Losar

Morning.The Rs 100 room has a faint reek of urine from the attached toilet, and the window has no latch and is held shut by a cinderblock.

... and I read of Alain de Botton fighting over a piece of dessert in Barbados with his girlfriend.
Travel , Botton tells us is both created by and undone by anticipation. We rush in to the plane , as in to a new relationship , with images of perfgect beaches .. and mar this by bringing in our own imperfections in to the picture.
We fight over a piece of creme brule' as the sun sets over Far Tortuga.

Many would say that this is a gloomy outlook , condemning us to lives of quiet despair in Teg & Clapham ,but Botton surprisingly brings in two prophets of gloom to refute this : Baudelaire and Edward Hopper. Both had the same yearning for the starting points : Baudelaire could wax on indefinitely about over modern boats and railways , and Hopper found many of his motives im waiting rooms, roadside diners and the like.

Anticipation may be wildly unrealistic in travel , as in romance, but in difference to the rest of the the dream industry it leads us to new places.
Thanks Joe in the next room , for lending me the book, thanks to the sister who gave it to him , and goodbye T. who came and went again in in the matter of a day.

As yoy may have guessed , Losar ( a three dhaba town with a police checkpost , altitude 4108 meters) is no obvious contender to Barbados. The small temple ( rather unceremoniously shut with shop-style steel shutters ) holds the reamins of Serkhong Rinpoche in a silver stupa , there are some rare photographs of Dalia Lamas tutors, and som good torma. There are nice walks. The dahbas makes the tired old Eastern Europe joke mandatory : never mind the menu , just tell me what you've got.
Imagine our surprise when we ( Joe , Neil & I ) as the only passengers remained in town after the bus left was told that no , no roooms .. you must reserve ahead.After getting rooms in the cinderblock palace ( to the considerable surprise of the other patron ) we had supper and turned in for the night.
Later : singing ! music ! (overdressed) women !
Next morning , we ask about the party ( feeling , of course , a bit miffed about being left out ) .
"No party "
"But the music , singing ... "
"Oh that .. that's the film team. "