After heavy rain the night before, it was cloudy and cold in Mussoorie on the morning of the 23rd. I walked up the Mall a bit for a look down the valley towards Dehra Dun to see if the rain had cleared the haze. It had to an extent, but the view down was still pretty hazy. After breakfast, I left on a 9:30 bus down the winding road to Dehra Dun, with good views both down into the valley and back up to Mussoorie. We arrived about 11 and I hired an auto rickshaw to take me out of town to the Forest Research Institute Museum in a huge brick building built by the British a century ago. It is said to be bigger than Buckingham Palace and is situated in a large park. Six of the large halls are museums, mostly about forests and forestry products, although one hall had tiger skins on the walls. I spent an hour there and then went to the Ram Rai Mausoleum in the center of town. His mausoleum has beautiful paintings and is situated in a quiet courtyard, with four smaller mausoleums around it for his wives. Apparently, he was a rebellious son of one of the Sikh gurus, who was rewarded with a fine tomb by the Sikhs' arch-enemy, the Moghul Emperor Aurangzeb.
I made my way to the bus station between 2 and 2:30, ate lunch and caught a 3 pm bus to Haridwar, arriving at 5. I got a hotel room and took a cyclo rickshaw along the very busy main street to the Har-ki-Pairi ghat on the Ganges. Haridwar is one of the holiest cities in India because this is where the Ganges emerges from the foothills of the Himalayas into the plains. There is also something about a footprint of Vishnu found on the banks here. At sunset on the Har-ki-Pairi ghat there is a ceremony with thousands of people on a canal of the Ganges that runs just west of the river. The ceremony is called the ganga aarti and I arrived just before it started. Thousands of people were sitting on the ghat steps of the canal. During and after the ceremony itself, which I didn't see from my vantage point, the people along the water lit small candles on little leaf boats containing flowers and the candles and set them afloat on the swift moving water of the canal. It was all quite fascinating to watch, with some young men bringing around platters of fire that people seemed to bless themselves with. I spent a little over an hour there and then walked back along that busy, noisy main street, with the incessant horn blowing and dodging of motorcycles and other vehicles that makes walking along the street such an unpleasant challenge. I stopped at a friendly little restaurant for a great thali dinner, with eight different courses for about $1.85, plus a lassi (a yoghurt drink) with sliced almonds on top. Only vegetarian food is available in Haridwar because of its holy status. In fact, one of the restaurants where I ate quoted Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita that "purity of mind follows purity of diet." (Not quite the same as General Ripper's "Purity of Essence = Peace on Earth.") In fact, I've eaten almost entirely vegetarian food here in India and been quite happy with it. Indians really know how to cook vegetables. I have had chicken here and there while in India, and some mutton in Moslem areas.
It was sunny and cool the next morning, with a cool breeze, as I walked to the Har-ki-Pairi ghat, arriving about 8:30. I spent about two hours there watching the morning activity. The canal water level was much lower than the night before (there are dams just above Haridwar and a very big one further up the Ganges), exposing rocks and lots of garbage, mostly plastic, wedged among the rocks. Lots of people were bathing in the dirty, though holy, water. Some were drinking handfuls of it, or putting the water into plastic containers to take with them. Men stripped down to their briefs while almost all women wore their clothes into the water. I did see a few old women sitting on the steps bathing bare breasted. People were also bathing in the Ganges itself, just a few feet from the canal. Some people were digging in the exposed rocks and sand, for coins, I think. It seemed more of a carnival rather than religious atmosphere, with people laughing and posing for photos and splashing each other. I saw one vendor selling cotton candy and balloons hanging from a pole. I appeared to be the only foreigner there and no one seemed to mind me there. There were dozens of saddhus (itinerant holy men) dressed in yellow and dozens of other beggars, most with some physical deformity. They were lined up in places.
I had a good breakfast nearby of cheese parantha, curd and tea, and then chose to walk back to my hotel not via the busy main street but through the crowded bazaars, filled mostly with religious articles near the ghats. I passed a square filled with cows and barbers shaving the heads of customers, leaving only a wisp of hair at the back. Nearby was an arcade along the canal with ceremonies taking place inside. I also stopped at a hotel in a beautiful old haveli (mansion) on the canal built a century ago or so ago. Further along, the crowds diminished and I ran into a religious procession, with two men dressed in yellow in a yellow chariot with carved wooden elephants in front. It was pushed and pulled by men in white. In front of it, women danced when it paused. Further in front were children on horses, a band with lots of horns, and at the front a painted elephant. I got back to the hotel about 1.
After lunch at that good little restaurant with very friendly waiters, I walked up to the Mansa Devi temple on one of the hills on either side of the Ganges. These two hills are the last two along the river and both have temples on top. There is a gondola to the top, but the sign said the wait was an hour, so I walked up in less than half that, as the temple was only about 500 feet up. The temple wasn't much, but the crowds were interesting and there were good views of the Ganges. The monkeys on top included not only the familiar red-butted, short tailed macaques, but also slimmer, long tailed langurs, with black faces and whitish manes. From there I made my way to the Har-ki-Pairi ghat again for the sunset ganga aarti. This time I saw the magnificent fire ceremony on the banks of the canal just after it gets dark. About ten Brahman priests swirl around platters of fire on the canal bank and nearby temples. It is quite impressive. I stuck around after to watch the boats being floated down the still low canal and then walked back through the crowded bazaars to my hotel and the friendly little restaurant nearby.
I made my way to the Har-ki-Pairi ghat by about 8 the next morning and watched the activity for more than an hour before walking back through the bazaars. I had a late breakfast and then visited the state tourist office to see about their tours of the Char Dham Yatra sites, sources of the holy Ganges and Yamuna Rivers. At noon I left on a bus to Rishikesh, only about 15 miles, but an hour by bus, up the Ganges. I checked into a good hotel full of foreigners, had lunch and then, with some difficulty, found the state tourist office to see about the Char Dham Yatra tours. It turned out they wouldn't take me because one of the hotels on the tour won't take foreigners. At least that is what they told me.
I made my way to the Ram Jhula (Bridge) over the Ganges, crossed it and walked downriver along the other side, past ashrams and shops, to a ghat outside an ashram that has an evening ganga aarti ceremony. Rishikesh is in quite a lovely spot, in a canyon of the wide, fast-moving Ganges with forest-clad hills on both sides of the twisting river. The elevation is about 1000-1200 feet and the climate at this time of year very comfortable, with warm sunny days and cool nights. I haven't seen a cloud since I've been here. In contrast to the more interesting Haridwar, Rishikesh attracts lots of foreigners, the most famous the Beatles in 1968.
Sunset was about 5:20 and the ceremony started soon after and lasted about an hour. It was a much more upscale affair than at Haridwar. About half the audience were foreigners. Yellow-clad boys, maybe a hundred of them, sat on the steps and around a fire pit on the fine stone stairs of the riverbank. Around and among them were foreigners and Indians, with people staying at the ashram given seats on the steps near the front. A musician played the small drum, the tabla, and another the harmonium, a keyboard with bellows, and the music was very pleasant. There was lots of singing. In fact, the ceremony was almost all singing. A few minutes into the ceremony, the ashram's maharishi, clad in red robes and with long hair and beard and looking like a younger version of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, came down the steps to the fire pit, threw some stuff into the fire, and then went back up to the center of the steps where he sat on a rug before a microphone and led the singing. It was all quite pleasant. Afterward, I walked back to the bridge, crossed it, and then took a vikram (a shared auto rickshaw) back to the hotel.
I spent the next morning and early afternoon in and around the hotel, situated in a pretty area on the high bank (in an area called High Bank) west of the Ganges. About 2:30 I walked to the Laksman Jhula, the pedestrian bridge upriver from the Rama Jhula (both "pedestrian" bridges, but with motorcycles and bikes allowed, so you have to pay attention), crossed it and walked down the other side past two 13-story temples and lots of ashrams, shops and saddhus to the ghat where the ganga aarti had been held the night before and then further to the abandoned ashram formerly headed by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi where the Beatles stayed in 1968. It is behind a wall with a locked gates. The abandoned buildings that I could see looked dilapidated and some saddhus seemed to be living in them. The forest there is very nice with langurs in the trees, near the rocky and sandy riverbank. I went back to watch the ganga aarti ceremony at the same place I had watched it the night before.
I spent the next morning and early afternoon again in and around the hotel, then made the same walk I had made the afternoon before, though stopping at the ganga aarti ceremony ghats, where I again watched the ceremony after dark. At the end the maharishi made a few remarks in Hindi and English and remarked about the number of Californians coming to his ashrams. He said something like, "There is something about this California." No kidding.
The next day (today) I've spent in and around the hotel. It is quite a nice place here, with some interesting people, and I have been trying to find someone interested in sharing a rented vehicle for a trip to the Char Dham Yatra sites. It's also nice to have a few days of rest and relaxation. Today is the 90th day since my arrival in India on July 31, so I am halfway through my allowed 180 day stay.
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Friday, October 22, 2010
October 17 - 22, 2010: From Amritsar through the Punjab to Chandigarh and Mussoorie
October 17 was my last day in Amritsar. The night before I had got to talking with a big guy with a beard and turban as we sat next to each other at the edge of the pool at the Golden Temple. He was from Birmingham (England, not Alabama) and told me he had become more interested in his religion in just the last year, and had let his hair grow, started wearing a turban and stopped eating meat and drinking alcohol (as Sikhs are required to do). I mentioned my interest in going to the Sikh temple in Anandpur Sahib and he invited me to go there with him and to his father's village relatively nearby. We met again the next day at 11, and again at 3 after his friends had arrived from the village (Mohanwala). He is a very nice guy, and quite interesting. His name is Sundip Singh Khalk, but goes by the nickname Kaka. He works in IT for Volvo, but also plays the dhol, the traditional two-sided Punjabi drum, about two feet long, in a Bhangra band. Bhangra music has become very popular in India and in the Indian diaspora over the last 20-30 years. His seven piece band plays all over Britain, and has toured in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. He, his two friends and I walked aroung the pool and met his mother and grandmother at the west end, near the causeway. His mother immigrated to the UK in 1973 (Kaka was born there; he's 29) but his grandmother (his father's mother) still lives in Mohanwala, along with a daughter-in-law. All her sons have immigrated, to the UK, US, Canada and Australia. One daughter remains in India.
