indeterminate quantity of nuclear waste into the Plateau everyday and even had the nuts to admit it! Tibetans are dying of radiation poisoning due to contaminated ground water and reports of birth defects in both newborn children and animals come out of the region in a constant stream of woe. Taking this along with everything else the Chinese did, it's hard not to imagine just how wretched a people the Tibetans are.

And through it all, the Dalai Lama continuously and consistently insisted on a peaceful opposition of China's regime. He isn't a Nobel Peace Prize laureate for nothing, I can tell you. I am not privy to how the OIC functions and I don't know why they selected Beijing to be the host to the August 2008 Olympics. To me, this just mocks everything the Olympics stand for.

I am downright embarrassed of admitting to a common ancestry with these sort of scums of mankind. Don't get me wrong - I am a big fan Chinese history, art and language but the China today is a greed-empowered monstrosity with no regards to humanity or the earth. All it does is eat everything it sees and when it has consumed all there is within itself, it reaches out with its slimy appendages and grabs at things which don't rightfully belong to it. It is a primitive and disgusting creature, highly effective at obliterating everything which is not profitable to itself. It has neither conscience nor reason.


I took quite a bit of my time out to research and write about the Tibetan plight and I did it because I actually care about the human condition. I've met a lot of Tibetans in my travel and they all strike me as a really amiable and peaceable people, and what happened (and is happening) to them is just wrong. I sincerely felt that and I wanted to tell as many people as I can about it.

I want to tell you "This is wrong. This is what's wrong with the world right now."

And I sincerely hope you can listen.



A YouTube video of Chinese soldiers beating up peaceful monk protestors (the last part is truly heart-breaking).
The Students for a Free Tibet homepage which is a good place to get started on your reading (if you intend to do any, that is).
China admits to nuclear waste in Tibetan Plateau.
State of Tibet's environment.



P.S. If you believe in human rights, please help spread the word. Remember that we are first and foremost, a citizen of the world. "Washing one's hand of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral."



Human too,
k0k s3n w4i

Virginity Sucks

"It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue."

Voltaire

Back on the trip in March, during one of the 12 hours plus train rides we endured between the cities we made our stops, talking was the most logical way for us to spend our surplus time, and if you've ever traveled with anyone for any length of time, you'd find yourself spontaneously loosening up before too long - even if you weren't very close to them to begin with. You want to get to know a person beneath the obvious? Invite them along on your vacation, get trapped with them for a whole day in a moving train carriage and prod a little. Every human being, I find, is a full bag waiting to spill. Everybody wants to be heard.

One recurrent conversational topic was about love and relationships, something we all can identify with (regardless of whether we have it or we don't) . Somehow after a few hours, the topic morphed into one centering on virginity and what each of us thought of it. Unsurprisingly, views were schismatic - and are basically polarized into two camps. One is for it, and the other thinks that it's better to be done and over with.

One guy thinks that virginity is paramount and said that he will only marry a virgin - or to put it in his own words; "I like my presents unopened." I won't bother listing out his reasons and arguments here because (1) I am sure everyone knows what they are, and (2) I won't be able to reiterate them with much conviction because I - well, I have a differing opinion on the subject. So I'll only talk about what I think.

I think virginity is bothersome, pointless and meaningless.

I was a bit surprised by myself when I said those words in that train carriage chug-chugging in the evening through the Indian countryside because prior to that moment, my vocal views on virginity was one of conservative conformation. I'm Asian. Sex outside of wedlock is evil and immoral. Blah and blah and blah. It's funny how one's mind can change so drastically without one noticing until that mind starts speaking again.

I remember a friend, a girl, told me that she lost her virginity to her boyfriend, after holding out and denying it for many, many years to all her previous boyfriends. What she said about that was this,

"I used to think that virginity is something very, very precious, and must be protected no matter what until the day I get married. It's only after I lost it that I see just how worthless it is."

Those words rattled in my head a lot till it came as a sudden revelation to me that virginity is (or will be) just like my sixteenth birthday. I don't know why it was significant but everyone seems to think it is in some ineffable way. No one seems to give much thought to all the other teen years. Why not fourteen or fifteen or seventeen? Why bloody sixteen? I remember looking forward to my own sixteenth birthday, being all excited and anticipatory of some magical transformation of my sixteen years old person or some secret knowledge which would be telepathically telegraphed into my sixteen years old mind - or something! I don't know what. No one ever specified that. And when my sixteenth birthday finally came for real, I felt just the same as I was before I was sixteen. Nothing changed the least bit at all.

