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Undeterred, foreigners full of good intentions stay for months, even years (it is cheap), getting into meditation and volunteering to teach English or edit newsletters begging foreign supporters for cash. Walls are covered with their posters like improvised university noticeboards; Reiki, inner-child therapy, inversion therapy, meditation during death, Tibetan massage, Thai massage, more massage than Bangkok.

Purists complain that in the classes aimed at Westerners, Buddhism ends up as a vague philosophy of being nice. (Certainly a session I attended seemed more like group therapy than religious instruction.) Tibetans often feel a bit sorry for them. “I have met so many Westerners who come here and say they have no purpose in life at home,” says the poet Tenzin Tsundue. “I think their work here is helping many of them more than it is helping Tibet.”

Tsundue, a tough campaigner who was beaten by Chinese police when he sneaked into Tibet a few years ago, has mixed feelings about foreigners. He thinks the money that tourists have brought in has softened his India-born generation. Disillusioned by the lack of progress on freedom for Tibet, few are bothering to struggle now. It is an easier life running cybercafés.

Tibet is even seen through a backpacker prism. “Much of our Tibet is our imagination, we have built our Tibet from our stereotypes, foreign tourists’ accounts and hearsay,” Tsundue believes.

“Contact with foreigners has profoundly affected refugees who make the dangerous journey from Tibet to Dharmsala for the chance to study their language and culture in freedom away from the repression in their homeland. What they find in Dharmsala fills some with despair. “Quite a few expect to be on demonstrations every day,” Tsundue says. “They are disappointed with what they find. Some give up and return to Tibet.”

Westerners, naturally, don’t share Tsundue’s jaundiced perspective. Kate, a nurse from London, thought she had found her dream Asian destination. “I have been in Thailand for the past couple of years and it is lovely. But I think this is what I’m really looking for,” she says. She had made friends with a disorientated Tibetan nomad who had just arrived. “Poor guy, he does not know anybody and he doesn’t have a penny. I’m trying to teach him how to make jewellery so he can leave for Goa and sell it.” Was Kate’s nomad as confused as he seemed? For plenty of the so-called Amdo Boys — the nomads from the grasslands of Amdo in Tibet — foreign women are a chance to get visas to the West or money to live off in India. For Western women, meanwhile, a Tibetan boyfriend means a personal connection to Buddhism and the Tibetan cause, and many of the estimated 500 marriages between Western women and Tibetan men in this town of 8,000 exiled Tibetans have been successful.

But some Western women who are not in the marriage market have developed a few shrewd strategies to deal with the attention. When Tibetan boyfriends looking for visas raise the subject of marriage, one blonde US postgrad student tells them: “I don’t want to interfere with your destiny.”

The girl-chasing trend has left conservative Tibetan society rather shocked. Scandalous tales circulate, such as the one about the man who claims to have slept with more than 50 backpackers, or the 60-year-old divorcée who married a 30-year-old refugee.

Monks are also getting in on the act. They are deeply attractive to many female Buddhists — middle-aged American divorcées seem particularly smitten — as well as to the many gay Westerners attracted to the faith despite the Dalai Lama’s disapproval of homosexuality.

As a cynic quipped: “The easiest way to get dates in Dharmsala is to put on robes.” One of the hill-station’s resident characters is a monk who roars around in a Jeep, wearing Oakley sunglasses, all paid for by his US girlfriend.

Some of the most talented people in the Tibetan community have left to go to America, Switzerland or Australia, although once they have a passport and dollars many make their way back to Tibet legally years later.

Back in Dharmsala, for the dwindling few, the struggle for Tibetan freedom continues.

A TALE OF TWO CULTURES

Tsun Thergyal, 31, from Tibet, came to Dharmsala in 2000 and met Corinne soon afterwards. They married in 2002, moved to Switzerland and, eight months later, Corinne told him she wanted a divorce. When we got to Zurich, says Thergyal, “I was just like a small baby. You start again. If it was in English I may be OK, but they speak German. So then I think maybe I asked her too much all the time.”

Thergyal could not find work and had to live on Huber’s meagre salary, he worried about his family in Tibet constantly, and he couldn’t understand how she could kiss other men in front of him. They were, he says, from “two different countries and two different cultures. We had love but sometimes I think love not strong enough. You really have to try to understand each other. That is really difficult.” Because the marriage had been so short, Thergyal was unable to stay in Switzerland and is now back in Dharmsala, jobless.