We left the intensity of Indian cities and headed to the mountains. In Dharamkot, a Jewish tourist village in the state of Himachal Pradesh, near Dharamsala – the refuge of the Dalai Lama, you can feel the presence of Tibet even without prior knowledge. Monks wander in the local mountains, and in neighboring villages, Tibetans run small shops with signs saying ‘Free Tibet.’ Our village is a collection of tourist attractions: cafes offering European food and rooms for rent, jewelry stores offering handmade jewelry. All the signs are in English, some are duplicated in Hebrew or Hindi.
In the mountains, it is much calmer, with no crazy traffic or bustling cities with beggars and vendors trying to catch your attention. However, calm doesn’t mean ordinary. Between the villages, you can encounter wandering monks and traveling merchants, from whom we bought a traditional needle and threads. In the villages themselves, there are many semi-stray dogs, much more than even in Tbilisi. On the outskirts, just beyond the villages, you can find troops of monkeys. One of the tasks of the local dogs is to keep them out of the villages. Thanks to the mountainous terrain, you can look out the window and see clouds passing below you, huge vultures soaring in the sky, a monkey on a nearby roof adjusting the antenna, and a barking dog trying to shoo it away.
During our stay here, I learned that if you feed wild monkeys, you must leave as soon as the food runs out, or they might take everything you have in your hands. But the little monkey gangs only appear if you’re carrying a local bag. In India, plastic is banned, and stores sell colorful bags made of thin cloth as a substitute. Once, they tried to take such a bag from us. Picture this: you’re walking down the road, monkeys are sitting on the curb to your left and up on the hill to your right. You pass through half of the troop, and suddenly they come out. The two largest individuals from the whole group start walking straight towards you, never taking their eyes off the bag. Fortunately, the bag contained bananas and marshmallows. We bribed the little gang with bananas and managed to keep the marshmallows.
Another interesting interaction occurred while we were hiking to Triund, a neighboring peak close to our village. A tourist coming down from there asked where we were from, and I said Russia. He got extremely excited and started boasting. He showed off a 10,000-ruble banknote from 1997. It looks like a 10-ruble note but with extra zeros. It turned out the guy was from Tibet and received that banknote from tourists around the same time. He’s been carrying it with him ever since. I gave him a hundred rupees as another souvenir, and it seemed to hold similar value to him.
Chandigarh, the last city we visited before returning to Delhi, is probably the most distinctive of all. The calmness here is not because of the absence of a city but because of the city itself. Built according to a plan, wide, and quiet by Indian standards, it looks like it doesn’t belong here. There are no traffic jams; drivers yield to pedestrians, and on rickshaws, you can see stickers saying, ‘I don’t use the horn.’ We didn’t stay here for long, just on our way back to Delhi and the airport, and the most unusual thing was the European normality and non-European cleanliness.
Now, some general quirks of India:
On all products, the maximum retail price is written directly on the factory packaging. Therefore, prices are the same everywhere, at their maximum.
A third of the country’s population are vegetarians, and that’s why all products have either a red triangle or a green circle drawn on them. These symbols indicate whether there are animal products in the ingredients or not.
There is their own version of English here. For example, Atta, Maida, Sooji – all of these are types of wheat flour. Searching for ‘flour’ in the store would be useless.
If you ask about the spiciness of the food in a non-touristic place, “not spicy at all, tasteless” means moderately spicy, “just a little spicy” means very spicy, and I refused anything beyond that.
In some cities, you may find signs at the entrance of cafes stating that drug distribution is prohibited. The principle behind where they put these signs is not entirely clear; it seems they appear in random places.
Train tickets come in several types. ‘Available’ is the simplest; you buy it, wait for it to be confirmed, and then travel. If it doesn’t get confirmed, you don’t go. ‘RAC’ is another type, a kind of lottery. With this, you can definitely travel, but if you’re unlucky, you might end up sharing one seat with another RAC ticket holder. ‘WL’ is a waitlisted ticket that becomes active if someone else cancels their ticket, and all the RAC tickets get allocated to different seats. There are also tourist quota tickets, which don’t involve a lottery, but they are difficult to buy.
