Visiting the Dalai Lama in Likir

The Ride to Likir
This morning we woke up at 5am to take a 2 hours drive on the motorbike to see the Dalai Lama. It was a good, but long ride. The roads were great.

The Dalai Lama and attending lecture
When we arrived, I think we never seen so many people flocking from all the villages in Ladakh to see His Holiness the Dalai Lama. It is quite amazing, today I saw on facebook how someone posted a picture of a huge crowd of people demonstrating. Yet here we all came together to receive blessing for peace and love.

I must say being in his presence I did feel this very nice, gentle soothing caring love, it literally moved your heart, in Marcus' words: "It's amazing". But then to sit on the ground for 3 hours, really hurt my ass, and it was like university all over again. Attending a lecture in general is boring, of course to be in His Holiness presence is great and special, but still is a lecture, and the worse was that the translator was really slow haha. After 1.5 hours, the translator decided to translate simultaneously, being silent for more than an hour…great.

Interesting to see how basically everybody was falling asleep after a while, similar in lectures. But then when you ask the people how it was, it was amazing haha. People are funny.

It was also tiring and painful to sit on the ground for so long, it did motivate us to get a big ass pillow for the Kalachakra, or even a chair haha.

But then again, I think it was interesting to see the Dalai Lama in real, rather than from Youtube.

Stop! In name of His Holiness
During our ride back, police were chasing us, or so it seemed. At first they forced us to drive faster; we tried, but our bike couldn’t go faster. After a while, the police who was driving in front of us, forced us to pull over (they themselves kept on driving). As we pulled over and got off the bike, the Dalai Lama passed us and was waving at us haha. Apparently, the police was clearing the road for the Dalai Lama, and we were obstructing the road :P

So another day of rest and then hardcore Kalachakra for 10 days straight on. Pillow hunting tomorrow!

Busy Leh
With the Kalachakra coming, Leh has suddenly been overcrowded in the past few days. I was talking to a local and he actually didn't like it at all. It was interesting to see, how to one extent, the arrival of the Dalai Lam is one of the greatest blessings, became also one  of the great frustration for locals.