The village of McCleod Ganj is nestled in the foothills of the Himalayas, about 15 hours drive north of the Indian capital Delhi. It is built on the slope of a mountain, leading down into the luminescent green valley below. Pine forests surround it, and old hippies can still be found in a few stone cottages left over from the British, deep into the shadows of the pines.

The village is home to the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan Government in Exile. Cows graze its dusty streets. One street leads to the Tsuglagkhang Complex and residence of the Dalai Lama, set amid pine trees and the deep shadows of the mountains. Another leads to the larger village of Dharamsala, way down in the valley below.

Standing on the balcony of our hotel room, there is nothing but the drop of the valley below. The mountains are covered in the dark green of pine forests. Some are capped in snow. Way down below, before the village of Dharamsala, I can see the golden roof of the gompa (meditation or teaching hall) of the Tsechokling Gompa, built in 1987 to replace the original Dip Tse Chokling Gompa in Tibet, destroyed in the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

If I stand at the very edge of the balcony, I feel I can slowly fall off and soar down the valley, just above the tree tops, all the way to the golden yellow of rice paddies, where the valley ends and the mountains begin again – just like the brown, yellow-beaked kites that circle the air waves above me.

“It’s beautiful,” whispers my partner, Alison. Down below at the gompa, inhabited by a small order of Gelukpa monks, prayer flags of bright yellow, green, blue and white, flap in the wind coming off the mountains. Larger flags – at least a metre-long and half-a-metre wide – flap from each corner of its roof. Tibetans believe the wind blows the prayers printed on the flags to the four corners of the earth, allowing all beings to find happiness.

The Indian summer sun is warm. I sit on the balcony for days, dreaming I can fly.

Alison interrupts my sun-soaked day-dreaming exactly 15 days later. “Let’s take a walk to Bhagsu, I could do with some falafel.”

Bhagsu is a village 2km into the mountains from McCleod Ganj. The single-lane tarred road winds around the surrounding mountains, shouldering corners a bus would battle to turn on.

The morning is bright, the mountain sun glitters off the statues of Hindu gods and goddesses on sale outside the small, single-garage-size shops. Tibetan women sell shawls of bright red, green, blue and purple, while sitting at tables on the side of the road knitting wool socks for the winter. The road is busy; often we have to walk right on its edge, a steep cliff-like drop below us.

About halfway up the road is a man painting thangkas, paintings on silk of Tibetan gods and goddesses, to be meditated upon to gain the insight, on the way to enlightenment, offered from each particular figure. The man holds a canvas of a snow-white woman, seated in the lap of a blue Buddha. The figure looks familiar, although I cannot name it. The Dalai Lama taught on the tantric insights of the image a few days ago – teachings I attended. But the insight is allusive.

Coming into Bhagsu we discover a dusty tourist village, smaller than McCleod Ganj, lined with clothes shops and German bakeries. Bright hippie-styled clothes hang from store windows down the sides of the streets. The village is an Israeli tourist enclave – falafel stores are interspersed among the clothes.

Indian tourists keep up a brisk trot passed the Tibetan vendors selling prayer beads and feng shui bells. We follow, thinking that they are heading to the Shiva temple. We are right. Tucked away in a corner of the village, near the public baths, is a temple dedicated to the Hindu god Shiva, built by the raja of Kangra in the 16th century. Devotees ring the bell at the entrance to the temple, announcing to the god that they have arrived. Vendors sell offerings of coconuts, wrapped in glittery gold and red tinsel.

A few kilometres from the temple is Bhagsu waterfall. The path is old, uneven stone. The valley recedes below us. The mountains are quiet, there is no one else around.

The waterfall is small, a cleft in the side of a Himalaya. The river is ice-cold below us. We watch a monk do his washing, where the flowing water has collected into a quiet pool near the rocks. A foreign couple has set up camp a few metres downstream. We think this is a wonderful idea and envy them the tranquility of the mountains, there being nothing else around.

It is a few days later when Alison breaks me out of another sun-soaked revelry on our balcony. “Come to the Tsuglagkhang Complex with me, I want to see where the Dalai Lama lives.”

The complex comprises the photang (official residence) of the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s spiritual and temporal leader; the Namgyal Gompa; the Tibet Museum; and the Tsuglagkhang temple.

The temple is the equivalent of the sacred Jokhang Temple in Lhasa, Tibet. The Tibetans who came here in 1959, following the Dalai Lama into exile after the Chinese invasion of their country, built the Tsuglagkhang as a replica of the Jokhang. It is sacred to Avalokitesvara, the Tibetan god of compassion, whom Tibetans believe is represented on earth by the Dalai Lama. A statue of Avalokitesvara stands next to a large, gold image of Buddha. The statue contains relics rescued from the destruction of the Cultural Revolution, bought to safety by fleeing exiles.

“It’s beautiful,” whispers Alison, looking around at the surrounding snow mountains. We walk the kora (sacred circuit) around the temple, turning its golden prayer wheels as we pass. Each wheel, about a metre-high, 30-centimetres in diameter and very heavy, contains a prayer or mantra, written on the wheel. When the wheel is spun, say the Tibetans, the prayer is released, the spinning motion sending it to the four corners of the world. It is a wish that all beings will find happiness.

On the walls of the temple is a massive mural of the Kalachakra, or the wheel of time. Indian families pose for photos beneath the massive gold Buddha statue.

Next to the Tsuglagkhang is the Kalachakra Temple, built in 1992. Inside the temple are beautiful paintings of the Buddha’s life and the Tibetan deities, seen through the wafting smoke of burning butter lamps. Encased in glass is a mandala made of coloured sand, one metre in diameter. I am mesmerised. It is intricate in its detail, beautiful in its symmetry. I know that when the time comes, as a symbol of life’s impermanence, the mandala will be swept up and its sand emptied into the wind.

The gates to the Dalai Lama’s residence are locked. We wait for the ominous-looking Indian army guard, a shiny black automatic weapon by his side, to turn the corner before hurriedly snapping a photo.

We enter the Tibet Museum, a moving, poignant collection of refugee stories, photos of protests against the Chinese occupation smuggled out of the Tibet, and harrowing stories of former political prisoners. The curators – all former political prisoners – tell the tragic story of the Chinese occupation of their homeland (one in every six Tibetans have died as a result of the 1949 invasion) and the subsequent Tibetan exodus (there are over 100,000 Tibetans living in exile) through photographs, interviews and video clips. We leave the museum deeply moved.

We are sitting on the balcony of our room, overlooking the immense valley beneath us, when it begins to rain, great drops that fall from the mountains in a sea of black cloud. “It’s beautiful,” whispers Alison, as the moisture of the valley below rises up in a grey, rainy mist. The only colour outside the grey is the dark green of the pine trees.

(Accepted by the Saturday Star, May 2008)