The seven of us left about 4 in a car they had brought from Mohanwala, and I had a comfortable ride across the flat, agricultural plains of the Punjab. We headed east on a very good divided highway and reached the city of Jalandhar a little before 6. Along the way we saw lots of effigies of Ravana, the evil king of the Ramayana, to be burnt after sunset on that last day of Dussehra. In Jalandhar we stopped at a McDonald's for dinner and had McVeggies (vegetable burgers), fries and cokes, plus ice cream sundaes for desert. McChickens and a Chicken Maharaja were also on the menu. No beef or pork. From Jalandhar we continued eastward in the dark, through Phagwara and Banga and reached Mohanwala, just a few miles outside the city of Garshankar, about 7:30. They have a big, comfortable house in a walled compound. We settled in and had a second dinner of delicious cauliflower, dhal and chappatis before going to bed. It was warm in Mohanwala, which is at about the same altitude as Amritsar, but cooler than Amritsrar.
I got up the next morning about 7:30 and walked around. The sky was very hazy. The house is at the edge of the village, with fields beyond. They have a humped-back bull, which Kaka told me his father (who lives in the UK; Kaka was making a week or so long visit to India with his mother) races, two cows, a calf and a very hairy goat. Wheat was the main crop nearby, but other crops, including cauliflower, were also grown nearly. A pile of corn was in the courtyard drying. Only the grandmother and her widowed daughter-in-law now live in the house, along with a boy of about 12 from Bihar (a poor state in northeast India) who does chores. I asked Kaka where his parents were and he said probably working nearby. With his two friends we took motorcycles around the village and into Garshankar to look around. After, Kaka and I walked to a small Hindu temple, dedicated to the son of Shiva and brother of Ganesh (I can't remember his name), that his father has built. Kaka told me the local people often worship several religions, not making much distinction, and his father has a special particularity for this Hindu god. We talked to the temple caretaker who told us there is a big cobra living in a pit behind the temple. Fortunately, we didn't see it. Apparently, it stays underground for the most part except for during the winter. Kaka told me his grandmother was bitten in the hand by a cobra when she was pregnant years ago.
We had a late breakfast, about 10:30, of delicious homemade cauliflower paranthas and curd, and then Kaka and I and his two friends drove to Phagwara, about an hour away, because Kaka wanted to buy a tailor-made traditional suit for his performances in the band. We spent more than two hours in the shop, while Kaka looked at materials and talked to the clerks. After he was measured and made the purchase, the shop served us a late lunch, with delicious food. We also stopped at a little music shop as Kaka wanted to by some drumsticks. The dhol is played with a curved wooden drumstick at one end and a thin, flexible bamboo drumstick at the other end. Kaka tried out several bamboo drumsticks on a drum at the shop, and then bought maybe 20-30 of them. We picked up another friend of his in Phagwara and then drove back to Mohanwala, arriving after dark and had another delicious dinner.
The next morning about 8 all of us (a driver, Kaka, his mother, grandmother and aunt, and his three friends and I piled into the car and headed to Anandpur Sahib, about an hour to the east. The three friends and I were jammed together in the far back seat, so it wasn't comfortable. In Anandpur Sahib we visited a gleaming white temple situatated on the spot where the last guru started the Khalsa, the Sikh community of leaders. It was much less decorated, and much less crowded, than the Golden Temple, but we were able to sit inside for a while and listen to the soothing music played by the three musicians sitting next to the holy book. That was very nice. Afterward, we all had a communal breakfast in the langar, the free dining hall that all Sikh temples have. Sitting on the floor, we had dhal and chappatis and a delicious sweet the size of a chicken egg.
We next visited a nearby temple with a reconstructed fort on top and a well, built during a siege by the Mughals, below. South of town we visited a couple of other temples and then made an uncomfortable three and a half hour drive across the plains to get to a place south of the big city of Luddhiana. It was very uncomfortable squeezed into the back seat of that car, maybe the most uncomfortable ride I've had in India, which is saying a lot. We ran into a lot of traffic passing through Luddhiana, too. But at last we arrived and met with a man Kaka admires and who apparently in part helped set him on the path to becoming an observant Sikh. He was a very nice old man, with a long white beard and dressed all in white: white socks, long white smock, and white turban, but a less ornate one than the usual Sikh turban. I later asked Kaka if he was a guru or swami or fakir, and he said fakir, so we'll go with fakir. We first met him in a small room, with the fakir (they called him Baba Ji) seated in a chair, the women on a sofa and we men on the floor. He served us Cokes. He seemed quite a jovial guy, very friendly. He asked about my travels and invited me to visit him again in December when he holds a month-long meditation session. He then took us to a larger dining room and helped his very nice daughter serve us a delicious dinner. Afterward, we looked at some water buffalo outside his compound with some unusually curved horns, curving circularly in towards their heads. He bid us goodbye about 5:30 after an almost two hour visit. We drove home, mostly in the dark, as it gets dark about 6. Fortunately, only three of us were in the back, so it was more comfortable, or rather less uncomfortable, than in the afternoon. Indians do have an affinity for stuffing as many people as they can into a vehicle.
Back in Mohanwala, I watched Kaka's aunt milk the cows, and then let the calf feed from her mother, which the calf did voraciously. Kaka's aunt then put some of the milk in a pot onto an outdoor fire to boil. Later, she served me some of that rich, fresh, hot milk with sugar added and it was delicious.
I got up about 7:30 the next morning and walked around the fields a bit. It was very hazy, almost foggy, with the rising sun an orange ball in the east. I spent the morning around the house, watching the activity and hanging out with Kaka and his friends. A little striped squirrel kept creaping into the courtyard to eat at the drying corn. Green parrots and other birds flew by. There are quite a few large fancy houses in the village. Apparently, it is the style for expatriates to send money back to build up their ancestral homes, even if no one lives in them anymore, to display their success. I watched the women cutting up cauliflower and rolling out dough to make cauliflower chappatis, which we had for breakfast about 10:30. After that, I bid them good-bye and Kaka and his friends took me into Garshankar to catch a bus for Chandigarh. They really were kind to me. We ran into a demonstration in town protesting electicity rates by blocking the road, so we had to make a diversion. I caught a bus about noon and, traveling over good roads, made it to Chandigarh in a little less than three hours.
Chandigarh is a new city, built in the 1950's under plans by the Swiss architect LeCorbusier. After partition in 1947, the old capital of the Punjab, Lahore, was in Pakistan, so the part of the Punjab in India (maybe one-third of the former Punjab) needed a capital. Since then, the Indian portion of the Punjab has been divided into three states, Punjab, Haryana and Himachal Pradesh, and Chandigarh serves as the capital of both Punjab and Haryana. LeCorbusier apparently had great affection for straight lines, rectangles and concrete. The city is laid out in a series of rectangular sectors (Sector 1, 2, etc.) with wide avenues separating the sectors, with traffic circles at the avenue junctions. I arrived at the bus station in Sector 43 and got a bus to the central city bus station in Sector 17 and then got a hotel in the adjacent Sector 22.
After a bite to eat I went to the tourist office to get written permission to visit the LeCorbusier-designed government buildings, the Secretariat and the High Court Building. I then took an autorickshaw along the wide avenues, past lots of trees and parks and even a municipal rose garden, to the High Court at the eastern end of the city. I needed to get additional permission from the Protocol Office of the High Court and that took some time, but I arrived at tea time and they gave me tea and sweets. The building itself was pretty ugly, concrete with lots of straight lines creating both rectangles and squares, and with concrete ramps connecting the floors. Nearby is a sculpture of an large open hand designed by LeCorbusier and the Secretariat and the Legislative Building.
From the High Court I walked a short distance to the Nek Chand Rock Garden, designed and created by a road inspector who had immigrated from Pakistan after partition. He fashioned the garden and the sculptures in it out of rocks and trash, principally discarded porceline, it seems. It is a sort of maze, quite large and interesting. I spent about an hour in it, as it got dark. Unfortunately, the most interesting part, with hundrreds of figures made principally out of porceline, was at the end, as it was getting quite dark.
I left on a bus for Dehra Dun the next morning at about 10. It took us about half an hour just to get out of Chandigarh and then we proceded generally east through hills and flatter areas until we reached Dehra Dun about 2:45. Dehra Dun was an army encampment started by the British and is now a big city and the capital of the new state of Uttarakhand, created in 2000 out of the mountainous portion of Uttar Pradesh. I took a relatively large (8 seater) sort of autorickshaw, called a vikram, from the bus station to the bus station in town specifically for the hill station of Mussoorie and after a longer than expected wait left on a crowded bus at 5 for Mussoorie. We climbed from about 2300 feet at Dehra Dun to 6500 at Mussoorie, with some good views both back towards Dehra Dun and up to Mussoorie on its long ridge. We arrived about 6:30, a half hour after it turned dark. I got a hotel and looked around. It felt cold at this elevation. Mussoorie was founded by the British in the 1820's and is called the "Queen of the Hill Stations." It is the hill station closest to Delhi. I walked along the almost traffic-less Mall, filled with Indian tourists, and in places had great views of the lights of Dehra Dun, more than 4000 feet below.
