Northern India

The program I’m here with has been going through a lot of changes, so there has been a lot of scheduling adjustments. We wound up having an entire extra week between when our allotted orientation schedule ended, and our classes began. Needless to say, most of us took the opportunity to travel. I wound up finding this great-sounding tour that started in Amritsar and took us through these small mountain towns in the Himalayas. So for the next 9 days and 8 nights, myself and 4 other American friends here with me in the program went on this tour.

We hopped on a train on Friday evening and arrived in Amritsar, located in the Northwestern state of Punjab. There we spent 2 nights in a nice hotel, and on Saturday got a guided tour of the Harmandir Sahib, known in English as the Golden Temple. For as long as I have known about India, I have known about the Golden Temple and its religious significance to the Sikhs. This temple is a sacred holy site because of it houses the Siri Guru Granth Sahib, holy book of scriptures, and its free community kitchen where anyone regardless of race, religion, sex, or origin is invited to come sit and enjoy a meal.

The pictures I have posted do not do the temple justice. For one, photography is prohibited inside the temple itself, where the walls, floors, and ceilings are covered in the most intricate, beautifully handcarved symbols, designs, and animal representations in marble, gold, and other precious elements. Walking around the perimeter alone was enough to take my breath away, and having the opportunity to go inside and see dozens of people volunteering for free to make thousands of Chapatis (bread) and food for all of the tens of thousands of pilgrims and visitors.

At night, we were taken out about 30 km or so to the Indian border, where we got to see the Wagah Border Ceremony at the India-Pakistan border. It was a great event, full of tourists from all over shouting chants meant to inspire nationalism and pride. It was insanely-humid, though, and by 6:30pm we were drenched in sweat just by sitting down.

After we got dropped off at the hotel, a few of us decided to take a rickshaw back to the Golden Temple to see it at night. The temple has people working there to keep it functioning and alive 24 hours a day, and it had a completely different feel at night. Still just as breathtaking and full of life, but in a very different way. Many people came up to us asking us where we are from and we took a few pictures with people. I also got to take a swim in the sacred waters, which some might be repulsed by knowing the amount of people who swim in those waters, but it was a very calming experience. One of the girls on our trip got really ill with a stomach condition and actually got progressively better, completely cured by the end of our trip, after swimming in the water surrounding the Harmandir Sahib.

The next day we took a 6 hour drive in our taxi to a small town called Dhalhousie, where we had this stunning view from our hotel room windows of the Himalayas. There was a ledge outside that connected our rooms where we sat out and sipped chai and watched the sun set over the mountains.

The next 2 nights we spent in Dharamsala, a small town in the state of Himachal Pradesh famously known for its large Tibetan community and being the hometown of the 14th and current Dalai Lama. The first night, a few of us went out and explored upper-Dharamsala, known as McLeod Ganj, to get to know our way around. The next morning, we set out to the main Tibetan temple in the town where we actually got to sit and listen to the Dalai Lama speak in person. He spoke in Tibetan, of course, so we had to bring radios with us so we could listen to the English translation being broadcast.

Later that night we got to explore the town a bit more, then went back to our hotel to pack and get some sleep. The next day we drove about 9 hours from Dharamsala through the mountains to a town called Manali. We stayed in Manali for 3 nights, met some really amazing people, and shared some great times. It’s a bit of a tourist town, much like most of the towns we stopped in, but the locals are so friendly and they really seemed to love meeting Americans, since they mostly interact with Europeans. One day, we drove to this town about 2 km away called Vashisht, where there is this beautiful Hindu temple in the middle of the town that has these natural sulfur hot springs. That morning it was raining very lightly, so relaxing in those hot sulfur springs felt amazing. Later that day our friends from Manali met up with us and took us on a hike through the woods to this beautiful waterfall.

By the end of our trip, we were all pretty worn out from travelling and soaking in all the sights, but we had to suck it up for one last day and endure yet another 8 hour voyage by taxi, this time from Manali to Chandigarh, where we were to catch a train back to Delhi. Our taxi driver (who, by the way, didn’t speak English OR Hindi and was a raging alcoholic) dropped us off way early so we had to wait in the crowded, filthy, incredibly humid train station for about 4 hours for our train to come. It was pretty miserable, but thankfully we had a short 3 hour trip back in our nicely air conditioned train. Arriving back in Delhi was a breath of fresh air, and despite the pollution, poverty, and chaos of the downtown, it actually felt really good to be riding in that crowded rickshaw back to our residence in Neeti Bagh.

written by  Indiestani on August 13, 2008 from Amritsar, India
from the travel blog: Amritsar - Manali
tagged Manali, Amritsar, Dharamsala, GoldenTemple, DalaiLama and Dalhousie
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