Prayer Wheels

Post-porridge, I head down Temple Road which slopes below the Annex, pausing only to 'phone Sara to come out onto the balcony so I can serenade/photograph her. The road is lined with small stalls selling Tibetan merchandise - bangles, blankets, banners and brass Buddhas is every conceivable pose (but all too heavy to hump home). Most craft shops sell variations of the same  theme; one is aptly called the Same Same but Different Shop.

Then comes the temple enclosure, Namgyal Monastery and residence of HH the Dalai Lama. Further on is the HQ of the Tibetan Government in Exile. The temple  is, at best, a modest affair. I expect queues of pilgrims from across across Asia and beyond, but find only a trickle of the faithful and the merely curious. None the worse for that. The temple is clean and cool, ringed with cylindrical polished brass Mani prayer wheels. Each prayer wheel is "filled with thousands of Avalokiteshvara mantras OM MANI PADME HUM. By turning this wheel once one earns merit equal to the  recitation of the mantras filled inside this wheel." A bit like an indulgence, then. "Kindly turn it clockwise", the notice adds. Indeed people are requested to "circumambulate" the whole site in a clockwise direction, and while I pause for a rest the same pair of monks circumambulate in animated conversation five times.

The temple room is quite small with three principal gold-coated images. The faithful leave offerings in front of these - money, jewellery, biscuits and cartons of fruit juice (mango especially popular). Outside, I am conscripted into an Indian family photo, Buddha in the background.

I am just chatting to Prikash, who loves Wordsworth, wants to visit the Lake District and has a doctor brother in Lincs, when who should appear but Sara. She has already been in the temple and now needs the loos. The gents' urinal has probably the best view of any I've ever p****d in, so forgive me for attaching photo of same. Just then, outside the gents, yet another extended Indian family arrives, and we are both ushered into their photo. This is becoming a habit. Next time we're in Norwich and spot an Indian family we must return the compliment and ask them to pose with us. 

Loo with a View

From there, a refreshment stop (lassi, banana not bhang) and we go our separate ways. S shops for spices and dried fruits, including brown sheets of dried mango which resemble conserved Tudor shoe soles rescued from the Mary Rose. I have my shoes shined, then promptly mess them up again by taking a muddy short cut through some woods and a nunnery.

Back at base, S is suffering from dose of that trouble which is said to stalk many Western visitors to the sub-continent. Undaunted, we head out for food. The streets are, at last, bright with Diwali lights - not to Shimla standards, but several notches up on Wymondham's pathetic Christmas decorations. We commission our delightful Nepalese waiter to find a pharmacy, from which he returns clutching strips of bulbous orange pills and rehydration salts. Almost immediately she feels better.