The next morning (today) I got out about 7:30. It was clear and sunny and not too chilly. It warmed up in the sun. I walked along the mostly deserted Mall and up to Gun Hill, about 400 feet and 20 minutes above the Mall, where they used to shoot off a cannon during British times. You can see the snow covered range of the Himalayas to the north from here, but they were fairly indistinct in the haze. Dehra Dun, to the south, was completely hidden by the haze. I spent the morning walking along the almost level Mall, running almost a mile and a half, and visited a couple of 19th century buildings now hotels. Both had been houses of British army officers and later were owned by maharajas. One, formerly owned by the Maharaja of Kasmanda, is quite beautifully situated and has tiger and leopard skins on the walls along the central staircase, along with the stuffed heads of deer, very big water buffalo and a rhinoceros from Chitwan in Nepal, killed in 1952. On other walls are old photos of the maharaja, his family, his palaces and his automobiles, the latter from the 1920's, I think. There were also photos of other maharajas, a photo of the Viceroy (whose attire included spats and a pith helmet) meeting with Indian royalty in 1919 (the Begum of Bhopal was completely covered, from head to toe), and a print of Wellington meeting Blucher after the battle of Waterloo. There was a nice restaurant and beautiful gardens, including a croquet lawn.
From the western end of the Mall, I took the again almost level Camel's Back Road, with few vehicles, that runs along the northern side of the ridge for about two miles to the eastern end of the Mall. The snow-covered Himalayas were now completely hidden by clouds, but there were nice views down the wooded slopes. It was quite a nice walk and I met a couple from Delhi who were friendly and interesting. I didn't manage to find, however, the rock shaped like a camel. I had lunch and then walked a bit east towards Landour but turned back because of the traffic. Too much of the incessant horn blowing that Indian drivers always engage in to warn pedestrians and other vehicles of their approach. It isn't as easy to get out into the forest here as it was in Dalhousie. I did see a few monkeys, but not as many as in Dalhousie. I have seen lots of monkeys here in India, particularly in the mountains and hills between Srinigar and Jammu. One area, close to Jammu, had hundreds of them along the roadside, along with signs saying not to feed the monkeys. I suppose they were there in part because people are feeding them.
I took another walk along the Mall in the late afternoon, but the sun disappeared behind clouds between 4 and 4:30. About 5:30 it began to rain and rain hard, and got very cold. The town lost electricity about 7 for half an hour or so. The rain stopped and there was a noisy and colorful procession on the Mall about 8, with lots of musicians with uniforms and western instruments (sousaphones and other horns) and dancers and people in the costumes of gods or princes and princeseses or demons. I don't know what it was all about, but as usual it was noisy and colorful. It was windy and cold, but the dancers seemed to be thoroughly enjoying themselves.
The seven of us left about 4 in a car they had brought from Mohanwala, and I had a comfortable ride across the flat, agricultural plains of the Punjab. We headed east on a very good divided highway and reached the city of Jalandhar a little before 6. Along the way we saw lots of effigies of Ravana, the evil king of the Ramayana, to be burnt after sunset on that last day of Dussehra. In Jalandhar we stopped at a McDonald's for dinner and had McVeggies (vegetable burgers), fries and cokes, plus ice cream sundaes for desert. McChickens and a Chicken Maharaja were also on the menu. No beef or pork. From Jalandhar we continued eastward in the dark, through Phagwara and Banga and reached Mohanwala, just a few miles outside the city of Garshankar, about 7:30. They have a big, comfortable house in a walled compound. We settled in and had a second dinner of delicious cauliflower, dhal and chappatis before going to bed. It was warm in Mohanwala, which is at about the same altitude as Amritsar, but cooler than Amritsrar.
I got up the next morning about 7:30 and walked around. The sky was very hazy. The house is at the edge of the village, with fields beyond. They have a humped-back bull, which Kaka told me his father (who lives in the UK; Kaka was making a week or so long visit to India with his mother) races, two cows, a calf and a very hairy goat. Wheat was the main crop nearby, but other crops, including cauliflower, were also grown nearly. A pile of corn was in the courtyard drying. Only the grandmother and her widowed daughter-in-law now live in the house, along with a boy of about 12 from Bihar (a poor state in northeast India) who does chores. I asked Kaka where his parents were and he said probably working nearby. With his two friends we took motorcycles around the village and into Garshankar to look around. After, Kaka and I walked to a small Hindu temple, dedicated to the son of Shiva and brother of Ganesh (I can't remember his name), that his father has built. Kaka told me the local people often worship several religions, not making much distinction, and his father has a special particularity for this Hindu god. We talked to the temple caretaker who told us there is a big cobra living in a pit behind the temple. Fortunately, we didn't see it. Apparently, it stays underground for the most part except for during the winter. Kaka told me his grandmother was bitten in the hand by a cobra when she was pregnant years ago.
We had a late breakfast, about 10:30, of delicious homemade cauliflower paranthas and curd, and then Kaka and I and his two friends drove to Phagwara, about an hour away, because Kaka wanted to buy a tailor-made traditional suit for his performances in the band. We spent more than two hours in the shop, while Kaka looked at materials and talked to the clerks. After he was measured and made the purchase, the shop served us a late lunch, with delicious food. We also stopped at a little music shop as Kaka wanted to by some drumsticks. The dhol is played with a curved wooden drumstick at one end and a thin, flexible bamboo drumstick at the other end. Kaka tried out several bamboo drumsticks on a drum at the shop, and then bought maybe 20-30 of them. We picked up another friend of his in Phagwara and then drove back to Mohanwala, arriving after dark and had another delicious dinner.
The next morning about 8 all of us (a driver, Kaka, his mother, grandmother and aunt, and his three friends and I piled into the car and headed to Anandpur Sahib, about an hour to the east. The three friends and I were jammed together in the far back seat, so it wasn't comfortable. In Anandpur Sahib we visited a gleaming white temple situatated on the spot where the last guru started the Khalsa, the Sikh community of leaders. It was much less decorated, and much less crowded, than the Golden Temple, but we were able to sit inside for a while and listen to the soothing music played by the three musicians sitting next to the holy book. That was very nice. Afterward, we all had a communal breakfast in the langar, the free dining hall that all Sikh temples have. Sitting on the floor, we had dhal and chappatis and a delicious sweet the size of a chicken egg.
We next visited a nearby temple with a reconstructed fort on top and a well, built during a siege by the Mughals, below. South of town we visited a couple of other temples and then made an uncomfortable three and a half hour drive across the plains to get to a place south of the big city of Luddhiana. It was very uncomfortable squeezed into the back seat of that car, maybe the most uncomfortable ride I've had in India, which is saying a lot. We ran into a lot of traffic passing through Luddhiana, too. But at last we arrived and met with a man Kaka admires and who apparently in part helped set him on the path to becoming an observant Sikh. He was a very nice old man, with a long white beard and dressed all in white: white socks, long white smock, and white turban, but a less ornate one than the usual Sikh turban. I later asked Kaka if he was a guru or swami or fakir, and he said fakir, so we'll go with fakir. We first met him in a small room, with the fakir (they called him Baba Ji) seated in a chair, the women on a sofa and we men on the floor. He served us Cokes. He seemed quite a jovial guy, very friendly. He asked about my travels and invited me to visit him again in December when he holds a month-long meditation session. He then took us to a larger dining room and helped his very nice daughter serve us a delicious dinner. Afterward, we looked at some water buffalo outside his compound with some unusually curved horns, curving circularly in towards their heads. He bid us goodbye about 5:30 after an almost two hour visit. We drove home, mostly in the dark, as it gets dark about 6. Fortunately, only three of us were in the back, so it was more comfortable, or rather less uncomfortable, than in the afternoon. Indians do have an affinity for stuffing as many people as they can into a vehicle.
Back in Mohanwala, I watched Kaka's aunt milk the cows, and then let the calf feed from her mother, which the calf did voraciously. Kaka's aunt then put some of the milk in a pot onto an outdoor fire to boil. Later, she served me some of that rich, fresh, hot milk with sugar added and it was delicious.
I got up about 7:30 the next morning and walked around the fields a bit. It was very hazy, almost foggy, with the rising sun an orange ball in the east. I spent the morning around the house, watching the activity and hanging out with Kaka and his friends. A little striped squirrel kept creaping into the courtyard to eat at the drying corn. Green parrots and other birds flew by. There are quite a few large fancy houses in the village. Apparently, it is the style for expatriates to send money back to build up their ancestral homes, even if no one lives in them anymore, to display their success. I watched the women cutting up cauliflower and rolling out dough to make cauliflower chappatis, which we had for breakfast about 10:30. After that, I bid them good-bye and Kaka and his friends took me into Garshankar to catch a bus for Chandigarh. They really were kind to me. We ran into a demonstration in town protesting electicity rates by blocking the road, so we had to make a diversion. I caught a bus about noon and, traveling over good roads, made it to Chandigarh in a little less than three hours.
Chandigarh is a new city, built in the 1950's under plans by the Swiss architect LeCorbusier. After partition in 1947, the old capital of the Punjab, Lahore, was in Pakistan, so the part of the Punjab in India (maybe one-third of the former Punjab) needed a capital. Since then, the Indian portion of the Punjab has been divided into three states, Punjab, Haryana and Himachal Pradesh, and Chandigarh serves as the capital of both Punjab and Haryana. LeCorbusier apparently had great affection for straight lines, rectangles and concrete. The city is laid out in a series of rectangular sectors (Sector 1, 2, etc.) with wide avenues separating the sectors, with traffic circles at the avenue junctions. I arrived at the bus station in Sector 43 and got a bus to the central city bus station in Sector 17 and then got a hotel in the adjacent Sector 22.
