Some people love solitude. They love the thought of living off the beaten track in their own private paradise, away from the foibles and the kids of Mr and Mrs Average.

This is not a slight on average. Average is what most of us are, me included, but still people (like me) dream of it not being so.

Anyway, we stayed in this cabin a few years back. It was way too far off the beaten track even for me, but I enjoyed the stay and I also enjoyed the leaving, and I also enjoyed the early morning espresso coffee we managed to find on long drive home.

Protein is often at a premium in the Tibetan monasteries I’ve visited. The Dalai Lama has asked monks to become vegetarian but Tibetans love meat and so many resist. Around Tibetan New Year (Losar) monks receive a variety of food and sweets they don’t get at other times. This young monk was happy eating egg.

city life–
even melting snow
costs money

Haiku by Kobayashi Issa | Link

Dogs have come and gone in my life but they have always been big dogs — Airedales and GSPs mostly. I never thought I’d EVER connect with a miniature poodle, especially one that’s all-tizzed-up to the nines. This one is special though. Her name is Toots!

Life is kinda fickle. Just when you’re confident all is well, when you think all your planets are aligned and the moon is full and the universe has your lucky number and is displaying it to the heavens — then, just as you smile and say to yourself, ‘what a great day’ or ‘I wouldn’t be dead for quids’ or ‘wow! what a fantastic road’ or something equally nonsensical, it’s then that it so often happens. You find your self sliding down a road on your butt, looking frantically around, wanting to make sure your faster sliding motorbike isn’t about to thump your already dented pride, even harder.

Arriving home from a month in India and Nepal was great. Hugging my wife at the airport and then driving up to the northern beaches of Sydney always reminds me of how fortunate I am. How, in the scheme of things, I live in a kind of ‘heaven realm’ with clean air, food and water. There is a lack of noise and visual pollution and a feeling of general safety that follows-on from the incredibly fortunate life I was born into.

Amoebic dysentery seems to have a way levelling the playing field of life. Sitting in our bathroom, five or six times a day and expressing this stuff that is partly of my body. Stuff, that if I didn’t know intimately where it came from I would swear originated from some rather dubious industrial process. Makes me realise that the procedure is no different for the untouchable caste Indian rickshaw driver, the high Brahman priest or this white man sitting on his pristine porcelain and looking out over blue skies and the waves of the Pacific Ocean.

Life is life. By that I mean people are ostensibly the same. I didn’t meet more angry, or unhappy people in India and Nepal, than I meet here on a daily basis. Yes, many have a lot less than I have. But I have not seen an increase in despondent people. I have not seen more unhappiness than what I generally see here. What I have seen are people getting on with their lives the best way they can. What I have seen are mothers suckling kids and fathers going to work each morning. What I have seen are people whose fears, hopes and dreams are not that much different from mine.

Okay! I know this is all a tad simplistic. But sitting on the loo doing what comes naturally, even if it is recovering from amoebic dysentery, has kind of helped me fill my heart with the realisation that we are much the same — and that, as the saying goes ‘those things that unite us tend to be far greater than those that divide us’.

There is a Japanese Temple in Sarnath and as you might imagine it’s a quiet place with a nice garden and an accommodation block off to the side. I’m not sure what the rooms are like, but the veranda is nice and away from the tourists and the noise. There is a table and a chair and I have used them a few times to sit and write emails and read my book.

There is something nice about being able to just wander into a temple and find a quiet place to sit. Being still, finding a place that doesn’t assault every single one of my senses, all of the time, is a luxury for me and quite difficult to find here –but I have discovered a few of these special places and I visit them to reload and calm my fried brain.

Constant noise is the worst form of pollution for me — music that is played 500 decibels above whatever the human ear was made to receive. People shouting with loud and strident voices, vehicles with their horns penetrating and constant pushing, always pushing, saying “get out of my way you stupid person, can’t you see I’m important and in a hurry…”

Everyone in India is important! Well, almost everyone — shopkeepers, rickshaw drivers, monk, sadu or Brahman. Everyone pushes and if a gap appears on the road, 328 people, vehicles and bikes dive in to fill it.

Funnily enough, once you calm to it, once you stop fighting the noise and the pollution, the acrid smells and the closeness of humanity you begin to see people simply going about their business–buying, selling, living and dying. Nothing different–nothing special.

In a few days I leave for Nepal. I’ve enjoyed being in India again. For me it’s a special and an awful place. It’s kind and also a horridly uncaring society. It’s calm and peaceful and it’s also hell — it’s life on steroids.