From "Tashi Delek", an email, written Nov 10/08

I have found myself, as was to be expected, in Dharamsala, in northern India. Arriving here may have been on the agenda but encountering such a place of wondrous beauty was still pleasantly surprising. I made it here just yesterday morning, after a near-epic overnight bus ride on a bus which did not exactly brake as much as it grinded... loudly. Nearing Dharamsala, the road narrows into sharp switch-backs that remind you that, oh yes, the himalaya are definitely bigger and considerably more powerful than you.

(a side note on driving in India: aka, Your Mode Of Attack.

When you want to communicate with those around you, the method is simple. Lean on the horn, just so, with much strength; hold the horn steadily, and wait until you feel as if enough time has passed that you would have been suitably rude in a country such as Canada. Keep holding. Hold more, until you feel as if maybe you may have ruptured someone's eardrums, and then, hold for a little bit longer. Patience, now, because once you've held the horn this long, please double that time. Then, and only then, feel free to ease up on the horn at your own disposal.)

Dehli airport is notorious for its aggressive taxi drivers who are by any standard very successful con artists, driving you not to your destination but to wherever they can get commission off your tourist dollars. As in, good luck getting the taxi to take you to the hotel you actually want to go to. And the horror stories get truly horrid, with the murder of a single Australian women in recent years. I had arranged for a driver to meet me at the airport, which was, in the deepest sense of the word, an extreme relief.

I arrived, saw my name, a faint assembly of letters on a wrinkled sheet of paper. I discerned fairly early on that my taxi man's English skills surpassed my Hindi-speaking abilities by, oh, two words. Body language it will be. Needless to say, our slightly awkward aqcuaintanceship was completely eradicated as soon as we got into his car, when he turned the radio on bust and loud hindi pop music jumped from the speakers. The thing about loud Hindi music, you see, is that while at first it may compress the top two inches of the inside of your head, after mere minutes you get used to the higher frequencies of sound and it becomes quite enjoyable. And then, of course, you can actually start to get into it: tapping your feet, keeping time with your hands, thus inspiring your driver to go into all-out drumming mode on the steering wheel. True story. After the excitement of the hindi music mellowed down into mere background noise, my senses focused elsewhere, for instance, to notice the expertise with which my driver wove --dare I say dove?-- in and out of cars. I thanked my lucky stars that meditation had leant me a calm centre, for those less chill among us would probably be clutching the edge of the seat with their eyelids equally clenched.

I thought "I wonder what speed this guy's going?" A glance over to the spedometer showed that its needle lay flat and lifeless at the bottom of the gauge. Nice. Further inspection led me to see all sorts of blatant defiances of Canadian road safety laws, such as the suddenly obvious lack of a passenger-side mirror. Also nice. Big smiles all around.

Two hours of terrible traffic later, and I was deposited safely in my gueshouse in the little "Tibetan colony" in northern Delhi.