After a bite to eat I went to the tourist office to get written permission to visit the LeCorbusier-designed government buildings, the Secretariat and the High Court Building. I then took an autorickshaw along the wide avenues, past lots of trees and parks and even a municipal rose garden, to the High Court at the eastern end of the city. I needed to get additional permission from the Protocol Office of the High Court and that took some time, but I arrived at tea time and they gave me tea and sweets. The building itself was pretty ugly, concrete with lots of straight lines creating both rectangles and squares, and with concrete ramps connecting the floors. Nearby is a sculpture of an large open hand designed by LeCorbusier and the Secretariat and the Legislative Building.
From the High Court I walked a short distance to the Nek Chand Rock Garden, designed and created by a road inspector who had immigrated from Pakistan after partition. He fashioned the garden and the sculptures in it out of rocks and trash, principally discarded porceline, it seems. It is a sort of maze, quite large and interesting. I spent about an hour in it, as it got dark. Unfortunately, the most interesting part, with hundrreds of figures made principally out of porceline, was at the end, as it was getting quite dark.
I left on a bus for Dehra Dun the next morning at about 10. It took us about half an hour just to get out of Chandigarh and then we proceded generally east through hills and flatter areas until we reached Dehra Dun about 2:45. Dehra Dun was an army encampment started by the British and is now a big city and the capital of the new state of Uttarakhand, created in 2000 out of the mountainous portion of Uttar Pradesh. I took a relatively large (8 seater) sort of autorickshaw, called a vikram, from the bus station to the bus station in town specifically for the hill station of Mussoorie and after a longer than expected wait left on a crowded bus at 5 for Mussoorie. We climbed from about 2300 feet at Dehra Dun to 6500 at Mussoorie, with some good views both back towards Dehra Dun and up to Mussoorie on its long ridge. We arrived about 6:30, a half hour after it turned dark. I got a hotel and looked around. It felt cold at this elevation. Mussoorie was founded by the British in the 1820's and is called the "Queen of the Hill Stations." It is the hill station closest to Delhi. I walked along the almost traffic-less Mall, filled with Indian tourists, and in places had great views of the lights of Dehra Dun, more than 4000 feet below.
The next morning (today) I got out about 7:30. It was clear and sunny and not too chilly. It warmed up in the sun. I walked along the mostly deserted Mall and up to Gun Hill, about 400 feet and 20 minutes above the Mall, where they used to shoot off a cannon during British times. You can see the snow covered range of the Himalayas to the north from here, but they were fairly indistinct in the haze. Dehra Dun, to the south, was completely hidden by the haze. I spent the morning walking along the almost level Mall, running almost a mile and a half, and visited a couple of 19th century buildings now hotels. Both had been houses of British army officers and later were owned by maharajas. One, formerly owned by the Maharaja of Kasmanda, is quite beautifully situated and has tiger and leopard skins on the walls along the central staircase, along with the stuffed heads of deer, very big water buffalo and a rhinoceros from Chitwan in Nepal, killed in 1952. On other walls are old photos of the maharaja, his family, his palaces and his automobiles, the latter from the 1920's, I think. There were also photos of other maharajas, a photo of the Viceroy (whose attire included spats and a pith helmet) meeting with Indian royalty in 1919 (the Begum of Bhopal was completely covered, from head to toe), and a print of Wellington meeting Blucher after the battle of Waterloo. There was a nice restaurant and beautiful gardens, including a croquet lawn.
From the western end of the Mall, I took the again almost level Camel's Back Road, with few vehicles, that runs along the northern side of the ridge for about two miles to the eastern end of the Mall. The snow-covered Himalayas were now completely hidden by clouds, but there were nice views down the wooded slopes. It was quite a nice walk and I met a couple from Delhi who were friendly and interesting. I didn't manage to find, however, the rock shaped like a camel. I had lunch and then walked a bit east towards Landour but turned back because of the traffic. Too much of the incessant horn blowing that Indian drivers always engage in to warn pedestrians and other vehicles of their approach. It isn't as easy to get out into the forest here as it was in Dalhousie. I did see a few monkeys, but not as many as in Dalhousie. I have seen lots of monkeys here in India, particularly in the mountains and hills between Srinigar and Jammu. One area, close to Jammu, had hundreds of them along the roadside, along with signs saying not to feed the monkeys. I suppose they were there in part because people are feeding them.
I took another walk along the Mall in the late afternoon, but the sun disappeared behind clouds between 4 and 4:30. About 5:30 it began to rain and rain hard, and got very cold. The town lost electricity about 7 for half an hour or so. The rain stopped and there was a noisy and colorful procession on the Mall about 8, with lots of musicians with uniforms and western instruments (sousaphones and other horns) and dancers and people in the costumes of gods or princes and princeseses or demons. I don't know what it was all about, but as usual it was noisy and colorful. It was windy and cold, but the dancers seemed to be thoroughly enjoying themselves.
Sunday, October 17, 2010
October 12 - 17, 2010: Kangra Valley and Amritsar
About 10 am on the 12th I took a shared jeep down the curvy road from McLeod Ganj to Dharamsala, and then caught a 10:30 bus east on a two hour trip through rolling hills to Palampur. Phil was heading directly to Amritsar that morning, so we parted ways after a month and a half of traveling together. He was a great traveling companion. A chemical engineer specializing in water treatment who live sounth of London, he is taking a year off to travel, first in India, then Nepal, southeast Asia and the Far East. From Palampur I caught a bus further east for another hour to Baijnath, arriving about 1:30. Baijnath is a small town at about 3200 feet elevation and I got a decent hotel and then had a good lunch. From my hotel balcony there were great views of the Dhauldhar Range, the high, jagged mountains that separate Dharamsala and the Kangra Valley from the Chamba Valley further north. Later in the afternoon I visited a couple of stone temples, one of which was very nice, similar in style to those in Chamba. The worshipers were friendly and I was the only foreigner there. Afterwards I walked to the train station on the narrow gauge line built in the 1920's. It was a longer walk than expected, a mile and a half away. I watched a train pull out at 6, just before dark. Back in town I had a great meal of 6-8 pieces of mutton, dhal, and chappatis for about $1.30.
It was clear with great views of the mountains to the north the next morning. I walked to the temple and enjoyed watching all the worshipers. There was much pouring of water and placing of flower petals on idols, plus bell ringing, and again people were very friendly. About 10 I walked to the train station, taking a shortcut, and left a little before 11 on the narrow gauge (2 1/2 feet, as in Shimla) railroad on an eight car train heading west to Kangra. There were only two other tourists and it was a scenic ride, though not spectacularly so. We had a long delay in Palampur waiting for another train to pass, and arrived in Kangra about 1:30. I walked a ways and then took a crowded bus to the center of town and got a hotel.
After lunch I took an autorickshaw to Kangra Fort at the western end of town. This huge fort was much fought over, as it was the strongpoint of the Kangra Kingdom, with a rich temple at Kangra itself that always attracted Moslem pillagers from the northwest, and was later captured by the Mughals. The fort is located between two river gorges, hundreds of feet deep, and can be entered only through a narrow neck at the east end. It was lastly occupied by the British from the 1840's until it was severely damaged by an earthquake in 1905. It looks like it has been partially rebuilt and is quite an impressive site, with great views over the river gorges, which join together to the west. It looks like a fairly impregnable spot, but I guess it wasn't..
I spent a little over an hour there and then went back to the center of town to visit the temple, approached through a somewhat steep and curving bazaar full of pilgrims, many of them in yellow, and shops catering to them. It was all quite colorful and chaotic. The temple itself is modern, built in the 1920's after the 1905 earthquake (and destroyed many times before that by Moslem invaders, usually from the northwest (Afghanistan) as it was a particularly rich temple). The story, as I understand it, is that after Sati, the wife of Shiva, burst into flames in protest at an insult to her husband by her father, Shiva was so incensed on finding her corpse that he began a dance of destruction. Vishnu, not wanting the world to be destroyed, stopped him and in the process caused Sati's body to break into 51 pieces, falling all over India. Her left breast fell at Kangra and the temple worships that. People at the temple were again quite friendly and I again was the only foreigner. Lots of the offerings were of sweets, attracting wasps or hornets, which was a little disconcerting. A tree by the temple had scores of pieces of cloth tied to its branches. It was all quite interesting and colorful. I stayed till after dark, when they illuminated the temple with all sorts of bright colored lights.
I went back to the temple the next morning and enjoyed all the colorful activity. The bazaar was not as crowded on the way up as the day before, but was by the time I returned an hour or more later. I also checked out some of the very crowded pilgrim hostels near the temple and was glad I wasn't staying in them.. I left on a bus for Pathankot about 9:45 and we traveled through hilly country, arriving just before 1. I immediately caught a bus for Amritsar and we traveled through the level and fertile plains of the Punjab to Amritsar, arriving about 4:15. We passed agricultural fields and bustling towns on the way. In one town, Dinanagar, there was a religious procession with an elephant painted with white symbols, marchers dressed in yellow, and a bearded guru at the rear on a sort of chariot drawn by horses.
It was hot in Amritsar, maybe in the 90's. I think it's elevation is about 900 -1000 feet. At least that's what my altimeter showed. I took a cyclo-rickshaw to the Golden Temple, the main temple of the Sikhs. This temple is my favorite memory of my trip to India in 1979 and it was great to see that it is as wonderful as I remembered it. I had planned to stay in the pilgrim dormitories, as I did in 1979, but they were pretty grim, crowded and hot. There is a specific dormitory just for foreigners, with thin-mattresses on maybe 20 beds with no gaps between the beds, all in a small room.
