Suddenly we're in Tibet — An Elegant Sufficiency

Not really. But we spent a few hours in a Tibetan Refugee Camp today with the second largest community of Tibetan people in the world, outside the country itself.

We’d noticed the signs as we drove into Madikeri yesterday, so had an idea of where we were heading when Sheka collected us this morning. First, he dropped us off by the temple with the stupa and prayer wheels - the best place to begin, said Sachin, our guide.

We followed his lead, turning each of the twelve wheels clockwise and working our way around in a clockwise direction.

We gave each of the large prayer wheels a turn as well, just to make sure.

The town of Bylakuppe was established in the 1960s and is pretty self-sufficient in terms of community resources such as schools, hospitals and so on. It’s a protected community, much like an American Indian Reservation and the language used here is still Tibetan.

Next stop was the handicraft centre named after one of the founders of Bylakuppe.

Now, Sachin had promised to steer us away from the tourist traps, preferring to tell us the story of the town by means of the activities going on. So, we were glad this was a genuine workshop rather than a thinly veiled souvenir shop as we’d feared. Downstairs, three ladies were making exquisite knotted wool carpets.

Their hands were moving so swiftly, I couldn’t quite work out the process beyond knotting a length of wool around the metal rod to establish an even tension.

They were working from a charted pattern in wool that had been dyed with natural pigments.

The chaps in the rear of the room were mixing the ground turmeric for the next batch.

They were working with a pleasing palette of colours.

and I couldn’t resist taking a quick snap of the loose ends!

We didn’t know what was going on upstairs, but we followed Sachin as he pointed out the kitchen “where the dough is prepared”. It didn’t look clean enough for food preparation - but what else?

The dough ws extruded through a machine to create……incense sticks!

Three men were working up here. Two of them separated and counted the sticks, tieing them in bundles of twenty.

He had a great pile of rejects, too curvy to bundle up!

This man sat wrapping the bundles up with a sheet of cellophane, inserting some information into each package and carefully sealing the ends of each bundle.

We asked Sachin about the process, for surely this would be more economically done by machine? Not with the unreliable power supply here, he said - much cheaper to employ these people to do the work. (I wondered how much they were paid)

Admiring the finished rugs as we left, we headed out through the town to our next stop.

I posted yesterday about the chaos and the commotion of an Indian town, so this came as quite a surprise. Hardly a soul to be seen, this orderly, well maintained community felt like a different world.

We stopped by the Sera Mey University, where monks could attend and study for twelve years. The Dalai Lama visits twice a year and takes great interest in the progress of the town, apparently.

The temple nearby was closed and the gates locked, as was the library, so Sachin did an about turn and we headed towards the next place on his agenda.

Down a small residential street to the place essential for everyday life.

The supermarket! Fascinating of course. I was amazed by the variety of toothpaste on offer here! This was a small, neighbourhood store - no great megamarket - and yet, the whole of that middle shelf was filled with different toothpastes. The most interesting flavour?

Surely that must taste better than the plain “salt” variety on the shelf next to it!

Of course, there were other essentials to the Tibetan way of life on sale here. A large proportion of the community here are monks, so one shelf was filled with an assortment of garments for them (I didn’t look too closely!)

Then there was a shelf of Tibetan noodles.

A few incense sticks.

There was also, surprisingly, a large variety of Cadbury’s chocolate!

As we left for our minibus, we were struck by the colourful town, but also how oddly empty the place was - maybe everyone was at lunch? Our cue to try some Tibetan food….

A mile or so down the road we were ushered into an empty restaurant, where the jovial owner first of all plied us with a salted lemon drink (delicious!) and then demonstrated how to make meat dumplings, First of all he carefully rolled out small circles of dough, slightly thicker in the centre.

Then he deftly filled them with the meat and, with only a few lightening quick squeezes, produced this lovely little parcel.

Soon joined by lots of others, a couple of which my Hero and I had attempted (the youngsters declined to have a go). Our attempts are those hidden by the pan!