Like what I said in that train carriage about virginity that evening,

"Virginity is a lot like a person's sixteenth birthday. It seems like a big deal before you reach it. But once you're there... Meh."

I think that the concept of virginity - especially of female virginity - is terribly unjust. It is used as a standard marker of a girl's virtuosity or purity. If an unmarried woman is virgin, she's clean, good and loved by God but if she's not, she's some promiscuous skank who is dirty and used. I find that that standard leaves much to be desired. Say if a virginal girl is raped, what does it say about her morals? Is she still virtuous or pure? A lot of people would say that her virtuousity is unsullied because she never had sex till it was forced upon her, but is no longer pure because she had been violated. I find that incredibly insensitive and degrading, and this is precisely the sort of thinking that puts so much stigma on the women who have undergone such an horrifying experience - as if they haven't been punished enough just for being a victim.

Some would even consider a virgin who was raped to be neither virtuous nor pure! No shit! They still stone rape victims to death in some parts of the world.

Anyhow, I agree that rape really have no bearing on this discussion, but it does reflect a bit of just how most people view women, including the women themselves.

Discounting that, what about those who have willingly given up their virginity premaritally to a person they thought they love or used to love? Can we consider them to be promiscuous or loose (no puns intended)? Again, most guys do. I used to be just like that. I used to like my "presents" unopened too. I used to think that girls who gave up or would give up their virginity before marriage are sluts. It isn't until recently that I started to realise that if a person have truly loved a girl before, he would never ever think a her as a "present" - an object, a thing. I think all guys are guilty of this, at least for some part of their lives. Anytime the loss of virginity is mentioned in the same sentence as "dirty" or "used"; that's objectification in action. That's a failure to see a woman as a real living, breathing person - one who is capable of making mistakes at some point in their past.

Heck, I don't think I even consider that a "mistake" on the women's part. A woman's body should be her own and however she wishes to express her love, and that shouldn't have any bearing at all on any relationships she gets into afterwards. A lot of guys will disagree with me, with variations of the same old chauvinistic arguments which demean women. I believe I am above that now. In case anyone starts running with scissors with just a gist of what I'm aiming to impart here, I would like to say that I'm not preaching promiscuity or infidelity here. I believe that wanton or unprotected sex with multiple partners is bad and I advocate sticking with the one you love as long as you can. All I'm saying is that virginity need not be such a big damn deal.

So in summary, let me just say that I don't give a fuck whether the person I'm marrying next time is a virgin or not. But if she is - well, more power to her!



P.S. On a related note, some guys think that it is their prerogative to control what their girlfriends wear on the pretext that it's to "protect" her. To a certain extent, it can be true but the tales I heard of some guys going as far as to only let their girlfriends wear formless T-shirts and pants - that's just another form of reducing a girl to the level of property. I think it's perfectly fine for a guy to dislike their girlfriend dressing in revealing clothes, but he ought not think that he has the right to prevent her from doing it. Or as a wise person (me) always say, "Just let her wear the clothes she like now, before she's too old to wear them."

P.P.S. There's this T-shirt quote I read once that goes, "Virginity is a disease, and I'm the doctor."

P.P.P.S. So, a show of hands if anyone wants to hear my thoughts on abortion, homosexuality and slightly burnt food?



Pro sex,
k0k s3n w4i

My First Time

"And you, maybe you'll remember me,
What I gave is yours to keep"

White Houses by Vanessa Carlton

I remember vividly our primordial MSN conversations, peppered with cute yellow emoticons & mainly childish curiosity on my part. Those hypothetical questions you used to ask & I loved to answer. Those daily messages you used to send, asking me out for dinner so we both wouldn't have to eat alone. We didn't have lengthy conversations on MSN, but I think I mentioned to you once how i've never received flowers before & I always wanted to know what it felt like.

I like listening to your thoughts too. The way you express your opinions & tell me things while I munch & listen. And how I can share my love for books with you without being thought of as some lifeless anti-social recluse. With you, it always feels like i'm more myself than I am with anyone else. With you i'm always comfortable in my own skin.