I spent the end of the afternoon and early evening at the temple complex, an enormous place with the Golden Temple in the middle of a pool of water maybe 500 feet long on each side. It is reached by a causeway and there is wide, marble walkway all around the pool, with white buildings all around that. In fact, "Amritsar" means "Pool of Nectar," and there has been a Sikh temple here since the late 1500's. It was destroyed by Moslems in the 1760's, rebuilt, and then in the early 1800's gilded copper plates were added by Ranjit Singh, the great Sikh maharaja of the Punjab. The plates are on the second and third stories while the first story is made of white marble with colored stone inlays of flowers, birds and animals. The inside, too, is beautifully decorated, and the Sikh holy book is constantly read aloud there during the day while quite soothing music is played by nearby musicians. As I recall, there was one drummer, using a small drum, and two playing small keyboards. They play songs from the holy book. All around the complex are tall bearded Sikhs in turbans with long spears keeping watch. You have to remove your shoes, wash your feet and wear an orange scarf on your head, unless you have your own scarf or turban. There were thousands of people around. I've been told the Golden Temple averages 200,000 visitors a day. I crossed the causeway and visited the Golden Temple at about nightfall. It was much more crowded than I remembered from 1979, but I was able to go up into the second and third floors, while a white-bearded man on the first floor read from the book and the musicians played. At about 7 I ate in the communal dining hall, where all are offered free meals 24 hours a day. Sikhs recognize no caste distinctions and these communal meals, eaten on metal plates on the floor, with no precedence for people of high rank, is meant to symbolize the equality of all men. It was just dhal and chapattis, but it was filling. Afterward, I found a hotel nearby and then went back to the temple until about 10.
I went back the next morning about 7 and there were quite a few men bathing in the water, with lots more people walking or sitting or lying around. There is an enclosed area for women to bathe. In the plaza where the causeway begins three musicians were playing what I was told were songs of Sikh bravery. Two had very small drums while the other a stout, violin-type instrument. The marble becomes quite glaring in the middle of the day, and I spent some of that time in the museum, filled with paintings of bloody battles and tortures and Sikh martyrs. It seems the Sikh religion took quite a martial turn in the 17th century after repeated persecution by Moslems. They are still quite martial, and all around the temple are plaques commemorating Sikhs killed in battle in India's wars with Pakistan.
About 4 I left in a crowded jeep with 11 others to head to the border with Pakistan, about an hour's ride away. At sunset every day there is a border closing ceremony, with much pomp and cheering and with goose-stepping soldiers. It draws big crowds, seated in stadium-like bleachers, on both sides, with much cheering, waving of flags and dancing. It had the feel of a college football game and was great fun. At sunset the soldiers on each side lowered the two flags and slammed the border gates shut, with much strutting and marching both preceding and following. The soldiers managed to get their legs up to ridiculous heights while marching.
Back in Amritsar, I had dinner and then went to the Golden Temple to walk around and then watch the ceremony in which they remove the holy book from the Golden Temple and put it away for the night in the building called the Akal Tikhat near the end of the causeway. They do this with a golden palanquin and great ceremony. At the very end, the book, in a blue cloth, is taken from the palanquin on top of the head of a bearded, turbaned Sikh, carried up the stairs of the Akal Tikhat, and placed in a small room, which is locked. Afterward, I went into the Golden Temple and watched the singing, turbaned men inside carefully cleaning everything, including polishing the gold ornaments, sweeping floors, and cleaning windows. On the hard marble walkway around the pool hundreds of people were sleeping, and I suspect they spend the night there. The holy book is brought out each morning at 4 or 5 am and again taken on the golden palanquin into the Golden Temple. The Sikhs had 10 gurus, leaders of their religion, from 1469 to 1708, but the tenth guru prior to this death said there would be no more gurus, only the holy book would serve as their guru.
I went to the Golden Temple again the next morning to watch all the activity. It was a Saturday and much more crowded than the day before. After breakfast, I went to the nearby Jallianwala Bagh, where in 1919 British soldiers killed about 400 and injured about 1500 people peacefully protesting. This was a major event galvanizing the independence movement and there is now a memorial park and museum. In the afternoon I took a cyclo-rickshaw through the crowded streets of Amritsar to the Ram Bagh, the site of the former palace of Ranjit Singh, where there is a museum with dioramas with a noisy soundtrack of battle sounds. From there I took another cyclo-rickshaw to the Mata Temple, in homage to a woman born in 1923. It is a sort of maze in a concrete building, with brightly colored statues. There is a lifelike statue of the woman with glasses (which I first thought might be her), and it had dozens of women around it singing. From there I took another cyclo-rickshaw to the Sri Durgiana Temple, a sort of Hindu version of the Golden Temple, also surrounded by a pool of water, but not nearly as nice. Outside there were crowds of people celebrating Dussehra, with dancers in monkey costumes, with red gowns, and two little girls dressed up in beautiful traditional clothes. I think Dussehra celebrates the Ramayana story, so perhaps one represented Sita, Rama'a wife. It was all very colorful, with much banging of drums. These Hindu celebrations seem to be always a riot of activity and color. Back at the Golden Temple, I again stayed till they put the holy book away for the night. The Saturday night crowd was enormous, with very friendly people, many eager to talk to you.
I got there again about 7:30 or 8 the next morning (today), again with enormous crowds, even that early. I spent the morning there until about 9 or 9:30, talking in part to a particularly interesting man from Jammu, and then had breakfast before doing some errands and internet this afternoon.
It was clear with great views of the mountains to the north the next morning. I walked to the temple and enjoyed watching all the worshipers. There was much pouring of water and placing of flower petals on idols, plus bell ringing, and again people were very friendly. About 10 I walked to the train station, taking a shortcut, and left a little before 11 on the narrow gauge (2 1/2 feet, as in Shimla) railroad on an eight car train heading west to Kangra. There were only two other tourists and it was a scenic ride, though not spectacularly so. We had a long delay in Palampur waiting for another train to pass, and arrived in Kangra about 1:30. I walked a ways and then took a crowded bus to the center of town and got a hotel.
After lunch I took an autorickshaw to Kangra Fort at the western end of town. This huge fort was much fought over, as it was the strongpoint of the Kangra Kingdom, with a rich temple at Kangra itself that always attracted Moslem pillagers from the northwest, and was later captured by the Mughals. The fort is located between two river gorges, hundreds of feet deep, and can be entered only through a narrow neck at the east end. It was lastly occupied by the British from the 1840's until it was severely damaged by an earthquake in 1905. It looks like it has been partially rebuilt and is quite an impressive site, with great views over the river gorges, which join together to the west. It looks like a fairly impregnable spot, but I guess it wasn't..
I spent a little over an hour there and then went back to the center of town to visit the temple, approached through a somewhat steep and curving bazaar full of pilgrims, many of them in yellow, and shops catering to them. It was all quite colorful and chaotic. The temple itself is modern, built in the 1920's after the 1905 earthquake (and destroyed many times before that by Moslem invaders, usually from the northwest (Afghanistan) as it was a particularly rich temple). The story, as I understand it, is that after Sati, the wife of Shiva, burst into flames in protest at an insult to her husband by her father, Shiva was so incensed on finding her corpse that he began a dance of destruction. Vishnu, not wanting the world to be destroyed, stopped him and in the process caused Sati's body to break into 51 pieces, falling all over India. Her left breast fell at Kangra and the temple worships that. People at the temple were again quite friendly and I again was the only foreigner. Lots of the offerings were of sweets, attracting wasps or hornets, which was a little disconcerting. A tree by the temple had scores of pieces of cloth tied to its branches. It was all quite interesting and colorful. I stayed till after dark, when they illuminated the temple with all sorts of bright colored lights.
I went back to the temple the next morning and enjoyed all the colorful activity. The bazaar was not as crowded on the way up as the day before, but was by the time I returned an hour or more later. I also checked out some of the very crowded pilgrim hostels near the temple and was glad I wasn't staying in them.. I left on a bus for Pathankot about 9:45 and we traveled through hilly country, arriving just before 1. I immediately caught a bus for Amritsar and we traveled through the level and fertile plains of the Punjab to Amritsar, arriving about 4:15. We passed agricultural fields and bustling towns on the way. In one town, Dinanagar, there was a religious procession with an elephant painted with white symbols, marchers dressed in yellow, and a bearded guru at the rear on a sort of chariot drawn by horses.
It was hot in Amritsar, maybe in the 90's. I think it's elevation is about 900 -1000 feet. At least that's what my altimeter showed. I took a cyclo-rickshaw to the Golden Temple, the main temple of the Sikhs. This temple is my favorite memory of my trip to India in 1979 and it was great to see that it is as wonderful as I remembered it. I had planned to stay in the pilgrim dormitories, as I did in 1979, but they were pretty grim, crowded and hot. There is a specific dormitory just for foreigners, with thin-mattresses on maybe 20 beds with no gaps between the beds, all in a small room.
I spent the end of the afternoon and early evening at the temple complex, an enormous place with the Golden Temple in the middle of a pool of water maybe 500 feet long on each side. It is reached by a causeway and there is wide, marble walkway all around the pool, with white buildings all around that. In fact, "Amritsar" means "Pool of Nectar," and there has been a Sikh temple here since the late 1500's. It was destroyed by Moslems in the 1760's, rebuilt, and then in the early 1800's gilded copper plates were added by Ranjit Singh, the great Sikh maharaja of the Punjab. The plates are on the second and third stories while the first story is made of white marble with colored stone inlays of flowers, birds and animals. The inside, too, is beautifully decorated, and the Sikh holy book is constantly read aloud there during the day while quite soothing music is played by nearby musicians. As I recall, there was one drummer, using a small drum, and two playing small keyboards. They play songs from the holy book. All around the complex are tall bearded Sikhs in turbans with long spears keeping watch. You have to remove your shoes, wash your feet and wear an orange scarf on your head, unless you have your own scarf or turban. There were thousands of people around. I've been told the Golden Temple averages 200,000 visitors a day. I crossed the causeway and visited the Golden Temple at about nightfall. It was much more crowded than I remembered from 1979, but I was able to go up into the second and third floors, while a white-bearded man on the first floor read from the book and the musicians played. At about 7 I ate in the communal dining hall, where all are offered free meals 24 hours a day. Sikhs recognize no caste distinctions and these communal meals, eaten on metal plates on the floor, with no precedence for people of high rank, is meant to symbolize the equality of all men. It was just dhal and chapattis, but it was filling. Afterward, I found a hotel nearby and then went back to the temple until about 10.
