Day 45, Nandroling Monastery [Thursday 17th January 2008]

Regrettably, it's time to leave Honey Valley. The owners Suresh and Susheela meet us to say goodbye, and we stock up on bananas and fruit for the road. On the bumpy ride down in the jeep we get some trekking tips for around Darjeeling from a Tasmanian couple, Rosie and Guy. At the bottom of the hill we catch a bus to Madikeri.

Bus rides here are endlessly interesting, no matter how long they are. If you don't want to stare out of the window at a passing landscape of rice paddies and dusty villages, you can watch instead the mayhem inside the bus. Women cram into the segregated women's section behind the driver and men fill the rest of the bus. Many travel with bloated bags of rice between their feet, or baskets of fruit resting on their knees. At bus stands, while the driver gets out to urinate against a well, hawkers push food and drink of all descriptions through the window bars: pouches and bottles of water, oranges, bananas, puffed rice, masala peanuts and cashews, tomatoes, cold drinks, toys, magazines, newspapers, VCDs, lotions and creams 'for health'. Men with trays hung around their necks, full of jars and tins of spices, make and mix bhelpuri on the spot. It's like a market on wheels. Sometimes there may be four or five hawkers on the bus, edging down the aisle shouting "Pani bottle, cold drink, pani bottle, cold drink". The bus suddenly jumps into life and pulls away, and any remaining salesmen unhurriedly finalise any transactions then make their way to the door, jumping off as the bus merges into the oncoming traffic. On school days the aisle is jam packed with schoolgirls, their pigtails squashed together and their bags piled in an enormous heap next to the driver. The bags are passed back over everyone's heads when it's time to 'step down'. The bus takes corners and overtakes so violently that if I'm standing up I'm have to hang on with all my strength, and am constantly in fear of going head first through the windscreen the next time the driver brakes suddenly for a cow, a rickshaw or a massive pothole.

We go to Bylakuppe, a Tibetan settlement for political refugees. We are aiming to stay in Sera for a night or two and meet some Buddhist monks, but when we arrive we see a sign stating that we are now in a protected area and need a special permit to stop overnight. We ask around and it turns out that we need to apply in writing to New Delhi for the permit, and it will take some time.

So, we visit the Golden Temple at the Namdroling monastery complex, 2km down the road. It's a large, dimly lit building reminiscent of a school hall inside with its glossy, tiled floor and high ceiling. At one end of the room are three very large statues of buddhas. The tallest is 60 feet in height. They are gold plated and inside them are hidden important documents, relics, ornaments and clay figures. The walls around the edges are full of psychedelic pictures of scenes from the Buddha's life. There are also scenes of tantric Buddhism and some terrifying portrayals of buddhas manifested as demons (this is the Buddhist equivalent of fighting fire with fire, apparently). There are two big drums either side of the entrance (no touching, monks only).

The temple is impressive, and the monks all approachable and friendly, but it is still hard to dispel the feeling that Buddhists have constructed a weighty and unnecessary apparatus of ritual, rite and doctrine around the humble and humanistic beginnings and ideas of the Buddha.

The toilets here consists of a line of urinals to wee in, faced on the opposite side of the bathroom by a line of squat toilets, open to the air, to poo in.

After a walk around the well kept grounds of the monastery we get a bus on to Mysore and check in to the plush-ish Hotel Maurya Residency.