Riwalsar, a Few Photos

I haven't posted too many photos of town yet, so I thought I'd share some I snapped yesterday. This is the Padmasambhava statue (Guru Rinpoche to the Tibetans) viewed from down in town. The corner of the pagoda structure that's in view to the right holds a smaller statue. We're staying up the hill in that cluster of houses behind the big statue, but you can't quite see it because of the pagoda.



To get down into town, we take a path that leads down past the base of the statue. Padmasambhava is sitting on a lotus on a platform that's held up by eight snow lions.





Every bit of work done on this statue has been done by hand. All of it - no laser-cut metal, no prefab parts, no cranes or bulldozers (or even a way to get them to the site if they were available). When they brought in a cement mixer to make the work a little easier, it had to be brought down the hill in pieces and reassembled. And work is continuing on prayer rooms inside the base of the statue and on outlying structures.

And one last, unrelated photo. This big boy wanders around town, and Nyondo tells us he's very fond of head skritches. So much so that once you start, you're pretty much committed to the job until he decides you're done. At this particular moment, he was deciding that a flower placed on the little altar looked like a tasty snack.