I went back the next morning about 7 and there were quite a few men bathing in the water, with lots more people walking or sitting or lying around. There is an enclosed area for women to bathe. In the plaza where the causeway begins three musicians were playing what I was told were songs of Sikh bravery. Two had very small drums while the other a stout, violin-type instrument. The marble becomes quite glaring in the middle of the day, and I spent some of that time in the museum, filled with paintings of bloody battles and tortures and Sikh martyrs. It seems the Sikh religion took quite a martial turn in the 17th century after repeated persecution by Moslems. They are still quite martial, and all around the temple are plaques commemorating Sikhs killed in battle in India's wars with Pakistan.
About 4 I left in a crowded jeep with 11 others to head to the border with Pakistan, about an hour's ride away. At sunset every day there is a border closing ceremony, with much pomp and cheering and with goose-stepping soldiers. It draws big crowds, seated in stadium-like bleachers, on both sides, with much cheering, waving of flags and dancing. It had the feel of a college football game and was great fun. At sunset the soldiers on each side lowered the two flags and slammed the border gates shut, with much strutting and marching both preceding and following. The soldiers managed to get their legs up to ridiculous heights while marching.
Back in Amritsar, I had dinner and then went to the Golden Temple to walk around and then watch the ceremony in which they remove the holy book from the Golden Temple and put it away for the night in the building called the Akal Tikhat near the end of the causeway. They do this with a golden palanquin and great ceremony. At the very end, the book, in a blue cloth, is taken from the palanquin on top of the head of a bearded, turbaned Sikh, carried up the stairs of the Akal Tikhat, and placed in a small room, which is locked. Afterward, I went into the Golden Temple and watched the singing, turbaned men inside carefully cleaning everything, including polishing the gold ornaments, sweeping floors, and cleaning windows. On the hard marble walkway around the pool hundreds of people were sleeping, and I suspect they spend the night there. The holy book is brought out each morning at 4 or 5 am and again taken on the golden palanquin into the Golden Temple. The Sikhs had 10 gurus, leaders of their religion, from 1469 to 1708, but the tenth guru prior to this death said there would be no more gurus, only the holy book would serve as their guru.
I went to the Golden Temple again the next morning to watch all the activity. It was a Saturday and much more crowded than the day before. After breakfast, I went to the nearby Jallianwala Bagh, where in 1919 British soldiers killed about 400 and injured about 1500 people peacefully protesting. This was a major event galvanizing the independence movement and there is now a memorial park and museum. In the afternoon I took a cyclo-rickshaw through the crowded streets of Amritsar to the Ram Bagh, the site of the former palace of Ranjit Singh, where there is a museum with dioramas with a noisy soundtrack of battle sounds. From there I took another cyclo-rickshaw to the Mata Temple, in homage to a woman born in 1923. It is a sort of maze in a concrete building, with brightly colored statues. There is a lifelike statue of the woman with glasses (which I first thought might be her), and it had dozens of women around it singing. From there I took another cyclo-rickshaw to the Sri Durgiana Temple, a sort of Hindu version of the Golden Temple, also surrounded by a pool of water, but not nearly as nice. Outside there were crowds of people celebrating Dussehra, with dancers in monkey costumes, with red gowns, and two little girls dressed up in beautiful traditional clothes. I think Dussehra celebrates the Ramayana story, so perhaps one represented Sita, Rama'a wife. It was all very colorful, with much banging of drums. These Hindu celebrations seem to be always a riot of activity and color. Back at the Golden Temple, I again stayed till they put the holy book away for the night. The Saturday night crowd was enormous, with very friendly people, many eager to talk to you.
I got there again about 7:30 or 8 the next morning (today), again with enormous crowds, even that early. I spent the morning there until about 9 or 9:30, talking in part to a particularly interesting man from Jammu, and then had breakfast before doing some errands and internet this afternoon.
Monday, October 11, 2010
October 8 - 11, 2010: Dharamsala
I went out for about a 2 hour walk, leaving about 7:30 on the 8th and walking out of Dalhousie on a road through the pines and rhodendrun, with good views down the steep slopes to the valley of the Ravi. I walked to the palace of a former maharaja maybe a mile and a half from town. Entry to it was barred by a gate, but it was a beautiful walk in the early morning cool. I met a retired man from the Punjab and his wife along the way and they were quite friendly.
After a late breakfast, Phil and I left on a bus for Dharamsala just before noon. It traveled on back roads through hilly country, at altitudes of about 2000 to 4000 feet after we descended from Dallhousie at 6500 feet. It was a scenic journey, but slow going with lots of stops and quite crammed with people toward the end of the trip, with the interior of the bus somewhat reminiscent of the stateroom scene in "Night at the Opera." If anyone else had wanted to board, I think they would have had to stack them horizontally on the heads of the other passengers. The road was narrow, but fortunately there were few trucks on this back route. Indian trucks, by the way, are multi-colored but invariably predominantly orange. They are relatively small (but big in comparison to other vehicles on the roads) and all have embazoned on the back "Blow Horn" in big letters (to advise vehicles behind them to blow their horns if trying to pass) and below that in smaller letters "Use Dipper at Night" (to ask them to use low beams on their headlights).
We arrived at the road junction of Gaggar near Dharamsala about 5 and had to board another bus there up to Dharamsala, arriving about 5:45. It began to rain on the way, with thunder and lightning. Dharamsala is at about 4000 feet, but we were actually bound further up the mountain, to McLeod Ganj (sometimes called Upper Dharamsala), at about 5500 feet. This is where the Dalai Lama resides, settling here in 1960 after fleeing Tibet following an uprising against the Chinese in 1959. It is only about 2 1/2 miles up the mountainside, but 6 miles by the route the bus takes. It began to rain like crazy just as I got out of the bus from Gaggar to board the bus to McLeod Ganj. We waited on that bus about 45 minutes before it left as the sky grew dark and it rained hard, with more thunder and lightning. Eventually, it hailed, quite noisily on the bus' roof. We drove up to McLeod Ganj in the dark, arriving about 7, and found a hotel and had dinner.
It was sunny and clear the next morning and I walked around the small town, though now a much bigger town than I remember from 1979. I walked out of town to the Church of St. John-in-the-Wilderness, which I remember walking to in 1979 on a quiet dirt road with monkeys in the trees. The road is now paved, with cars whizzing past, and there were no monkeys. The colonial church is in a lovely location, surrounded by pines, but it is now tin-roofed, with metal grates and shutters on its entrances, and had a guard dog barking inside. The Earl of Elgin, a viceroy who died in 1863 at age 52, is buried in the churchyard and there is a big memorial to him. It states he also served as Governor of Jamaica, Governor General of Canada and Ambassador to China. There are other graves in the big churchyard. One couple lost two infant children within three months in the 1860's.
After breakfast, I walked to the Tibetan temple complex at the southern (downhill) side of McLeod Ganj. (McLeod was a Deputy Governor of the Punjab when the town was founded in the 1850's as a military encampment and hill station.) It is quite an ugly concrete complex, somewhat reminiscent of a parking structure, and has been built since I was here in 1979. It is filled with red-robbed monks, many debating in the Tibetan style, with much gesturing and clapping of hands. They seem to be having a good time and it is fun to watch. I visited the two temple halls, with some treasures brought from Tibet. The Dalai Lama lives in a fairly nondescript three story concrete building across from the temple, with not much security, at least to my observation. However, I saw his schedule and he is scheduled to be in the U.S. starting October 12 in San Jose, and thereafter Palo Alto, Atlanta and two places in Ohio, so maybe he hasn't been here. I remember seeing him, or at least his car with him in it, as he went to his residence one late afternoon in 1979. I did see him last month in Leh, though I have to admit that a good portion of the time I was in his presence I was trying to remember what was the advice Bill Murray gave him in "Caddyshack," earning him the Dalai Lama's blessing.
There are quite a few tourists here, but I think the Indian tourists may outnumber the western ones, as apparently many Indians from Delhi have a holiday while the Commonwealth Games are going on in Delhi. (They started October 3 and go on for two weeks. I saw the opening ceremonies on tv and have watched some of the events on tv at night.) Somewhat surprisingly, most of the western tourists here are of the older, rather than the younger, sort. There are lots of red-robed Tibetan monks and nuns in town, and other Tibetans, with many women in traditional dress.
The monks ceased their debating just before noon, apparently to go off to lunch. I had lunch myself in a little cafe just outside the temple and nine of them (four at one table and five at another) were also in there. It had clouded up about noon and began to rain about 2, so I headed back into the temple complex to escape the rain. It rained for over an hour an a half, quite hard, with thunder and lighning, and again it hailed. I saw one marble-size hailstone. Afterwards, I walked around town, watching all the people and activity, and then walked down 200+ steps to another temple built since I was here in 1979. (There really wasn't much to see here in 1979 other than the Tibetans themselves.) It had some interesting butter sculptures and the grounds were full of friendly monks. They were being fed just as I left to walk up the stairs to town. All had bowls of rice and beans, though a few of the young ones also had bags of potato chips and I saw one with an orange soda.
