I woke up in the morning with some anxiety because I had given my passport to Rohit the night before, and I wanted it back. He had told me the check in would open at 9:30am and then I could pay and retrieve my passport. I went upstairs and asked to check-in but Rohit said I needed to wait for the manager who wasn’t there yet, so I decided in the meantime to go look for a place to eat breakfast.

I walked about ten minutes down the road to a cafe called The Other Space. The cafe also serves as an art gallery where local artists can sell handmade art and other items. I ordered breakfast and coffee and sat down at a table on the balcony, which featured amazing views of the Dhauladhar mountains (a range of the Middle Himalayas).

The breakfast I ordered was essentially a Full English breakfast, with fried eggs, bacon, baked beans, potatoes, tomatoes, mushrooms, toast, juice, and a flat white. All for less than $5.

After eating breakfast I walked up a big hill to the Dalai Lama temple. The Dalai Lama Temple, officially called the Namgyal Monastery, is the residence of the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of and head of Tibet. People come from around the world to pray and study here, although the prayer is often not led by the Dalai Lama himself (he is nearly 90 years old). There is a public schedule for the Dalai Lama and he does teach occasionally, including a seminar he would be leading March 7-9, so I just missed him.

The temple featured a lot of Buddhist idols and prayer wheels to use for prayer, and a huge group of monks were sat throughout the courtyard, all listening to the prayer leader who was chanting over a microphone. A lot of people had radios with earbuds because the sermons are simulcast in many different languages over FM radio.

There were a lot of tourists in the temple too who were not there to study or pray but instead just to visit the site, and I’m amazed that those who are praying are not completely distracted by all the tourists.

I left the temple and headed down the street to the station of the Dharamshala skyway, which is a cable car that recently opened that runs between Mcleodganj (the hill station where the Dalai Lama’s temple is located) to Dharamshala (the city at the bottom of the mountain). I took the cable car down just to see the scenery and planned to come right back up. For whatever reason, when I got to the bottom I was made to wait for 30 minutes before I could get on a cable car to go back up. They had warned me before I bought the ticket that this would be the case for “security reasons,” but I’m pretty sure that the staff were just taking a lunch break.

Because of the delay in the cable car due to what I assume was the staff lunch, I was very hungry when I got back to Mcleodganj. I walked through the handicrafts market and headed to the main center of Mcleodganj, where there are lots of stores and places to eat. I walked past Kalachakra Temple, which is famous for being surrounded by prayer wheels and having some murals of the Kalachakra (the Wheel of Time). It was a bit chaotic because there was construction on the road behind it, but I walked around the entire temple and spun each prayer wheel one spin clockwise. Spinning the prayer wheel is said to be equivalent to reciting the mantras that are inscribed on it.

I went into Tibet Kitchen, a well known restaurant located right behind Kalachakra Temple, for lunch. I wanted to try a couple different Tibetan dishes, so I ordered some chicken momos and also a bowl of vegetable thukpa, which is a Tibetan noodle soup. The food was very good, and it was nice to have the hot thukpa since it was a bit chilly outside. The momos were just okay, they reminded me a lot of Chinese style dumplings, with a slightly different blend of spices.

After lunch I went for a nice walk down the mountain road to Bhagsu Naag Temple, and then past it to Bhagsu Nag waterfall, which was about a 3km walk. The temple had a swimming pool outside and there were a lot of people swimming there. There are lots of streetside cafes in the vicinity of the waterfall, but I didn’t stop to eat anything. I got to the waterfall, and saw that the path continued up to walk over the waterfall, but I didn’t want to walk all the way up the steep pathway. There was also a couple of short zip lines in the area, which I elected to skip because they were all located below the waterfall and just zip-lined over a less interesting segment of the river.

After seeing the waterfall I headed back to Mcleodganj and started heading a bit down the mountain. I wanted to go to the Tibet Museum which was closing soon, so I tried to find a driver. There were tons of taxi and auto drivers in Mcleodganj and I found one who was willing to take me to the Tibet museum, wait for me there, and then bring me back when I was done. The museum was located inside the Central Tibetan Administration, which is a complex of buildings located down the mountain from Mcleodganj and the headquarters of the Tibetan Government-in-Exile. In addition to the museum, they had things like the Tibetan Supreme Justice Commission, and the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives.

The Tibet Museum was very modern and contained a wealth of information on Tibetan history and culture. There was a nice exhibit depicting artifacts from different sects of Tibetan Buddhism, and lots of information on the Dalai Lama, the modern conflict between the Chinese government and the Tibetans, and the Tibetan escape and exile.

I explored the museum and headed back up to Mcleodganj. I went to get an afternoon snack, some taro boba, before I went for another walk, this time towards the northwest. My destination was Naddi, another hill station located a few kilometers away, where there are supposedly great sunset views. The walk ended up being much longer than I had anticipated. I made it to Dal Lake, which was a shallow and dirty lake that supposedly is a tourist destination, before I decided I’d just hire a driver to take me the rest of the way to Naddi and then back to Mcleodganj.

I arrived in Naddi and walked down a path to the sunset view spot, where there were breathtaking views of the mountains. The sun was at the right angle to illuminate the tops of the mountains. There were a lot of vendors around to sell chai and other snacks, so I purchased a masala chai and took a seat to watch the sunset.

I headed back in the auto to Mcleodganj and went in search of food. First I stopped at Tibet Quality Bakery, which was closing in just a few minutes. I asked the guy what he recommended and he recommended the rum raisin cake, but I ended up getting some yak milk cheesecake instead because that sounded unique. It was very tasty.

I then went to Kalimpong Restaurant to get more Tibetan food. I knew I must be in a right place because I saw lots of locals inside and even more locals lining up outside. Since I was alone I was able to just sit down at a table in the corner next to other solo people. I had some mutton momos, which were really good (much better than the momos at Tibet Kitchen), ginger honey lemon tea, which really hit the spot, and vegetable thenthuk, which is in principle the same as the thukpa I had earlier, but the noodles are thin and fat (like dumplings almost) instead of long and thin. The food was fantastic.

After dinner I noticed that a store across the street was advertising selling SIM cards, so I decided to try my luck once again to buy one. The guy here was willing to sell me a SIM card and he just charged me 200 rupees (about $2.50) above the normal price, which I decided was fair because I was tired of worrying about getting a SIM card. It took about half an hour to sell to me because of all the hoops he is required to jump through to prove my identity (it required bringing my passport and my visa, and taking a bunch of photos of me). After half an hour he gave me a physical SIM card which I could put in my pocket WiFi device. The total price of the phone plan was 300 rupees (less than $4) and included 1.5GB of data a day for 30 days, and unlimited SMS and calls. I could also refill with 50GB of data for 301 rupees, which amounts to about 7 cents per GB, which is orders of magnitude cheaper to the cost of roaming or buying other eSIMs from online vendors.

In order to convert the physical SIM into an eSIM, which would work in my phone, I would need to be able to confirm I wanted to over SMS and over a phone call, and since I couldn’t make phone calls with my pocket WiFi device, I stopped by an electronics store on the way back to the hotel to buy the cheapest Nokia phone they had, which cost about $15.