Forts n' Picnics

This is the view from Kangra Fort's Terror Balcony. The fort is surrounded on three sides by cliff and river with pretty nice views from the top, which is about a half hour spiraling hike up from the main gate and is best reached atop trusty Shadowfax, chief of the Mearas. You can read more about Kangra fort here and here.

The main road from Guggel to the Sarah campus has a number of beautiful vistas, along with many cows and angry bus drivers.

Tibetans Love Prayer Flags. Some rinpoche or another is buried here and it has become a popular place for weekend hikes up from mcleod.

We stopped for some tea while on our hike here, on one of the peaks above Mcleod on the way to TCV. While I still do not really enjoy tea all that much, the mountains made up for it.

Standing on the rock to the right is Passang-la, our program coordinator and president (or something equally important) of Sarah. He has coordinated all our guest speakers (including Tenzin Tsundue), arranged all of our weekend trips and hikes, and generally seems to know everything. Standing in the left side of the pictures are our stray bodyguard dogs, who followed us from the tea shop all the way to TCV, protecting us from monkeys and whatever else hides in the mountains. They are Very Good (proto)Dogs.

Lunchtime in the Baby House!

This is the Guys dorm at Sarah, behind the main basketball court. For those of you who did not catch ESPN last thursday, the visiting Miami team beat the Sarah Third Years 53-47, although there has been a rematch scheduled which promises to include more monks.

Our last few days at Sarah corresponded with the week long campus picnic in honor of the founder of the college. The students didn't have class and instead were expected to spend all day playing a number of games, like the one above. The object here is to use a small hook on the end of a string on the bamboo poles to catch the top of the soda, and if you can reel it in without dropping it you win the soda instead of losing ten rupees. I lost ten Rupees. I lost thirty more rupees on some card based betting game that I still cannot comprehend before going back to ping pong.