For the photography enthusiast in Sukalp Sharma, McLeodganj is a paradise bestowed with picturesque settings
This town seems to be almost hanging between Dharamshala down below and the mighty and majestic Dhauladhar Range above, or shall we say caught between two vast, vivid and seemingly infinite frames. It seems to mark a sheepish grin on the mountains. Both for the back-packer as well as the photography enthusiast in me, McLeodganj?or Little Lhasa, its seemingly more illustrious title?should have been tick-marked long ago on my travel to-do and to-click list. But some of the most desired things, and destinations in this case, just take a back seat like a dog-eared page in a book you forgot to resume reading. However, a random get-set-travel plan worked out, and like it didn?t matter at all, I, armed with a brand new DSLR camera, was on a 13-hour bus ride from scorching Delhi to a town in the lap of the Himalayas, resonating with Buddhist hymns.
Your drab and worn out 13-hours-in-the-bus appearance just vapourises with the first look you take at the snow-covered Dhauladhar range, which beholds the town in its lap, as if to protect the place and its people, torn and removed from what they really call home?Tibet. The sun was a little strong, casting beautiful golden light to the pictures in the forenoon, while chilly breeze made it a little difficult to hold the camera with a steady hand for early morning and post-sunset shots.
McLeodganj is a paradise for an amateur photographer looking for anything and everything from landscapes, to portraits of Buddhist monks, and from shots of a buzzing marketplace, to the rolling prayer wheels that give a sense of fleeting prayers being renewed. Prayer flags are lined over your head wherever you go, and the market streets are lined with handicrafts, silver jewellery, cafes and eating joints dishing out delectable Italian food (for some inexplicable reason), and Buddhist monks carry on with their lives, going through their trials and tribulations. There?s just so much happening at this place that everywhere you look, there?s a frame waiting to be captured, preserved, admired and loved.
Tsuglagkhang temple, referred to locally as the Dalai Lama temple, has hardly anything grand about it. But the calmness and harmony that can be sensed on the premises just grow on you, as you go around rotating prayer wheels, while monks, commoners and foreigners meditate, as their hands keep on counting prayers and blessings over the rosary beads. The atmosphere is infectious, not overwhelming, but in a way calming.
But the best shots of the trip were found beyond the McLeodganj town. However, at a place where it is hard to distinguish one town from the other purely based on distance, if you start your day early enough, you can cover Bhagsunag temple and waterfall, as well as the quiet and quaint village of Dharamkot. Both are a mile or so from Mcleodganj, which is hardly any distance for a regular hiker. The Bhagsunag waterfall might not be the most majestic of waterfalls you had seen, but the easy accessibility makes it a great spot for just whiling away, and also to get up-close shots of a waterfall, from as close as it can possibly get. It?s a pleasure playing with the camera settings at this waterfall to click creative shots of the water gushing here and crashing there, falling from a height with Buddhist prayer flags lined above it in one string.
Now, anyone who knows a little about photography would vouch for the high range of options in capturing shots of water, falling and flowing. Someone tells me that the waterfall looks majestic in monsoon and late autumn. ?Another time, another trip,? I say to myself.
Back to McLeodganj and then a couple of kilometres uphill bring you to a hill village, which seems right out of a fantasy book, at least, visually for a photographer. Kuccha hilly trails, running through small farms, and tiny single-storied houses, Dharamkot is bestowed with a picturesque setting, with spaced out hut-shaped houses, and curves on the pathways that spiral around the village. Closing in on the evening at Dharamkot, one has to make a definite stop at this small and humble joint called Family Pizzeria. Sitting out in the frugal seating arrangement in the backyard of the Pizzeria, under the golden-yellow light of the sun ready to slip into the covers behind the high and mighty Himalayas, Dharamkot is a treat to the eyes, and the lens.
And if the trip till now made me run out of one memory card, the hike back from Dharamkot to McLeodganj from a path behind the village, where trees and twilight play hide and seek, deserves quite a bit of the memory available on the camera. Going downhill is a pleasure anyway after a long day, but when the route you take is as breathtaking as this one is, the joy just multiplies manifold.
Back at McLeodganj, while savouring momos at the popular vegetarian restaurant Pema Thang and Tibetan sohya lapning, yhamein and noodles from roadside vendors on the street leading to the Dalai Lama?s temple, if you look at the pictures captured and frames preserved, it?s a sense of achievement that fills you.
But something seems missing. And that something is that perfect sunset shot, which people around tell me is only available in another village close-by, by the name of Naddi. But Delhi was calling me back and it was my last evening in Little Lhasa, so I had to make do with shots of the retiring sun from the roof of popular restaurant McLlo, bang on the McLeodganj main square. Having captured sunsets at many locations, this wasn?t a great view for me, but maybe the reverence and calm that McLeodganj stood for in those two days made this sunset somewhat special. Naddi?s famed picturesque sunset will have to wait for a while, till the hangover of this trip washes down. But with more than a thousand pictures stored in the two memory cards, it would be a long hangover.
McLeodganj for many people stands for pot-smoking hippies, Israeli wanderers and Tibetan refugees. For some it stands for spirituality and Tibetan Buddhism. But for me it stands at the perfect confluence of natural beauty and the positivity of life, at one place, which is an exile settlement, but which I call a paradise in exile. Saint Augustine once said, ?The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.? McLeodganj and around will forever be a page marked with a book-mark and a picture postcard for me. And with that, I undertook another 13-hour-long journey back to Delhi, back to home.