You never tell me stray puppies & dogs are icky & I shouldn't touch them. You care about them just as much as i do & you understand that they deserve their equal share of lovin'. Long walks with you are never exhausting because you're company makes it all worthwhile.

That night when you walked me home & I had tears streaming down my face, I told you the answer you wanted to hear. All these thoughts came flooding into me & I knew then that you gave me a glimpse of all the things I wanted & could have. And all I had to do was just reach out & take it. With you, happiness is never far away.

You asked me once, how I knew I loved you then.

I think it was when these came knocking on my door & you touched me in a place no one ever did before.

Phlowers.

Missing him,
Ph0ebe

My Favourite Place in the Whole Wide World

"A vacation is like love - anticipated with pleasure, experienced with discomfort, and remembered with nostalgia."

Author unknown

My old English tuition teacher, Auntie June, used to tell a story about how she once gave the essay topic "My Favourite Place" to a class as an assignment and one boy handed in a piece describing how his favourite place in the whole wide world is on top of his girlfriend. He retold a vivid account of how he enjoys fondling, kissing and sucking on her breasts, nibbling her ears, breathing in the scent of her hair, leaving red lustful hickeys on her neck... well, I'm sure you got the colourful picture by now.

I remember being very impressed. Before listening to Auntie June's little story, writing is just these stupid boring chores English teachers set me to do to test how well I can perform up to their Education Board approved standards of grammar, spelling and the ability to string a few stupid words together. It's unimaginative. It's brain dead.

I'm not ashamed to say that a third-rate, pubescence-fueled work of erotica (not even discounting that it was probably intended as a joke, anyway) changed my opinion of that. Words can be compelling and shocking. Words can change the way someone look at things forever. Words can be ridiculously, ridiculously powerful. Take the "My Favourite Place" porno essay for example - it's going to shine out from the tens of thousands of generic takes on that same topic an SPM examiner is going to mark in her lifetime. And that examiner is going to share it with all her colleagues, friends and students - and if luck would have it, with an impressionable young boy like me as well who'd do more have a good chuckle about it.

I think right now, I have the same topic as that guy had; "My Favourite Place". Unlike he, I am not privileged with the allowance of an open interpretation of said topic. I have a specific thing to write about in mind already and no matter how I wrestle it, I don't think I am capable of penning it in a way which is witty, forceful or memorable. Heck, I don't think I can even make it remotely interesting to read.

You see, this is going to be another travelogue, and it's going to be about a place which I love the most in the whole wide world,

McLeod Ganj, Dharamsala.

The reason why it is so hard to write about is because there isn't anything obviously special about it. I kept telling people (over and over again) ever since I got back from McLeod Ganj how much I love the place and that one day, I will must return there - but no matter how hard I think, I can't really say why. I can't really tell you what it has that another place elsewhere does not have better.

I remember arriving in the darkest hours in the morning from Amritsar in a minivan we hired and immediately bunking down in an inn till late in the afternoon because we were all so bushed from the journey. Well, everyone else did. I stayed up and waited for an hour for daybreak to come because I couldn't sleep. I seem to have a knack in being the odd guy out.

At about 6.00 am, I ventured out of the Cherryton Cottage and the Chocolate Log and found myself in mood which quite resembled disappointment. McLeod Ganj looked almost ordinary. The streets and the buildings were commonplace and wouldn't look at all weird even if they were plonked into the middle of a Malaysian suburb. Maybe it's because till then, my vacation till then had me exploring places that looked like this, this and this.

Then, I walked into a stretch out road which wasn't completely surrounded by foliage, shops and houses and I saw this,

The moment I fell in love with Dharamsala.

My first thought was, "How did I get up here?!"

You see, I was asleep throughout the ride and I did not notice our ascent. Nothing I read about Dharamsala gave me an idea at all what to expect and my initial mental picture of the town of McLeod Ganj was, to put it bluntly, 'near sea-level'.

So imagine yourself walking through some bland porridge everytown which looks as if the only chance it can become a vacation hot spot is if an UFO crash-landed smack dab in the middle of the market place - and suddenly find that you're 7000 feet above sea-level and are surrounded by the Himalayan mountain range which looms majestically all around you. It was the awesomest kind of surprise there is.

The view from the other side of town. It was a really, really small darling little town.

Tibetan prayer flags strung outside the Tsulagkhang, the Dalai Lama's temple.

