In search of Saraswati…

Just got back from a 7 day trip to see the Taj Mahal, Dharmsala, Dalhousie, Chamba and Kujar (I think it was Kujar). The later four are all in the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh, in the Western Himalayas.

Pictures describe most of what we saw better than words, so here are just a few. I’ll post a few of the “nuggets” I picked up along the way, especially in Dharmsala (the Dalai Lama’s home base), later on.

Just quickly, some of the highlights included: getting to the Taj from Delhi and back in under 20 hours; crossing the Bhagsu waterfall with a French couple and hiking along the other side with them; dining with a very cute Japanese couple in McLeod Ganj/Dharmsala over…pizza; meeting a Dutch Buddhist in training, learning from her, and playing with her gorgeous son; stopping the car outside of Chamba and hiking up some unknown trail to the top of a mountain to find ~4 families living there who make the hike everyday just to get to the store, school, etc.

One of the major low-lights was the amount of discarded chip/snack packets we saw pretty much everywhere. It would be great if Pepsi Co. (the owner of Frito Lay, and one of the major, if not #1 distributors of chips/snacks here) could find a better solution to preserve their chips/snacks. One that’s biodegradable or at least recyclable. You’d think that given their CEO (Indra Nooyi) is of Indian descent, there might be a greater sense of corporate responsibility or concern about Pepsi’s role in the pollution of India.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 20th, 2008 at 5:12 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.