Neither here nor there

In Dharamsala, Jigmey's story is far from unusual. Seven years ago, the Buddhist monk fled Tibet, walking for two months through Himalayan passes in the depths of winter to reach Nepalese capital Kathmandu. Yet he blushes when he learns I've just walked from Triund, a mountain meadow 8km from Dharamsala, in the northern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh.

'I've never been there,' he confesses. 'I'm very lazy.

I don't walk far.' Just to freedom, it seems.

I met Jigmey in the courtyard of Namgyal Monastery, metres from the entrance to the Dalai Lama's residence. Like so many young monks, Jigmey had been drawn from Kathmandu to Dharamsala, the home in exile of his magnetic spiritual leader. We talk for a while, then Jigmey asks me to take his photograph. He writes down an e-mail address to which I can send a digital image, picks up his mobile phone and walks away in his brand-name running shoes. It seems anything but the classic monastic existence but in Dharamsala it is as common as the tale of Jigmey's flight from Tibet.

When travellers talk of Dharamsala they invariably mean McLeod Ganj, a satellite suburb wrapped around a Himalayan spur 500 metres above the city. It was named after a colonial lieutenant governor of British Punjab, David McLeod, and a divisional commander, Forsyth Ganj. It was here that the Dalai Lama settled in 1959 and it's here that monks, Tibetan refugees and waves of tourists have been coming ever since. Prayer flags flutter like hung washing on adjacent spurs and the housing is such a rich mixture of colours - ochre, yellow, red, green - it's as though the chir pine forest that engulfs the town is in perpetual bloom.

McLeod Ganj is an island of Buddhism in a nation of Hinduism and for many travellers it's also the eye in the Indian storm, one of the few calming escapes from the maelstrom that is India - short of becoming a sadhu, or holy man.