Just up the road from the hill station of Dharamsala, India, is a settlement known as McLeodganj. It is the headquarters of the Tibetan government-in-exile.

It’s also on the international travelers’ circuit, and a visitor strolling around town crosses paths with many Western backpackers with dreadlocks and shawls bearing the Hindu symbol for “Om.” The settlement is full of coffee bars offering lattes and internet cafes, as well as yoga studios and open air kitchens offering cooking courses.

There was a time that the settlement was called “Little Lhasa” because the number of Tibetan exiles living here. Behind a main temple is the hidden compound is the most famous of them, the Dalai Lama, the most revered leader of the Tibetan Buddhists.

Fluttering above many buildings here is the Free Tibet flag, and the place has the quaint air of a tiny international capital, although there is no territory to rule.

Probably the oldest store in McLeodganj belongs to the Nowrojee family. It is at the main bus stop. The sign above the entrance notes that it was established in 1860, back when the region was a hill station for British seeking to escape the heat of the northern Indian plains.

“When I grew up here, it was a sparsely populated town,” Parvez Nowrojee, one of the proprietors of the store, tells me. “It did not have much tourism because Kashmir was doing well.”

The Dalai Lama arrived in the early 1960s, but McLeodganj didn’t begin to bustle until the 1980s when troubles hit Kashmir and halted the flow of tourism there.

Tourists now come from all over, some to study Buddhism, others to do trekking in the mountains, still others to soak up the vibes of a place with a distinct Tibetan air.

“The place is on the international map,” Nowrojee said.

 Many of the young people come from one country in particular.

“The present influx is more of Israelis,” Nowrojee told me, “lots and lots of Israelis. They don’t learn Buddhism, but they just found the place a haven for themselves. In fact, there’s a joke going around town that it’s time they had a rabbi there are so many of them.”

At one point, McLeodganj became known as “Little Lhasa” because of the number of Tibetans living here.

“We Indians got up and said, ‘You better not do that because we don’t want it to become a Lhasa only. This land belongs to us,’” Nowrojee said.

Another longtime resident here, Phil Void, an American Buddhism expert with a long gray-flecked beard, remembered how much the settlement has changed.

“There were no taxi cabs then,” he recalled. “The road between the temple and the library was a goat path.”

Monkeys roam the town. Yesterday afternoon, I was walking up the road from the temple, and a large monkey barreled down from a pine tree and crossed the road, setting two dogs to howling. I looked around and saw a dead baby monkey on the side of the road. Apparently, the dogs had killed the baby, angering the mother.

Today, many thousand Tibetan exiles live in this settlement, but not all of them really feel settled, as it were.

One with whom I spent a bit of time is Tenzin Losel. Like many Tibetans, he hopes the region isn’t his permanent home. He wants to go home to Tibet.

“I just feel like I’m a passenger at the station. The train can leave at any time. I never feel settled,” Losel told me.