Scampering about on the streets that same morning was some very friendly and painfully cute strays which looked better groomed than the dogs some people own.

I mean, look at this little fella,

So posh.

And this dopey big pup,

I wonder why some stray dogs in mountainous regions look so well-fed and healthy - and massive.

The Tibetans are known to be great environmentalists and animal lovers. Maybe it has something to do with their almost-innate adherence to the teachings of Buddhism, it figuring a big part of their lives. I mean, their state leader is the Dalai Lama and arguably, the current one is one of the greatest humanitarians the world have seen this century. And I'm not saying this because I'm a Buddhist myself. I'm a Theravadin, and if you know what that means, you'd know that what I believe in is intrinsically different from what the Tibetan people practice.

I heard that the Dalai Lama personally meets every single refugee who makes it to Dharamsala from the now China-controlled Tibet.

Triplets! Gosh, people here really like dogs. I can certainly identify with that.

As you can imagine, the people here is some of the nicest you'd ever met. Unlike in the other parts of India I've been to, I felt that I didn't really need to be worried of being ripped off here. The prices quoted to me always felt reasonable, instead of the usual "highway robbery specials" that I'm faced with elsewhere that always made me gasp in disbelief (audibly). That's really how a vacation should be like. I know how some people just love the thrill of beating down some merchant's bluff and bragging about it afterwards, but that's just not for me. And if you're like me, you'd love Dharamsala too.

Besides, you won't feel very proud of yourself even if you bargained successfully against refugees whose homeland was invaded by the Evil Chinese.

A Tibetan woman with a gold tooth demonstrating her knitting skillz outside her shop.

You can't throw a stone in any direction without hitting a maroon-robed monk or nun in McLeod Ganj.

I'd talk more about the depressing subject of the Tibetan exile and my views on it in another post but now, I want to focus of the happy bits. Like food!

There is seriously no short of good eats in McLeod Ganj and they range anywhere from traditional Tibetan fares and hawker food like the ubiquitous momo to pizzas and pastas to even Japanese, Thai and Korean cuisine! For someone like me who've had Indian food and faux-Chinese food which taste Indian for the past 6 months, I thought that I have died and gone to food nirvana.

The Japanese vegan restaurant Lung Ta (a name which means 'wind horse' and had religious connotations) is an especial traveler favourite, and it has my vote. And surprisingly, it is managed by a bona fide Japanese family who I imagine fell in love with Dharamsala and decided to live there for good. That's a common occurrence hereabouts. The nice lady who runs the Cherryton Cottage and Chocolate Log, for example, used to be an literature lecturer at some university before she quit her day job and settled in McLeod Ganj too to open her own backpacker's inn and cafe. There's just this prevailing sense of peace, wholesomeness and harmony in the place which just makes you walk around with a happy, contented silly smile on your face all day long.

I got sidetracked there. Back to the food we go!

I had my first onigiri ever there. 10 points to whomever spotted it in this picture first.

Vegan udon.

And imagine eating all that in a place like this. I want to go back there now :(

One of the waitresses in Lung Ta , a pony-tailed Japanese girl who I imagine to be in her early twenties, is quite possibly one of the most beautiful women I've ever met. When she was taking our order, she bent forward and rested her arms on our table in an 'unintentionally provocative way' (how's that for euphemism?). Poor Joon Keat who was sitting face to face with her instantly lost his ability to speak and his will to live, and couldn't even stutter out what he wanted.

Regrettably, I don't have a picture of her to show you guys. So if you want to see her for yourself, you know where to find her.

Also, I wouldn't even know that there's an authentic Korean restaurant in McLeod Ganj if the nice lady who ran Cherryton Cottage didn't put me in the wise about it. It's practically criminal of the Lonely Planet Guide of India for not listing it!

Ramen! Ramen!

Some chicken dish which took an hour to prepare, and was worth every bloody minute of the wait.

Anyhow, I didn't sink all of my time just prancing about town. On the second day, I took a short hike up a rocky trail to the Bhagsu waterfall with Joon Keat.

A very round monkey I spotted on the hike.

There's this really interesting thing which happened on the way and I doubt anyone would seriously believe me. At the leg of the hike where the trail started to run uphill, we came to a small little outpost housing a temple and several shops, and I met a strange spotty stray there which came sniffing after me, but in a solemn, restrained manner - unlike the slobbery, overbearing friendliness I usually get. As a joke, I demanded that it to lead the way to the waterfall.

