Amritsar

This is the Sikh golden temple in Amritsar, a beautiful and very spiritual place. It's the home of their holy book, protected by 4 priests who spend the day playing music and singing. The sound is broadcast arcoss the temple complex. At night, the book is moved to another building and one night we joined the procession following the book to it's night time home. It is carried in a huge gold cushioned casket (ooooh, Kerry even knows the technical term - palanquin), being constantly fanned by a priest for the 30 minute journey. Lots of pushing and jostling to get as close as possible to the book. The temple looked completely different in the daytime...

One night there was a big fireworks display at the temple - and these were big dangerous homemade fireworks, showering the assembled audience with sparks and burning stuff. Apparently the occasion was the 300th anniversary of the holy book being at the temple. Not sure if that's true or not, but the turnout was pretty poor. It was raining. Faith, it's a funny old thing.

Before leaving Amritsar we visited Jallianwala Bagh, a small memorial park to commemorate all those that were killed when a British soldier, Dyer and his men opened fire on a peaceful demonstration in 1919. 2000 were killed. I think I remember this from the film Ghandi. I was ashamed to be English, and we snuck out.



We took a 6 hour bus ride to Chandigarh, India's only planned city - lots of rickshaws as everything is very spread out with lots of roundabouts. A bit like an Indian Milton Keynes. A Lot fewer turbans and lots more Reebok tshirts. The best thing here was the 'Fantasy rock garden'. Some bloke had spent his life creating this garden containing waterfeatures, Tim Burton-like trees and thousands of human and animal figures, all made from rock. One group of locals took a strong interest in us and dragged us around for half an hour. We got the impression they were a religious group so we turned down their offer of going back 'home' with them in their jeep. They were in a rush because one of them was a teacher with a pending lesson. He gave us a 10RP note on which he had written his telephone number, as a leaving present.





Our next destination was Shimla. At 2200m we escaped the lowland heat and humidity, and even got to see a few snow capped Himalayan peaks in the distance. The town, really just a developed hill station was the summer home of the British Raj and the rest of the British government before India/Pakistan independance in 1947. It has a very English feel - many Tudor style buildings and a great place to get a real English breakfast. One of the downsides is the number of monkeys roaming the streets. We have both narrowly avoided being attacked by 2 of these little bastards - you can see their eyes light up before they are about to pounce. We have taken to carrying one of our trekking poles as a monkey deterent.

In Shimla we spent a fair amount of time at the Indian Coffee House. Can't sniff at a good cup of coffee for 10pence served by white suited waiters in red and green cummerbunds.

On our last evening I sold our monkey bashing stick to a random man who seemed to really want it. Kerry was not happy. We had to get another stick in order to get her back to the hotel.

I have begun to involuntary use the Indian sideways head wiggle. No idea what it means though. Sometimes it means yes, and sometimes it means no, I think. I'm really not sure. It feels good though. If David Gray can do it, then so can we.