Bylakuppe

Bylakuppe is a Tibetan settlement about 250 kms from Bangalore, off the road to Coorg. 

It’s like stepping into another land. Diksha sent a couple of pics from there to a friend and he’s like..'where bro…Bhutan or Nepal?' It’s really like that.

It’s a town mainly inhabited by Tibetans, with an estimated 7000 who’ve made it their home and you can feel the culture even beyond the temples and monasteries. And that was best experienced when we lost our way, which we did for a good one hour.

The living areas, the houses and the paths have these really colourful flags everywhere and they seemed to create a high energy aura around.

Onto the big temple, the Namdroling Nyingmapa Monastery. The sanctum sanctorium is this huge meditation hall, apparently the largest teaching center of the Nyingma lineage of Tibetan Buddhism in the world. Was so happy to hear that the Indian Government granted this forest land to the Tibetan exiles, and they've developed it into something of real significance. When I'd visited it in 1997, it was nothing like this. 

Entrance to the Namdroling Monastery

You step into the hall, and it's over whelming in more ways than one.  

It has three really imposing, 60 feet tall statues and meditation places for the monks. The statues are austere, but surrounding them is brilliantly colourful work of dragons and and other motifs in great detail.

Could feel the energy of the place even empty, and can only imagine what it must be like filled with the reverberations of Buddhist chanting and beats.

The walls again have very colourful and detailed murals depicting various emotional facets....anger, peace, love.....

A couple of beautiful frescos, but the windows were behind so that's the best I could get on my phone.

After we found the Golden temple and had our fill of it, we went back 10 kms searching for where we’d lost our way. We'd seen a local food joint, and guess it was just the draw of the natural charm of a novel landscape, especially with its colorful flags and maroon robed monks, so searched again....and this time not even knowing what we were searching for, but we eventually found it. Was divine lunch :)

A temple we found when we lost our way

Monks at the market place

Waiting for momos :)

Diksha getting a kingfisher on camera. She got some lovely shots but those are yet in the camera . Thankful for my phone :)

Now, that was brilliant diversion for sure. I'm so glad we left early that morning, as what was intended to be a one hour diversion turned out to be a five hour halt, and we were still within time of reaching Coorg before dark....though just about. It wasn't just about both of us travelling alone, but also because we'd been strictly warned to reach early because of the high risk of wild elephants that frequent the area after dark.