Have you ever seen a woman so beautiful that as she walks down the street, men crane their necks to look at her, and in doing so drive right into another car, or an old lady crossing the road, or someone's living room? That's dangerous beauty, and it is rare.

We're in Manali. We arrived just before dawn after a mostly sleepless eight hour drive from McLeodganj. Our guesthouse is about a ten minute hike from the main road in Old Manali, and before dawn, with giant packs and no sleep, the hike is less enjoyable than it has been since. It starts with some steep, shallow stone steps, some of which are broken, then a narrow ledge built into some rock. From there you climb up more steep steps and through a perpetually wet/muddy, narrow ally between two buildings. After that there's a path that runs along the place where they collect the huge pile of dung, which is an easier walk, except that there's a tendency to hold one's breath for longer than is healthy during a hike. That's the first minute and a half. It continues in similar fashion from there, except most of the rest also involves a narrow/slippery path on the edge of a cliff. It's a pretty high cliff, and at the bottom is a raging river and giant boulders – generally a bad place to land if you fall.  But that's all fine, because if you're careful, if you focus on the trail in front of you, you won't fall. The problem is that the world around you is that beautiful woman. It's there, minding its own business, naturally too beautiful to ignore. It pulls your attention from the trail, and if you forget to stop moving, if you are too caught up in the view to think of where your foot should be landing next, you could get into trouble. And you don't want to stop moving, because with every step you see something new – the perspective changes, the light changes, the bend opens up into something spectacular. The Himalayas, majestic and snow-capped, stretch out in front of you and behind you. To either side there are glowing green hills and amazing old pine trees, little houses and big estates, rose bushes (roses are so plentiful here that you could literally stop and smell the roses for entire afternoons) and the river, which winds and rushes and roars below. The water is light blue-green with the white foam of a river in a hurry, trying to make room for all the glacier water as it melts and comes down from the mountains. (The same glacier water is what we get to drink from the tap, cold and crisp and clean.) There are edible (and smokable) plants underfoot, fruit trees lining the path, adorable mountain dogs waiting for a pat on the head and sunshine, sunset, sunrise or the giant golden moon overhead... The air is so fresh, perfumed with all the mint, roses, wild oregano and fruit blossoms, but still crisp. The sky, most days, seems to be a clear, vibrant blue with just enough white cloud for contrast. And that's not even the best part...

Manali is divided into two parts – old and new. New Manali is pretty gross – tons of traffic, dirt, pollution, trash, smoking tourists and pushy vendors. (But thereare also some amazing characters wandering around.) It's loud and bustling, but not in an invigorating way. Also, the main ATM always has a huge line, and has run out of money several times.  To get to it, you need to cross over a huge ditch by way of a rickety railing stretched across as a bridge.  Old Manali is much smaller and quieter. There are shops and beauty salons, cafes and guest houses. The river runs alongside parts of old Manali, and the rest is very steep with narrow roads, so there aren't many cars or tuck-tucks. It is much cleaner than New Manali, and looks newer, too. Yogi warned us that all of Manali is “The Junkie Corner.” (Yogi has a way with words. His way is hilarious and honest, and this is one of his phrases that we use constantly. It means a place where junkies – aka people who smoke or drink or worse – congregate to get high, or low, or to “use each other as closets.” I'll let you work that last phrase out on your own, it's another group favorite.) Anyway, of COURSE it is the junkie corner. Weed literally is a weed here – it grows everywhere, and many shops sell baby hookas, rolling papers, pipes and other smoking paraphernalia. I can't think of a better place to sit and get high than anywhere along the path to our guesthouse, or at our guesthouse, which is in an apple/apricot orchard with a giant yard full of roses, honeysuckle and plush grass, a staff waiting to make you food, a view of the river and mountains and Yanu, an amazing dog who is always ready to hang out. As a non-junkie, I would prefer it if the junkies would stop smoking and go to bed at a reasonable hour (like 9:30), but to each his own...