It was sunny and clear again the next morning, and about 8:30, after breakfast, I left on a two hour walk, going along the ridge to the little town of Bhagsu and then up the hillside to another small town, Dharmakot, and then back down to McLeod Ganj through the pine trees. Then I walked down to St John-in-the-Wilderness, arriving just at the end of the 10 a.m. Sunday service. A young blond guy was playing a guitar and singing a song apparently of his own composition. He finished and the Indian pastor closed the service. There were about 35 people in attendance, about 90% westerners. Afterwards, they served tea and cookies. The church was fairly bare inside, but had two stained glass windows in the apse and some interesting wall plaques from colonial times. I kept wondering where the guard dog was.
After lunch, I went to the museum in the temple complex and it was very good, focusing on the Chinese subjugation of Tibet with photographs, text and film, the latter of the demonstrations in 1987 and 1988. I spent some more time in the temple. It rained, but only for maybe an hour, that afternoon.
The next morning (today) I walked down the mountainside (about a 700 foot drop in elevation) on a steep road to the seat of the Tibetan government in exile, a complex of several buildings, including a monastery and a library with an interesting museum. It was very interesting to read the literature about the Tibetans' democratically elected goverment in exile and the Dalai Lama's statements on China. A little further downhill is a museum of Tibetan medicine and that was quite interesting. On display were many natural remedies for ailments and they included not only vegetable but also mineral remedies, including lapis lazuli, copper and even gold. I remember reading that at one time the excrement of the Dalai Lama was considered an effective medicine, but I did not see that on display. The sky had clouded up, with some thunder but no rain, and I took a taxi with three others back up the steep road to McLeod Ganj. It hasn't rained yet and it is still a sunny afternoon here at 4.
After a late breakfast, Phil and I left on a bus for Dharamsala just before noon. It traveled on back roads through hilly country, at altitudes of about 2000 to 4000 feet after we descended from Dallhousie at 6500 feet. It was a scenic journey, but slow going with lots of stops and quite crammed with people toward the end of the trip, with the interior of the bus somewhat reminiscent of the stateroom scene in "Night at the Opera." If anyone else had wanted to board, I think they would have had to stack them horizontally on the heads of the other passengers. The road was narrow, but fortunately there were few trucks on this back route. Indian trucks, by the way, are multi-colored but invariably predominantly orange. They are relatively small (but big in comparison to other vehicles on the roads) and all have embazoned on the back "Blow Horn" in big letters (to advise vehicles behind them to blow their horns if trying to pass) and below that in smaller letters "Use Dipper at Night" (to ask them to use low beams on their headlights).
We arrived at the road junction of Gaggar near Dharamsala about 5 and had to board another bus there up to Dharamsala, arriving about 5:45. It began to rain on the way, with thunder and lightning. Dharamsala is at about 4000 feet, but we were actually bound further up the mountain, to McLeod Ganj (sometimes called Upper Dharamsala), at about 5500 feet. This is where the Dalai Lama resides, settling here in 1960 after fleeing Tibet following an uprising against the Chinese in 1959. It is only about 2 1/2 miles up the mountainside, but 6 miles by the route the bus takes. It began to rain like crazy just as I got out of the bus from Gaggar to board the bus to McLeod Ganj. We waited on that bus about 45 minutes before it left as the sky grew dark and it rained hard, with more thunder and lightning. Eventually, it hailed, quite noisily on the bus' roof. We drove up to McLeod Ganj in the dark, arriving about 7, and found a hotel and had dinner.
It was sunny and clear the next morning and I walked around the small town, though now a much bigger town than I remember from 1979. I walked out of town to the Church of St. John-in-the-Wilderness, which I remember walking to in 1979 on a quiet dirt road with monkeys in the trees. The road is now paved, with cars whizzing past, and there were no monkeys. The colonial church is in a lovely location, surrounded by pines, but it is now tin-roofed, with metal grates and shutters on its entrances, and had a guard dog barking inside. The Earl of Elgin, a viceroy who died in 1863 at age 52, is buried in the churchyard and there is a big memorial to him. It states he also served as Governor of Jamaica, Governor General of Canada and Ambassador to China. There are other graves in the big churchyard. One couple lost two infant children within three months in the 1860's.
After breakfast, I walked to the Tibetan temple complex at the southern (downhill) side of McLeod Ganj. (McLeod was a Deputy Governor of the Punjab when the town was founded in the 1850's as a military encampment and hill station.) It is quite an ugly concrete complex, somewhat reminiscent of a parking structure, and has been built since I was here in 1979. It is filled with red-robbed monks, many debating in the Tibetan style, with much gesturing and clapping of hands. They seem to be having a good time and it is fun to watch. I visited the two temple halls, with some treasures brought from Tibet. The Dalai Lama lives in a fairly nondescript three story concrete building across from the temple, with not much security, at least to my observation. However, I saw his schedule and he is scheduled to be in the U.S. starting October 12 in San Jose, and thereafter Palo Alto, Atlanta and two places in Ohio, so maybe he hasn't been here. I remember seeing him, or at least his car with him in it, as he went to his residence one late afternoon in 1979. I did see him last month in Leh, though I have to admit that a good portion of the time I was in his presence I was trying to remember what was the advice Bill Murray gave him in "Caddyshack," earning him the Dalai Lama's blessing.
There are quite a few tourists here, but I think the Indian tourists may outnumber the western ones, as apparently many Indians from Delhi have a holiday while the Commonwealth Games are going on in Delhi. (They started October 3 and go on for two weeks. I saw the opening ceremonies on tv and have watched some of the events on tv at night.) Somewhat surprisingly, most of the western tourists here are of the older, rather than the younger, sort. There are lots of red-robed Tibetan monks and nuns in town, and other Tibetans, with many women in traditional dress.
The monks ceased their debating just before noon, apparently to go off to lunch. I had lunch myself in a little cafe just outside the temple and nine of them (four at one table and five at another) were also in there. It had clouded up about noon and began to rain about 2, so I headed back into the temple complex to escape the rain. It rained for over an hour an a half, quite hard, with thunder and lighning, and again it hailed. I saw one marble-size hailstone. Afterwards, I walked around town, watching all the people and activity, and then walked down 200+ steps to another temple built since I was here in 1979. (There really wasn't much to see here in 1979 other than the Tibetans themselves.) It had some interesting butter sculptures and the grounds were full of friendly monks. They were being fed just as I left to walk up the stairs to town. All had bowls of rice and beans, though a few of the young ones also had bags of potato chips and I saw one with an orange soda.
It was sunny and clear again the next morning, and about 8:30, after breakfast, I left on a two hour walk, going along the ridge to the little town of Bhagsu and then up the hillside to another small town, Dharmakot, and then back down to McLeod Ganj through the pine trees. Then I walked down to St John-in-the-Wilderness, arriving just at the end of the 10 a.m. Sunday service. A young blond guy was playing a guitar and singing a song apparently of his own composition. He finished and the Indian pastor closed the service. There were about 35 people in attendance, about 90% westerners. Afterwards, they served tea and cookies. The church was fairly bare inside, but had two stained glass windows in the apse and some interesting wall plaques from colonial times. I kept wondering where the guard dog was.
After lunch, I went to the museum in the temple complex and it was very good, focusing on the Chinese subjugation of Tibet with photographs, text and film, the latter of the demonstrations in 1987 and 1988. I spent some more time in the temple. It rained, but only for maybe an hour, that afternoon.
The next morning (today) I walked down the mountainside (about a 700 foot drop in elevation) on a steep road to the seat of the Tibetan government in exile, a complex of several buildings, including a monastery and a library with an interesting museum. It was very interesting to read the literature about the Tibetans' democratically elected goverment in exile and the Dalai Lama's statements on China. A little further downhill is a museum of Tibetan medicine and that was quite interesting. On display were many natural remedies for ailments and they included not only vegetable but also mineral remedies, including lapis lazuli, copper and even gold. I remember reading that at one time the excrement of the Dalai Lama was considered an effective medicine, but I did not see that on display. The sky had clouded up, with some thunder but no rain, and I took a taxi with three others back up the steep road to McLeod Ganj. It hasn't rained yet and it is still a sunny afternoon here at 4.
Thursday, October 7, 2010
September 26 - October 7, 2010: Kashmir and Chamba
On September 26 in Kargil we checked out the travel situation to Srinigar in Kashmir. We had been uncertain whether we would be able to travel safely to Kashmir, as there has been violence in the valley all summer. Over 100 Kashmiris have been killed by the Indian security forces in Kashmir since June. The Kashmiris, mostly boys and young men, throw rocks and the security forces shoot back. Curfews are often imposed. But everyone we talked to in Kargil, including people from Srinigar, encouraged us to go. We left Kargil for Srinigar in a jeep with three others at 2, in order to travel the final leg through the valley at night, when the rock throwers are confined to their homes by the curfew. Actually, we really got going about 2:30 as there was a big traffic jam just out of town, including perhaps 50 army trucks, and many other trucks and other vehicles. Just north of town is the junction of the Drass and Suru Rivers, and a bridge that leads to Pakistani Kashmir only a mile or so away. We followed the Drass upriver through a narrow valley, with lots of military encampments and memorials along the road to fallen soldiers. Signs warned us that "You are under enemy observation." The Pakistani lines are just north of the Drass and about 10 years ago the Pakistanis made an incursion and were repulsed by the Indians, with the loss of thousands of lives, I've been told.
