For a moment, I thought I was hallucinating. Or maybe I had teleported somehow? How else could I make sense of the fact that on our way to Coorg we were…in Tibet? We had left from Bengaluru about 4 hours ago, headed to Coorg for a weekend in the misty hills. Around lunchtime, we started looking for a good meal and this led to one of the most serendipitous surprises I have ever encountered while traveling. Following signs marked ‘Bylakuppe’ and ‘Camp 1’, we reached the second-largest Tibetan settlement in India and the world, after Dharamshala in Himachal Pradesh. Suddenly, we were driving through what I always imagined rural Tibet to look like, quiet and quaint, passing by houses with sloped roofs and prayer flags strung across courtyards, in Kodagu district in Karnataka. Lugszungbsamgrubgling is the official name of this settlement established in 1961 but since that’s quite a mouthful, it's usually referred to by the names of nearby towns, Bylakuppe and Kushalnagar or simply as ‘Camp 1’. Subsequently, three more camps were added, spreading across 3000 acres. If the word ‘camp’ seems too rudimentary for this beautiful oasis, it is because the name is a remnant of a painful past. Tibetans have been seeking asylum in India since the forceful occupation of their homeland by Chinese Communist forces in 1951. On 10 March 1959, the then 18-year-old Dalai Lama fled to India after a failed uprising against the occupation by Mao Zedong’s Peoples Liberation Army in Lhasa. Since the ‘Lhasa Uprising’ the Tibetan spiritual and political leader has lived in Dharamshala, and more than 100,000 Tibetans who followed suit, now live in 39 formal settlements across India. We made our way to one of Bylakuppe’s most famous landmarks- Namdroling Monastery, locally referred to as the Golden Temple, and walked through the gates amidst a mixed crowd of monks of all ages dressed in crimson robes and a handful of Indian and foreign tourists. The monastery was established by His Holiness Penor Rinpoche as a 9×9 feet bamboo structure in 1963. It started with only 10 monks then, but today it is home to over 8,000. Built in the Nyingma tradition, the monastery’s main temple has three resplendent, 60-ft-tall, gold-plated statues of three different reincarnations of Buddha, adorned with scriptures, relics, small statues, and clay stupas, making for a truly spectacular sight. After we spent a couple of hours exploring the town, it was time for us to continue our journey to Coorg, but I didn’t feel like leaving. My reluctance made me wonder about how hard it must have been for the Tibetans to first move here, escaping a home they never wanted to leave. Nobody except those who have endured it can ever understand the pain, the resilience and the struggles of a displaced community. When we move to a new place, we often spend weeks or months planning, lining up jobs, searching for houses and reaching out to friends. We can’t even begin to imagine the fear and trauma of having to leave our whole lives, everyone and everything we know behind, overnight, with no idea of what awaits on the other side. But the proud Tibetans, exiled from their home, have created something truly beautiful and unique. A peaceful, dignified, tight-knit community, focused on preserving their traditions and way of life, regardless of where they live, they have made their home, in a whole new land. Though communities across the world have created their own little islands in foreign lands, I never fully appreciated why until that moment. I always thought it prevented displaced communities from fully assimilating with their new homes. But here, for the first time, I realized that it was a natural instinct, the coming together of a group of people that shared the memory of pain and loss, hope and survival, held together by the unforgettable memory of a lost home. With these thoughts, at sunset, driving through gently winding roads, flanked by green fields, dotted with red rooftops and golden pagodas in the distance, this little microcosm of Tibet, in India, crystallized into an unforgettable memory for me.