On our way to Amritsar

22.09.11

Today has been an interesting day. We left Mcleod Ganj, the lovely TIbetran oasis of calm. in a shared tax with Julia, a primary school teacher from London. We had been told the journey would take anything from 5 hours to 9 hours so we weren't really sure what to expect. It took us about 2 and a half hours to get to Pathenkot and out of the mountains. The scenary

was beautiful as we wound down through the hills and over large shallow river beds through Himachal Pradesh. AS we left the hills aand entered the province of Punjab the scenary changed. The land was extremely flat with green, lush fields as far as you could see. The people also looked different. We began to see more Sikh men with orange, white or purple turbans on

and long beards. A majority of the woman were wearing baggy trousers and long tunic tops. The auto rickshaws also looked different -they were larger than the autorickshaws we had seen before, a cross between a tractor/rickshaw/classic car! All the villages we have been through the house/shops have looked like rows of garages, just one room with a shutter.As we came closer to Amritsar the towns and villages we passed seemed more industrial with small foundries, brick works or mechanical workshops.

In total it took us about 6 hours to reach Amritsar. When we arrived we made our way to near the train station, we thought we'd find a hotel room near the station and then buy a ticket for tomorrow or the next day. however after trying 3 different hotels we couldn't find a clean room or a cheap enough room so we decided to go to the station and then find a hotel near the

Golden Temple. Buying a ticket was much more complicated than we antipated! We found the ticket office and waited in line. When we explained to them what we wanted they ushered us around to the side door and asked to go inside the ticket booth. Inside they sat us down and tried to decipher exactly what we wanted and then gave us directions to a reservation office.

So we hauled up our packs and walked to where we thought the reservation office was. Only to find this was the 'wrong' office, they then directed us to another office on the other side of the tracks. When we got there we had to fill in a form that could only be found, it seemed, in piles on the floor and had large blobs of ink on so you couldn't read what we had to fill in. However we did our best and joined the queue. Which for the first 20 minutes didn't seem to move anywhere and various people kept going up and contribute to whatever the person at the counter was asking for.

After much patience we eventually reached the counter and they were very helpful and managed to book us a ticket-Amritsar to Delhi, 5 hours in Delhi then on to Jaipur.

After that we were exhausted and couldn't wait to get to a hotel room, so we hopped in an auto rickshaw and got to a hotel near the Golden temple. We dropped off our bags and went for a wander. It was very busy, evening prayers were obviously going on in the temple. As we walked around the outside of the temple, through the Gurdwaras where people could stay, they

were handing out daal and rice in small dishes to whoever wanted it. There were shiny streamers hanging over us, the buildings of the temple were all lit up with coloured lights and we could hear singing and chanting over the speakers. We came out the other side of the complex to find a blively market that we're going to explore tomorrow along with the streets

of the industrial quarter near us. For dinner, we went to a little local's Dhaba. There was no menu, but they invited us in and did there best to explain what was on the menu. We had a green pea, daal in gravy and then cauliflower, along with roti all washed down with chai. It was

delicious and very cheap. We were some what the celebrities though and got lots of stares!