India, The Dalai Lama, Muay Thai, and Nearly Losing My Leg

So, we left off after I met Jesus and Ganesh and pals by drinking WAY too much mushroom tea. Then I got robbed by weird Mormon girl who got kicked out of her university.

I know I promised a Part 2 on Thailand, and I keep putting it off because honestly, trying to explain what it’s actually like to live in Thailand feels like climbing a mountain. So I’m going to come back to it later. Instead, I want to tell you about something that happened during my time there — something that started in a tiny jungle town and ended in a hospital bed with an infected leg and a $236 surgical bill.

University in the Thai Jungle

Jump to the third quarter of my Thailand era: the year is 2011, and I’m living in a tiny town called Chombeung, about 30 minutes outside of Ratchaburi — closer to the Myanmar border than anything resembling a city. I was teaching Business English at Rajabhat University, which sat in the middle of the jungle like something out of a fever dream. My friend Andrew — yes, the same Andrew from the mushroom story — had landed a job in the English faculty, and since we got along well, we decided to share a house. We paid $175 a month for a two-bedroom place with a massive living room, a massive kitchen, a carport (practically unheard of in Thailand), and a giant rice paddy stretching out behind the back door. It was, by Thai standards, pretty modern.

To make life in the middle of nowhere more interesting, Andrew and I started training with the Muay Thai fighters at the university. As it turns out, our school was the only university in Thailand where you could earn a bachelor’s, master’s, or PhD in Muay Thai fighting and traditional Thai medicine — the two disciplines went hand in hand. The Muay Thai instructors let us train alongside their students as long as we taught them English and how to explain Muay Thai technique in English. We even got to go behind the scenes at Rajadamnern Stadium in Bangkok a couple of times — greasing up the fighters, wrapping their hands, and walking out with them into the center of the ring. Straight out of a movie.

The university had a small mountain and cave on campus where monks and bats lived inside. The monks collected the bat poop (guano) and sold it to fund the upkeep of the Buddhist shrine inside the cave. Also on the campus were thousands of monkeys that wandered around the campus terrorizing the students and teachers. They would climb into my classrooms and steal the most random things... markers, erasers, books and escape through the window. You couldn't walk around the university with food or takeaway containers. You always had to put food in your bookbag. The alpha monkeys would come threaten you and even attack you for the food if you didn't give it to them.

The Three Month Problem

University teachers in Thailand get about three months off in March, April, and May. The catch? My faculty wanted me to come in every single day during the break with literally nothing to do but sign my name and leave. My syllabi were already done. I needed a better plan.

One night over beers at home, Andrew mentioned an organization he’d volunteered with back at Tulane — the Louisiana Himalaya Foundation. They were always looking for volunteer teachers to go to McLeod Ganj, India, where the Dalai Lama lives in exile and the Tibetan government operates. That immediately had my attention. I wrote them an email and heard back almost instantly. They’d seen on my resume that I was a licensed massage therapist out of Atlanta, and they asked if I could teach a one-month massage course to their Tibetan refugees. In my head: hell yes. Out loud, professionally: I said I’d be glad to help.

The trickier part was selling it to my boss — a man who had spent most of his life as a Buddhist monk (more on that in Thailand Part 2, I promise) — and to the dean of the university. I framed it as volunteer work that would generate good press for the school. They greenlit it immediately, on the condition that I take photos and write an article for both the school newspaper and the local paper in Ratchaburi. Done.

Arriving in India

That is how I ended up in India for a month and a half.

Here’s the thing about India: absolutely nothing can prepare you for it. Not the books. Not the documentaries. Not Shantaram. Not Slumdog Millionaire — which had come out a few years earlier and genuinely had me worried about what I was walking into. The moment you arrive in New Delhi, it hits you all at once: the traffic, the noise, the smells, the sheer scale of everything. You’re in one of the major capitals of the world, and yet the levels of poverty you witness are staggering. On the same bus, you’ll see someone in a suit with a Rolex and a Louis Vuitton briefcase sitting next to children in rags rolling their bodies over broken glass for coins. It’s a lot to take in.

The next morning, I hopped on a bus to McLeod Ganj — home to the Dalai Lama’s temple, the Tibetan government in exile, and thousands of Tibetans who have made their lives there after fleeing China. When I stepped off that bus and saw the snow-capped Himalayas in the background, Tibetan prayer flags everywhere, monks in robes walking the streets — I genuinely thought: How did I get here? Is this real?

I was staying with a Tibetan family who were incredibly kind to me. They owned a small bakery out of the front of their home, selling western-style pastries — cheesecake, brownies — to the tourist crowd. Because I was living with them, I got to join their cooking classes for free. The food was amazing.

