The photo tells the story. Yesterday morning, blessed by the kind of cool blue sunshine you want to inhale and never give back, we met the Dalai Llama at his summer residence in Choglamsar, 6km south of Leh, here in Ladakh. He welcomes 350 people into his compound on many mornings during the summer and we were lucky to be ‘chosen’ by his team and double lucky as he returns back to his normal home in Dharamsala, Himachal Pradesh, this weekend.
So how did it happen?
And did this really come from talking to a woman in a shop 70 km away?
Talking to strangers – the heart of travelling and why don’t we do it more?
Flashback to Day 2 of our road trip from Srinigar to Leh, stopping at the Alchi monastery which is the final tourist stop from our halfway overnight stop at Kargil en route to Leh. The monastery is underwelming – some charming shopping stalls and the standard chilled Ladakh vibe, but the monastery compound is unloved, hard to engage with and probably needs some TLC. There are no monks in residence, nor are there any explainers about the four large statues and the associated meanings. Perhaps other tourists are more educated and do not need any explanation?
Luce and the girls are overexcited at the shopping opportunities, and while I’m ready to go, standing by the car, huffing and puffing like mood-kill fathers the world over, they are connecting, talking and creating our own little sliding doors moment.
Lola sees a lady in the same shop, wearing traditional Islamic dress but with white skin. Lola has this superpower where she strikes up conversations with anyone, and they get talking and it turns out she is meeting the Dalai Llama tomorrow. What? This shows how much we know – we didn’t know he spends the summer in Leh, we didn’t know he opens up his house to meet and bless strangers and followers, and we didn’t know how to apply.
Now we do. This kind American lady suggests we rock up tomorrow, not registered, and she will try to help us get in. That doesn’t come to pass but once we reach Leh, Lucy fires off our application (begging?) emails to the DL’s team and we sit and wait.
Two days later, no reply.
We head off to go trekking for five days.
“We welcome you to meet His Holiness on Weds 26th August”
After five days with no wifi on the trek, this email is sitting in Lucy’s inbox on our return. We’re in. We send back our Visa and Passport scans and then go to look for a khata, which is a ceremonial sash worn around the neck at key moments in Tibetan Buddhism and which we will need to take.
It all seems too good to be true as we head off at 7am with the morning sun creating it’s own auspicious setting for the day. The gate to the Choglamsar compound is swarmed by hundreds of people and we look at the queues and gulp. Fortunately for us, most of these people have come on spec, unregistered, and we collect our passes and saunter in. We hand in our bags, phones and watches and try to understand where to park ourselves.
The vibe is unparalleled, 300 people waiting with the reverence of lifelong devotion and ambition flowing with respectful and religious reserve. We cannot help but feel out of place when most of these 300 appear to be Tibetan or Ladakhi and are dressed in their finest religious clothes. Some of the ‘xamo gyalse’ worn are there to be seen, to be admired – these traditional Tibetan fur-lined hats with three flaps sticking out – deliberately so.
We feel like frauds. Of course we do. It feels like some of those surrounding us have waited their whole lives to meet the Fourteenth Dalai Llama, after decades of worship and understanding of the Buddhist texts. Meanwhile we can hardly spell ‘Tibet’ and understand little about the religion. We stand in the corner, quiet and awkward,
At this point the very contemporary issue of stomach problems returns and my immediate priority is to find a WC. I head into a cubicle at the same time as one of the dressed-up, high cheekboned local chaps and I can confirm that excess wind is a problem distributed equally among races and religions, people and places.
Showtime
If there are 350 people waiting to meet the Dalai Llama, there must be 50 or 60 people organising us. We are split into groups and led to sit down on chairs outside the main residence. Quiet adrenalin. Warm anticipation. Nervous energy. The gorgeous tall thin poplars, so common to Leh, intercept the sunlight and we sit and wait. I sit opposite about 10 people in wheelchairs, all of them carrying their mala (prayer beads with 108 beads to symoblise the spiritual universe) and question the situation again: are we taking up spaces which could have gone to more deserving (eg religious) people? Or is there a reason that the DL’s team like to have Westerners so they can spread the word? These questions remain unanswered.
Eventually the Dalai Llama is brought to sit outside the front door of the residence. He appears frail with his team supporting him on either side. He is 91 and it is extraordinary that he wishes to keep meeting his public, his people, on mornings like this. We slowly file through and think about what we’re going to say. One of the main organisers talks to us and tells us that he and the Dalai Llama were at the Oxford Union in December 1990.
I am sweating with nerves out of all proportion to the situation. Our hands have been sterilised and the khata has been put on our shoulders. We put one hand over the other and as I reach the Dalai Llama, I’m just about to say ‘tashi delek’ (Tibetan for good luck or hello) when the big man is distracted and looks to his right. So I end up saying these two words of Tibetan to myself as he doesn’t hear me. I then say ‘Greetings from Oxford’ which his team repeats. Photograpers on each side snap away. He nods and, like that. my turn is up. His team hands us some healthy seeds, a photo and some biscuits.
An unusual morning
It is 9:30am and we walk back up the avenue of trees that link the palace to the road. We feel lucky, we feel ‘blessed’ in the generic, universal sense and perhaps in some way in the religious sense – that is for each person to figure out. We cannot understand why the 40 or so foreigners went first – perhaps the DL wanted to spend more time with the 300 or so local people who speak his language (literally and metaphorically).
Later that day we see the news about the Nepal flash floods and intense loss of life. We receive some kind worried texts from friends and fortunately we are nowhere near the area in question. Lucky again.
Travels with my Family 