Part 5 - Tibetan Settlement

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The last stop of the journey was Bylakuppe, a Tibetan settlement “camp” consisting of several villages and a monastery with at least 5,000 monks. This is the largest Tibetan settlement (total population >15,000) outside the homeland, settled since the late 1960s. India gave the land to the Tibetans; if you want to stay the night, you have to get documentary permission from the Tibetan Government in Exile.

We just went for a couple of hours to see the amazing temples, shop around a bit, and eat (of course). It was a bit of a random immersion experience, between the Chinese food, Chinese trinkets for sale, young monks playing hackey-sack, singing or music or chanting practice, some western dread-locked hippies hanging around in seeming-meditation, and the ubiquitous Indian auto-rickshaw drivers calling "Rickshaw, Madam?"

At what appeared to be a ceremonial break in the singing/chanting/music-playing (see video), while the participants organized their chanting/singing pages, one monk rinsed his fingers in a small bowl of water, then burned incense, then re-arranged the ornaments on what I assumed to be a prayer mantel, and then passed a large bowl around to let each of the participants select a cadbury's chocolate bar.

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