Bylakuppe, Kushalnagar & Steven Seagal

In the last weekend , I had the best trip of life ever. I went to visit a place called Bylakuppe. Bylakuppe is the location of “Lugsum Samdupling” (established in 1961) and “Dickyi Larsoe” (established in 1969), two adjacent Tibetan refugee settlements in Karnataka in India. The trip was arranged by Dr Vivek M of the BWS group. We met at Mysore Bus stand around 3:30PM on Friday. I never been to Mysore before, so I was kind of excited for the trip. We took a volvo bus and reached Mysore around 6 in the evening, had some dosa and started the next bus ride to Kushalnagar. It was kind of strange that the place and /me both are sharing the same name :) After we crossed Mysore city, suddenly rain started and the next thing came in kind “What will happen to the next morning shoot ?”. Luckily there was no raining at Kushalnagar. We reached there at 9:53PM , the last couple of minutes of the bus journey shaked everything in my body, the road was really bad. The city was already almost dead, very few people on the streets. Vivek booked a hotel couple of days back , so we went straight into hotel, came out again for the dinner. There was one international hotel with national price :P I also saw couple of strange hoardings , like “Hotel Top in the Town” , “… Hi tech dental clinic” . Had a good sleep after that :)

Woke up at 6 next day morning , got ready, and went for Namdroling. It is around 5-7Km from Kushalnagar. It is famous for the Golden Temple.

Started clicking and kept going on, after 9 we met two other fellow BWS member , Anita and Sandeep. Next stop was Sera Je. On the way went to small temple in Old Camp 3. The priest and some other members of the local community to have some prashad , I had Chang (read about it in “Tintin in Tibet” ).

At the end we went Kugyudpa monastery and found one interesting football match is going to start. The monks changed their cloths and become football superstars.

Next day, at Golden Monastery , one special event was there for losar (the tibetan new year). Never saw such colourful cloths before. They chanted the mantras, did the puja and then there were few dances by local camp 4 people.

We also found the surprise of the trip, Steven Seagal was in Golden temple on a personal tour. Never thought of finding him so near :)

As I said earlier this trip is the best so far in my life and more important the place is so beautiful. Anyone can simply forget all the worries in his/her life there. I had peace in my mind , irc or email never came to my min. I want to go there again and again. Trying to fix another trip on April. You can find the full photo set here.