Anyway, Old Manali and New Manali are joined by a road and a park. The road is icky, and the park is the best place I have ever been in my life, so I generally take the park. It's the Great Himalaya National Park, and I want to live there forever. I have spent the last few days trying to figure out how to accomplish this goal, and I'm not generally a pessimist, but it's not looking good. (It would be a much more attainable goal if I had an invisibility cloak or the ability to generate electric power from inside the park without drawing any attention, so let me know if you have any ideas on those fronts. I know in the Yoga Sutras the whole last chapter is on super powers like floating and invisibility, but Yogi says I'm not ready for that yet...)

The park is an ancient pine forest with lots of moss-covered boulders and grass and a little stream and, past the cliff, the river. Forgive me for not trying to put into words the beauty of this forest, but I know I cannot. The pictures don't even come close... There's nothing that can even come close to describing the feeling of being amongst those trees. It may sound crazy, but the first time I walked into the park, I cried almost the whole way through to the other end. Everyone has their form of nature that moves them the most – some people want to be on the beach forever, others love the mountains, and a few even love the desert most (but those are the crazies). I'm a forest person. I've been trying to understand the reaction I had, and here's what I got: we are energy, flowing through these organic human bodies. That's fact – we all have an electro-magnetic component that hasn't been fully explained by modern science. Energy vibrates, and those vibrations travel past our bodies and can be felt by others. (Think about when you “feel” someone watching you, or get a bad feeling from someone without any tangible reason, or like someone right away, before you even speak to each other.) The forest is full of trees and plants, all vibrating at their own levels, and creating a certain energetic “hum” that must just really amplify the “hum” going on in my own body. Oceans, mountains and deserts all have their own different vibrations due to the energy in the rocks, the crashing waves and the plants. When I walked into the forest, I felt it through my whole body. It was amazing, but completely overwhelming. I've been back a few times since then, and it mostly isn't overwhelming anymore – I've figured out how to deal with it. Lori, Dia, Mac and I went to the forest yesterday to take some pictures for our yoga websites and bios, so I will post a few here, but again, they don't even come close... (Oh, but the “photo shoot” was hilarious! There are tons of Indian tourists in Manali now, so there was a constant trickle of people down the path through the woods, and many stopped to watch us, cheering after we finished particularly difficult poses, and one family even posed with Lori as she did her pictures.)

I thought being vegan in the East Village was easy... Then I came to Mcleodganj, where most restaurants advertise their “veg” status alongside their name – either “veg” or “pure veg,” meaning no meat served at all. (Though sometimes places have no name, and you have to inquire within and hope someone speaks English. One of the best places we found is literally a hole in the wall, so small that there is really only room for making food or eating food, not both at once. Cleanliness is something you have to put out of your mind when you are there - it's not a place for germophobes. It's not that it's dirty, exactly. When we went for the first time (the nice Indian restaurant across the street was only serving breakfast, and we were so hungry for lunch, so we poked our heads in and asked, “Veg?” Two men looked at each other and then at the third, who responded, “Yeh, veg, dal.” They seemed a little surprised that we seemed interested in them (don't want to jump to conclusions, but I think it's because we're white...). So we squeeze in past the three men (well, one was still a boy) and looked around for a place to sit. There were benches, maybe enough room for five comfortable, average-sized tushes (India average, not American average), and along the wall there was a little ledge instead of tables. There was a couple and their child there, and another man, so there wasn't much room left, and the ledge above that spot of open bench was covered in dirty dishes and shmutz. The boy came and started passing the dishes past us to the other two men, but there was so little room to move and maneuver that the pile of dishes soon crashed to the floor... When the area was cleared enough that we could sit and get out of their way, they ran a wet rag over the ledge and started making our food. The parantha (bread) was whole wheat, stuffed with shredded potatoes and chili peppers, then cooked on the stove top. Then we had dal, yellow lentils with some larger beans, some pickled something (mango, I think – sour and sweet and very mildly spicy) and a potato curry. It was all delicious (though I don't like the pickled mysteries, I prefer kosher dill). There were spoons, but mostly you ate with your hands, using the bread to scoop up the beans and potato, and my hands got pretty messy. I asked for a napkin, and they said they had none. They weren't out of napkins, they just don't have them, ever. But, they had a small sink in the corner, so I used that, and they even offered me a rag for drying my hands. We ordered another round of dal and aloo parantha and ate happily. When we finished, we asked how much we owed them. “Sixty rupee.” Sixty rupees is equivalent to about $1.20 in the US. We also did not get sick from that meal, and have been back since. Charlie got what we think was all-you-can-eat thali for thirty-five rupees (about $0.70 US). He ate a whole plate of food, asked for more, they brought him round two, and then round three, and at the end, the bill was the same as for one plate. All veg, no ghee or butter or cream or meat, and delicious. We never got a picture of the place, but it was smaller and much less fancy than this one:

All “pure veg” places offer lots of cheese, butter, curd (yogurt) and other dairy, and are often very confused when we ask for the dish without those things. We ordered a veg pizza one day and everyone in the restaurant, from the busboy/waiter to the cook to the owners, all came to try to understand what we really meant – because a pizza without cheese is... well, there are not even words for that. They use vegetable oil here a lot, instead of ghee, though ghee and butter are still very present. One of the Tibetan staples is yak butter tea, a cup of tea with a big scoop of salted yak butter in it, and even as I type this I am trying not to wretch. But it works for the Tibetans, so that's nice...  (And even though it's veggie oil, don't eat the stuff that's fried in it.  Yogi says they brought that oil all the way from Tibet and just keep using it in the big deep-fry wok.  ;)  Toxic.)

There's one vegan restaurant we've found, though they offer cheese as an addition to many of the dishes, but everything on the menu is vegan (if you don't add the cheese). It's one of our favorite places, up on the third floor with an amazing view of the valley and lake in the distance. There is hardly ever anyone there, so there's always enough room for large groups, and even though they're never busy, it always takes at least an hour for anything you order. But it's worth the wait. Pema, the manager, is an amazing, friendly man with an infectious smile and an awesome attitude and funny stories about chickens in Goa, though his English is a little spotty, so maybe the stories aren't as funny as we think. The place, Khana Nirvana (Food Heaven), is actually a non-profit with environmental goals, though I'm not sure what they do other than run an empty vegan-ish cafe. They offer volunteer opportunities, such as conversation with the workers and baking desserts. They almost never have desserts, though they're listed on the menu. Pema doesn't like sweets, so I think he just never makes them. We volunteered one day and made some interesting cookies. It was fun, and after tasting them, we weren't so sad the next time we came in and there were no cookies made. Their motto is “Liberation through mastication.”

Another favorite place is JJI Exile Brothers Cafe, very close to our guesthouse. They seem to be the only place in town for whole wheat momos (Tibetan dumplings), and the steamed spinach momos are the best. They also have (good) vegan chocolate cake, a rooftop garden with an awesome view, dogs and Johnny Cash playing on the sound system. There's a man who works there, he may be part of the family. There's something not quite right about him, but with the language barrier, we're not sure what it is. But he loves Mac. LOOOOOOOOOVES him. Tenzin will come up behind Mac and hug him, squeeze him, pretty much molest him, and even once gave Mac a zrbtt on the arm. (Zrbtt= putting your mouth on someone's skin and blowing until a farty noise comes out; spelling courtesy of Rudy Huxtable.)

They use a lot of green vegetables here. Spinach, bok choi, something like chard (but better) and a few others make it into the regular rotation, and getting a plate of crunchy, stir-fried bok choi alone is easy to do. They also have carrots, daikon, green cabbage, mild red onions, green peppers, potatoes, zucchini, cucumber, napa cabbage, beets, bitter melon, green beans, okra, English peas, eggplant and fruit – apples, bananas, watermelon, canteloupe, mangoes, papayas, peaches and the occasional kiwis, pears and apricots.  We've made some pretty incredible meals here - gazpacho with cilatro-cashew cream sauce, papaya and brined English pea salad with apricot balsamic dressing, chocolate-covered bananas with homemade coconut-honey muesli...  There are also wild stinging nettles and mint growing everywhere here, so I got new scissors and went out to harvest them one day to make delicious tea with Ceylon cinnamon.

