holi

Holi is the famous festival of colors in India where people buy bags of powdered paint, get wasted, play music, and cover each other is clouds of pigment. We decided to leave Buddhist dharamasala for the hindi occasion and headed to the small city of kangra a couple hours away. It was great little town with one of the most amazing temples weve been to…it had a giant banyon tree in it covered in ribbons and bangles, an assortment of shrines devoted to various deities, a crap ton of monkeys, checkerboard marble flooring, and a spectacular view of the snow capped Himalayas.
On the actual day of holi we put on our worst clothing and headed to the streets with our stash of red, green, and yellow paints. It was only a matter of minutes before the first group of men kindly accosted us over breakfast, applying paint to our faces, making for a colorful meal. We were two of the only tourists in kangra, so once we got hit, and they saw our stash of paints, they knew we were game, and it was a pretty much nonstop barrage of men covering us in paint for the rest of the day…women don’t pariticipate in the festival so much caused the men get too wasted and end up groping them…gross, I know. Regardless, it was still fun, and most of the people were respectful, and things were conducting in a friendly manner. I had brought a waterproof camera for the event, which worked out nicely, I think, none of the images have been processed yet, but it would have been suicide bringing out my expensive camera, which I attempted for the first few minute, before realizing its uselessness.
There was a fort a few k out of town that we decided to walk to for something to do. Along the road, motor bikers covered in paint would pass by and wave, often stopping to cover us in more paint before sending us along our way. There were lots of parties with people playing music and joining in on the festivities and begging us to come join them. We made it to the fort, that was geographically spectacular, it was basically built on the cliff side of an island surrounded by rivers and more cliffs and beautiful mnts. From there we wandered back through the village and passed though some more rowdy parties where we were basically forced to dance around and play music for their entertainment…but it was fun anyways.
We ripped ourselves away from the crowds and eventually made it back to town as the festival was starting to die down covered head to toe in paint that started out as beautiful streaks of colors and ended in one giant smeared purplish pink tone. We got some pictures back at the room and packed away our clothes to remember the occasion. There wasn’t any hot water at the hotel, so we froze trying to clean ourselves off, washing off layer upon layer of endless pigment away the best we could, but it still ended up dying our hands and hair and got stuck in our ears for the next week to come.