It looks like mud

So, after taking a look at the buses and discovering they were like schoolbuses but without all that padding on the seats, we opted for the taxi for the 10 hours on bumpy, winding roads to McLeod Ganj. I'm not sure it helped Liz -- she actually looked green with sickness, but we both made it.

McLeod Ganj is the sight of the Tibetan Government in exile, and as such has a lot of Tibetan exiles. Liz and I signed up for Sangye's Tibetan cooking classes. We learned to make Tibetan breads, soups, and momos (dumplings), but more interestingly we learned Sangye's story of escape from Chinese-occupied Tibet.

Animatedly, humbly, and without sadness, Sangye told the class, after Liz asked, how he got here. "In the winter, the mountain passes on the border of Tibet get very cold, so the Chinese leave the borders until spring. That is when everyone tries to leave Tibet. I walked 25 days to get to Nepal. I went three days without food! Yeah, I almost died." Again, no reflection here, just fact. "It is difficult to ask for food when you leave because there is not much of it, and some people will inform the Chinese because they get food and protection in exchange. So I didn't have enough food. After 14 days, I ran out of food. I went 3 days with none, then some other people with me shared some of their food. There were about 30 people in my group, but only me and one other were from my village. The rest we joined in Lhasa. We passed over the mountains into Nepal." We asked what happened when he got there. "I had to pay a lot of money for food. I ran out of money quickly in Nepal. And the food, it was dal and rice." He pronounced it dal-ee. "Tibetans don't eat dal and rice. I had never seen it before and it didn't look good. 'What is this? It looks like mud!'"

Sangye is doing pretty well for himself in McLeod Ganj, where his Lonely Planet-endorsed cooking class had plenty of students. He can't communicate with his family and can't go back to Tibet, but he is still a warm, happy, and friendly person. Someone asked if he did go back, if Tibet were to regain independence, would he teach Indian cooking classes there? "No. Tibetans won't eat the dal and rice. Looks too much like mud."