The old town of Dege is compact enough to walk thoroughly in an hour but rewarding enough to deserve longer. The streets immediately surrounding the printing house are lined with traditional Tibetan stone buildings, small temples, and the kind of modest commerce — butter, barley flour, religious objects, secondhand goods — that suggests the town has not yet fully oriented itself toward the tourist trade. Tibetan pilgrims arrive regularly to circuit the printing house and the monastery, their pace and attention providing a useful counterpoint to the approach of most foreign visitors.
Several small neighbourhood temples are accessible from the alleyways above the printing house. They are staffed by a single monk or monk-in-training and contain modest collections of thangkas and butter lamps. The atmosphere in these spaces — genuinely devotional, entirely unfussy — is harder to find in larger Tibetan towns that have seen more visitor traffic. In the morning and evening, the sound of horns and drums from the monastery drifts down through the valley.