Teaching Massage to Torture Survivors

I started my massage classes the following Monday, and I knew almost immediately it was going to be an uphill battle. Massage therapy requires people to undress and allow strangers to touch them. Many of my students had fled China on foot, crossing the Himalayas into India. Some had been detained. Some had been tortured. Several had visible scars. Some of the women were deeply reluctant to remove their clothing or be touched at all.

It took a solid week for the trust to build. But once it did, the students were determined. Their motivation was real and urgent.

What most people don’t know is that when Tibetans flee China to India, they lose their Chinese citizenship — and India doesn’t grant them new citizenship either. The Tibetan government in exile issues its own travel documents and passports, and several western countries offer visas to Tibetan refugees, but they must pass language exams and demonstrate a marketable skill. The Louisiana Himalaya Foundation provides free language and skills training to help them qualify. My massage course was designed to give them something they could use immediately — working on tourists passing through McLeod Ganj to visit the Dalai Lama’s temple.

Meeting the Dalai Lama

One day I showed up to class and all of my students were gone. The woman at the front desk told me they were in the temple — the Dalai Lama was holding a private mourning ceremony for monks who had been shot and killed in a temple in Chinese-occupied Tibet. Then she said: You should go. I can get you in.

I went.

Meeting the Dalai Lama was the cherry on top of an already surreal trip. I stayed for the entire ceremony — the chanting, the bells, all of it. I still can’t fully believe some of my own stories.

The Golden Temple and the Pakistan Border

That same trip, I took a weekend to visit the Golden Temple in Amritsar, in Punjab province — the holiest site in Sikhism, and one of the most stunning places I’ve ever been. Every Sikh is meant to make a pilgrimage there at least once in their life. If you register ahead of time, they provide free lodging and free food multiple times a day. The only exchange: you volunteer to wash dishes afterward. Absolutely worth it.

While I was in the area, I took a side trip to Wagah, the border crossing between India and Pakistan, to watch the daily flag-lowering ceremony. Picture this: two facing stadiums — one on the Indian side, one on the Pakistani side — packed with locals. Soldiers in elaborate uniforms performing dramatic, almost theatrical marching drills. Both sides screaming insults at the other across the border. Vendors walking the bleachers selling popcorn and snacks. It was one of the strangest and most fascinating things I’ve ever witnessed.

Rishikesh and the Ganges

After my massage course wrapped up, I spent my final week traveling back through Delhi and up to Rishikesh — one of the four sacred Hindu pilgrimage sites and the place where the Beatles famously studied with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. It’s known for its meditation centers, its ashrams, and the pilgrims who come to bathe in the Ganges.

While I was there, a group of locals invited me into the water to do it with them. I hesitated — I’d heard plenty about the Ganges — but they assured me that up here, near the Himalayas, the water was clean snowmelt, not yet contaminated. When in Rome, right? I went in.

What I forgot was that I had two bug bites — one on each leg.

The Infection

I noticed one of the bites looked a little red and swollen when I got back to Delhi. I didn’t think much of it. I had an early bus the next morning to the Taj Mahal in Agra, and I wasn’t going to miss that.

What I didn’t know was that this “quick day trip to the Taj Mahal” would turn into a 22-hour odyssey. The bus I was on made stops at the birthplace of Krishna, the birthplace of his consort, and about four or five other holy sites before finally returning to Delhi at 3 in the morning. By then, my leg was throbbing.

I had a flight back to Bangkok the next morning. The choice: go to a hospital in Delhi, or get on the plane and deal with it in Thailand, where I knew the hospitals were cleaner and the medical care was more reliable. I chose Bangkok.

On the plane, I could feel the infection spreading — a pulsing, burning sensation moving through my calf. When I landed, instead of taking the bus home to Ratchaburi, I paid ฿500 for a taxi. The moment I arrived, I went straight to the hospital. The doctor told me: If we can’t stop the infection, you could lose the leg.

They gave me an injection that made me feel like I was floating, had me sit in a chair for 30 minutes, and sent me home with instructions to come back immediately if it got worse overnight.

It got worse overnight.

The infection was climbing up and down my leg by morning. I went back and they told me they needed to operate — cut out the dead tissue before it spread further. I spent five nights in the hospital in a ward of about 30 people, separated only by curtains. My friends from Ratchaburi came to visit and brought me real food, which I was grateful for.

When the bill came, I braced for it the way any American would. Five nights. IV antibiotics. Surgery. I was expecting thousands.

It was $236.

And then — the dean of the university, the same man who had approved my trip to India in the first place, came to visit me in the hospital and told me the university would cover it entirely.

I still can’t believe I lived all of this. Sometimes it is hard to believe my own stories writing these blog posts and it makes me realize how crazy lucky I am to have had these experiences - both the good ones and the bad.