And it did just that. It trotted a few steps ahead of us and every few seconds, it would look back at us as if to see if we're really following it. And when it reaches a bend or a turning, it would just stand there patiently waiting for us to catch up to it!

I'm seriously not bullshitting you.

Halfway up, another stray - a bigger black one - joined the spotted dog and they both played guide to us,

Looking to see if Joon Keat is following around a corner.

And yes, they actually did lead us up the right path to the waterfall!

The rock pool of the Bhagsu waterfall.

The waterfall itself isn't particularly big or impressive, but the water is as clear as polished crystal. It was fed exclusively by snowmelt and I could see every pebble in the pool's bottom. I took off my shoes to stand in the shallow rock pool but I couldn't stay in it for more than a few seconds at a time before I had to leap out of the burning cold to rub some life into my toes.

Unlike most waterfalls I've been to, Bhagsu does receive a lot of visitors and on that particular morning, the only other people we saw was a couple of Indian rocker guys who have just finished their morning dip (it's a medical miracle they survived it). After they left, we had it all to ourselves for the rest of the time we were there. It's a very serene piece of real estate there, up in the Himalaya range. It's perpetually shaded, being a cul-de-sac surrounded by the rocky mountains and it is comfortably chilly even in the noons. If you're into meditation or yoga, you'd want to sit there all day long. If dipping your pimply legs into the icy pond and then immediately pulling them out while squealing like a schoolgirl is your thing, you'd want to sit there all day long too.

Joon Keat doling out Tiger biscuits as reward for out intrepid canine cicerones. See the shop behind him? I really like how the whole thing was built by just stacking flat mountain rocks without any mortar. So quaint.

I'm wondering if the dogs regularly lead backpackers up to the waterfall in exchange for a bit of whatever lunches they usually bring with them. The dogs actually lazed about waiting for us to finish with whatever human business us humans came to do and then led us down the trail again.

We actually met a group of hikers coming down from the mountains with four dogs in tow!

A bird shaped bush I saw from the waterfall.

Joon Keat's Lassie moment.

Aside the fact that the spotted dog either understood English, or in a freaky coincidence, decided in its doggy mind to do the thing I asked it to do, it also stares into the distant a lot, as if it's enjoying the scenery. You can see in the picture above that Joon Keat actually managed to sidle up close beside the pup to camwhore with it while it continued staring absentmindedly at some faraway thing or other.

And while I'm at it, Joon Keat is one big man-whore, I tell you,

A shrine-like niche built along the trekking trail in which countless camwhores have posed in various positions of deep meditation and furtive masturbation.

It's a shame that soon after we arrived back in McLeod Ganj, we had to leave the place. We only planned to spend two days there because from what we could find out about Dharamsala, there isn't really much to see there at all. There's about a dozen other hikes I wished I could have gone on, including one to the Dal Lake and another two-day return trek through boulder fields and rhododendron forests to Triund, but I would have to chalk them up into the next trip I plan to make there.

I was the architect of the routes and stops we make throughout the whole North Indian backpacking escapade and this is clearly a BIG oversight on my part. Part of me wish that I have cut out Agra and the Taj Mahal and put the big fat waste of time I spent there into Dharamsala (I'll elaborate on that in my Agra post). I ought to have done more research and reading into it instead of just dismissing it as "a nice place to see Tibetan culture and nothing much else". And would you believe that it was originally planned as a day stop? I feel like knifing myself.

There's just something about falling in love with a place that's almost like falling in love with a girl. I can try give reasons and make excuses for it, but they won't really explain why. I always liked the phrase "there's just something about her" because it doesn't narrow what I feel about a person down to a few piddling criteria that just cheapens my love for that someone.

Dharamsala isn't superlative when you pit it against all the other places I've been to. Some might actually find the town to be quite gray and dull. There's no big, impressive monuments there to gawk at. There's no local history of interest there that extend further back than the last century. Sure, it has a bit of awesome landscape but so do the hundreds of other towns and cities that were built along the sprawling Himalayan mountain range.

But I'm in love with that place and I felt happy being there.

And that's all that matters, right?

P.S. I took a rock out of the pool and brought it back with me. It's now a paperweight on my desk. One day, I hope to put it back.



Found a place he wants to die in,
k0k s3n w4i