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Hello, so here we are in the home of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan Government in Exile up in the Himalayas, and it's mighty cold.
Our last update finished back down in the desert where it was mighty hot. Our week volunteering was such a great experience and it was very hard to say goodbye to all the kids we had come to know in such a short time. The girls especially shone out as the brightest and most conscientious with lovely personalaties too. Yet they are all probably married off and destined to serve their husband's family with no chance of a career of their own. We wanted to take them all home and tell them they could be anything they wanted to be. It was very sad.
We finished painting the outside of the building and attempted to teach them some football tactics and a bit of English sentence structure. If nothing else, our week in the school taught us we'll never make very good teachers or painters and decorators.
From Mandore we moved on to Jaisalmer in the Thar Desert. It has a huge sandstone fort that looks like a giant sandcastle. After a couple of days in town we headed out to a small village further into the desert where we took a camel safari out on to the dunes sleeping under the stars. It was pretty magical and the food the camel drivers conjured up with a couple of rocks, twigs and vegetables was outstanding. We then spent a night in a small homestay in the village eating dinner with the family on their kitchen floor.
That was the end of Rajasthan for us and we embarked on a 32 hour train journey up to Amritsar in Punjab. It's the home of Sikhism and contains their holiest site - The Golden Temple. In the kind-spirited nature of sikhs they offer free transport, accommodation and food for all pilgrims and travellers coming to Amritsar. We stayed in the dormitory where thousands of people sleep for free every night and ate in the communal kitchen which serves up to 150,000 people a day at the weekends and has been open 24 hours a day for 450 years! The place was amazing and we were made so welcome by everyone we met. It feels like a completely different country to where we've been for the past few weeks and we loved it.
We didn't want to abuse the three night limit so reluctantly left and took an amazing little mountain train up here to Dharamsala. We've learnt a lot about the Tibetan struggle and yet again on our travels are heartbroken at the local history (Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia! Why did we pick these places!) We'll be here a few days learning some more (and taking advantage of the amazing cake shops and Italian restaurants, finally a meal that isn't rice, dhal and chapati), then we're going to go back to Amritsar again because it's amazing.
Photos soon we promise.
Matt and Katie
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