Mountain Monks is a docu-travelogue produced and filmed in the Eastern Himalayas by Vasudeva Joly for BhakTV. Mountain Monks takes a candid look at the many similarities between two monastic traditions of Tibet and India, as seen in Lamaist Buddhism and Vaishnava Hinduism. The first half-hour of the film is set in Darjeeling and the scenic foothills of North Bengal. The second half-hour starts in Gangtok, the capital of Sikkim. In the surrounding mountains Vasudeva interviews a young lama at the ancient Rumtek Monastery, and takes us on a scary ride up a steep mountain road that was destroyed by a 6.9 earthquake in 2011. Finally we come to to the glacial Changghu Lake, 3,780 meters above sea level at the Tibetan border. The travelogue ends in an unplanned but peaceful encounter with a Himalayan black bear.