Our best Tibetan meal here may have been with Yeshi. He walked to McLeodganj from Tibet with nothing when he was eighteen. He didn't know anyone in India, had no prospects. It's a pretty common story here. He ended up going to art school and learned traditional Tibetan painting and is now starting to branch out into tattoos. He's very talented, and one of the sweetest people I have ever met. He's a struggling artist, sharing a tiny apartment with two friends, but they always bring us tea when we come over and consistently go out of their way to help us or show us generosity. He's trying to get to the States or Canada to study art, so if anyone knows of a good scholarship out there... Anyway, he invited us to his little home for dinner before we left, and so Lori, Dia, Carla, Mac and I happily accepted. We brought homemade sushi made of brown rice, nori, cucumber, carrots and lentil sprouts with a sesame-peanut-lime-chilli dipping sauce. Unfortunately, Yeshi and his friends don't like sushi, but we ate the whole plateful. Yeshi made thukpa (a traditional vegetable soup) for dinner with fresh, whole wheat dumplings, and taught us how to make it, too. It was so delicious and so simple... Working on a raw version...

So, I meant to be updating regularly, but classes have been so very busy, from 5:30 in the morning to 9 at night most days, until now... The extra classes (reiki and ayurvedic massage) have ended, and now there seems to be so much time, as our classes end at 6pm! Of course, we're supposed to be in bed by 9, but still, that's three whole hours to eat dinner, wash clothes and update blogs. :)
The yoga program is amazing, learning so much from a teacher who not only lives the life he encourages, but also has such vast knowledge on so many topics, much of which he is kindly passing on to us. He's truly amazing, explaining very spiritual topics from a sound scientific viewpoint. He doesn't seem to do anything without a reason, whether its the way our fingers are spread in certain asanas or the specific three-hour meditations to initiate us into each reiki level. He is funny, down-to-earth, professional and kind. I couldn't have imagined a more inspiring teacher, and I can't wait to get home to back to teaching.

I will, over the next few weeks, fill in the gaps in time I have left here, but for now, here's a bit about this week:
We had our naming ceremony. As we grow and learn in this course, we become different people, we change and, hopefully, become truer versions of ourselves. With this shedding of old ideas and ego-identities comes new understanding and a new name. I was anointed "Manisha" the Goddess of Mind and Desire. (The desire part doesn't seem super yogic, but I'm working to understand it better...  Haha)  The ceremony was so beautiful, in the sun-filled yoga hall, with organic incense filling the air and ghee (butter) candle to signify the light and knowledge that we have recieved. The new students were welcomed, the old ones recieved certificates and we all received gifts from our beloved Yogi. We (the outgoing group) also presented him with a Lapis ring, a small token of our gratitude and esteem, and he seemed touched. Mac is now "Dinesh" the God of the Day, and our buddy Sarah is Sarada, another version of Saraswati.

After the ceremony we had class, which Yogi stopped to so that we could all marvel at the rainbow coming down from the mountains.  I've never seen the end of the rainbow before...  There was no pot of gold, but it was beautiful.  (Yogi is great with priorities, like the natural wonder of a rainbow at the end of a beautiful storm over an extra minute of forward bending, or five minutes of rest during lecture today because he was feeling a bit tired.)

That night we went out to a small concert at a local (and well-hidden) cafe. Our friend, the master tabla player who graces us each morning with his music during kirtan, Kushi Ram, was playing with his friend, a master flautist, AND they were serving VEGAN chocolate momos! (Momos are a Tibetan dumpling, delicious.) Kushi and his friend were amazing, and tomorrow I hope to have their assistance in buying a small flute of my own.  Anyway, I was being introduced to an Indian man who wasn't able to get my name, so I told him he could call me Manisha, and he said that it's the most perfect name for me...  He was smiling, and not in a creepy way, so I think that's good.

Afterwards we passed by this little dark doorway on the way home.  In the darkness there was a basket set over some candles, the light coming through in patterns of the weave on the dirt and concrete walls and floor, but it was so beautiful.  I was lagging behind the group, but I made them all stop and come inside with me, the place was called Heart Rock Cafe.  We entered through a little doorway and took a few steps in, the room opening up before us.  It was like a cave, with other basket lights and pillows and small tables all around.  The proprietor beckoned us in, a small Indian man, greeting Mac as "kind Sir."  It was late, so we didn't stay, but we're heading back again soon, and will return with pictures.

Enough for now, more to come on hand-made tattoos (no machine, just needles), Buddhist meditation centers, mountains, monkeys, friends, and FOOD!!  And... goats...