We followed the Drass up past the camps and memorials and a village or two till the valley widened, with trees and agriculture before we arrived at the town of Drass about 4:30. We had a tea stop there till 5, with views of pyramidal, snow-capped Tiger Hill, where fighting took place in 1999. After Drass the valley scenery became much more dramatic, with rocky, snow-capped mountains on either side that seemed to rise almost vertically. We crossed the Zoji La (Pass) at 11,600 feet at about 6:30. The view on the other side was quite dramatic, with three long switchbacks leading down into another valley, which was almost 2000 feet below. Unfortunately, the light was fading, so we made the three long switchbacks down for the most part in the dark. It was quite a narrow road, too, with lots of trucks. I'm surprised the jeep drivers don't leave a littler earlier so they can do that road down the pass in the daylight. Hundreds of trucks were parked along the side of the road, in several different places. That, and the oncoming trucks, made getting down difficult. But we reached the town of Sonamarg, at about 9000 feet about 8, and had a 40 minute dinner stop, for some greasy mutton and rice. The last two hour drive to Srinigar was pretty strange, with almost no traffic but a few trucks and our group of three or four jeeps. In the towns we passed all the shops were shut, with shutters down, and I don't think I saw more than 10 people on the streets, and most of those were at police checks on the way. Entering Srinigar, we passed Dal Lake on its eastern shore and our jeep took us to a hotel just southwest of the lake. We had to wake the proprietor to get in, as everything on the street was shut. I took a shower and got to bed just after midnight.
The next morning there was some, but not a lot of activity on the street near our hotel. We got out about 8 to look for a houseboat. When the British first came to Srinigar they were not allowed to buy land, so begin to stay on houseboats on the lake, which has become a tradition. There are more than 1400 of them now, I've read. The streets nearby had quite a few troops with batons and rifles, and checkpoints with concertina wire. There were Kashmiris on the street, though. We walked to the Houseboat Association office and there met Mohammed Taba, who took us in a jeep to his houseboat, a trip that again took us along the east side of Dal Lake and then to Nagin Lake, just northwest of Dal Lake. There we met his brother Habib and looked over their sumptuous boat, the Palace Heights. It is 105 feet long, 15-20 feet wide, and filled with beautiful furniture, of walnut for the most part, Kashmiri rugs and cedar carved wood interiors. There were easy chairs, tables and a desk and even a television and a refrigerator. It had three bedrooms, each with its own bathroom, a dining room, a sitting room and a balcony off the back. It was definitely a deluxe class houseboat, and we got it for about $15/day each, which included breakfast and dinner. Tourism has been hit hard by the disturbances in the valley, and it definitely is a buyer's market. In fact, I saw only one other western tourist the entire time I was in Srinigar.
We had breakfast in the boat's dining room and then rather than go back to our hotel by jeep to pick up our things, we took a shikara, a gondala-type boat with a canopy. We were paddled across Nagin Lake and through the waterways connecting it to the southwest extention of Dal Lake, passing houses and farms and other shikaras on the way. It was quite an interesting trip as we lounged on the boat. At the southwestern part of Dal Lake are hundreds of houseboats, and this was where I had stayed in 1979. Habib and Mohammed said they moved their houseboats (they have six) to Nagin from Dal to avoid the congestion, and it is much less congested on Nagin than on Dal Lake. It was quite different in 1979. The build up of hotels along the lake since 1979 is quite disappointing. We docked and got our stuff and then were paddled back to our houseboat, another beautiful trip, each way taking an hour and twenty minutes or so. There don't seem to be any motor boats on the lakes and waterways, which is nice.
Back on the boat, we spent the rest of the afternoon relaxing, mostly on the balcony on the rear. It was beautiful on the lake, and very peaceful. Sunset was just after 6 and it was great to watch the lake grow dark. The mosques' calls to prayer began soon after sunset and echoed across the lake, with some of the romance that I remember when I first heard them in Istanbul 30 years or more ago. Now I have to admit I mostly find them irritating, especially early in the morning. Unfortunately, they amplify them, usually on pretty poor sound systems and they amplify not only the call to prayer but the continued wailing of the guy leading the prayers, which can go on for a long while. Venus set in the west about an hour after the sun, and another planet (Jupiter? Saturn?) rose brightly over the high mountains to the east. We had an okay dinner on the boat.
I got out about 7 on the balcony to watch the lake in the early morning. The sun rose over the high mountains just east of Dal Lake a little after 7. There were kingfishers, with irridescent blue backs, herons, hawks, small red-faced ducks, some other type of duck, and other birds on the lake. Fishermen on canoes sat patiently fishing, catching fish about a foot long. There is a lot of green duck weed on the lake, appearing only over the past 7 or 8 years, I was told. It is bright green and said to help cleanse the lakes, which are fed by springs. The water is quite clear.
Kirsty left after breakfast, to fly to Jammu, as she had to leave India in less than a week, and Phil and I left about 10:30 on a shikara ride that took us, after more than two hours, across Nagin and Dal Lakes to the eastern shore near Shalimar Bagh (Gardens), built by the Mogul Emperor Jehangir in the early 17th century for his wife, Nur Jahan. The gardens had beautiful flowers, fountains and a somewhat derelict pavilion with the remants of a fine painted ceiling. We spent about half an hour looking around and then walked a short distance to have tea with the boatman's brother's father-in-law, a very friendly gentleman. We then took the shikara south along the eastern shore to another Mogul garden, Nishat Bagh. It is right on the lake, but not as nice as Shalimar Bagh, I think. The long trip back took an hour and a half, into the setting sun. We got back to the houseboat just after sunset, at 6:15.
The next morning Phil and I walked into the old town, southwest of Nagin Lake. We left about 11 and it took us an hour or so to get there. There weren't many shops open, though there were pedestrians and cars on the streets. There were quite a few police with rifles and batons, and roadblocks with concertina wire. Nobody stopped us and the people were friendly. There were posters of Khomeini, Khameini, Achmadinejad and Nasrulllah (the Lebanese Hezbollah leader) along the way, in what was obviously a Shia part of town. Most Kashmiris, I've read, are Sufis, a gentler form of Islam. We also saw "Go Back India" and "Go Back Indian Dogs" graffitti.
We passed through an old city gate built by Akbar, who conquered the valley for the Moguls in the 16th century, and up to a ruined 17th century mosque and a Sufi shrine just below the massive fort (closed to the public as the army still uses it) that sits on a hill above the town. The Sufi shrine, with graves of two Sufi holy men, was very nice, with friendly people. One man had a goat, which peed and then pooped on the carpet. I saw a woman scoop up the poop, but didn't stick around to see what happened to the goat pee.
The giant Jama Masjid was closed but we did visit a couple of other Sufi shrines and mosques, one of which, the Shah-i-Hamadan, was quite beautiful, with papier mache decoration inside and out. We stopped by the Rozabal Tomb, claimed by some to be that of Jesus, with a sign quoting the Koran about how Jesus was not crucified. The streets became quite full and most shops were open as the afternoon progressed and we wandered the narrow streets of the old town. At the last mosque we visited two friendly little girls showed us their dyed hands. We got back to the houseboat just after sunset and on the way back the roadblocks and soldiers were gone. We did see a bunch of them boarding buses at one location.
We spent the next day relaxing on the boat, planning to leave the next day. But the next day was a Friday (when demonstrations often occur after Friday prayer service) and the day after the High Court in Uttar Pradesh State had issued a decision about the future use of the site of the Ayodhya Mosque, which was destroyed in 1992 by Hindu activists claiming it was built on the site of a former Hindu temple where Rama was born. Habib said the authorities were expecting trouble, had imposed a curfew and no jeeps were going to Jammu, our next destination. So we spent the day on the houseboat. We did leave about 1 to walk to the nearby Hazratbal Mosque, a gleaming white 20th century construction on the shore of Dal Lake, to see the Friday prayers. There was a security check, with police frisking people. I was told there would have been many more worshippers there but for the curfew. We infidels weren't allowed into the mosque, so contented ourselves with watching all the activity outside. Afterwards, we watched a man making big paranthas, about two feet wide. He flattened out the dough on a wide disk and then tossed it into a vat of oil for about a minute. I had about half of one with some delicious pumpkin filling. It was all delicious, but greasy. Nearby, I had some potatoes (French fries) and peas and onions fried in batter. Perhaps not the most healthy meal.
We spent the next day, too, on the houseboat, Habib told us the curfew was still on and no jeeps were going to Jammu. We were beginning to wonder if that were true or if he just wanted to keep us paying customers on his houseboat. Still, it was very pleasant on the houseboat, watching the morning and late afternoon activity. It is chilly in the mornings, with temperatures in the 50's. Srinigar is at about 5700 feet. I watched three fishermen just beyond our boat that last morning. One guy caught eight fish in a little less than an hour, while the others caught none. One guy gave up and moved to another part of the lake.
We did leave the next morning. Habib took us in his jeep through town past several check points where he had to show his pass and I had to explain we were going to catch a jeep to Jammu. The police were not uniformly friendly. We boarded the jeep (already with several other passengers) about 7:15 and set off for Jammu. We saw hundreds of police as we traveled south through the Vale of Kashmir, mostly concentrated in the towns but also along the road in the rural areas. Also, about ten buses were carrying troops south. It took us a couple of hours to reach the mountains at the southern end of the valley, passing lots of wheat fields being harvested. We had a breakfast stop at a little town and then went into the mountains and through the Jawaharlal Nehru Tunnel, at about 7500 feet. We passed through mountainous scenery thereafter for several hours, going along the Chenab River for a time. We passed very large flocks of sheep and goats, herded by fierce-looking mountain people in shaggy beards and clothes, wearing turbans and with very dark, sun-burnt faces. They move their flocks from high mountains pastures to lower regions this time of year, and it takes some time to pass the flocks on the narrow mountain roads. There were still troops along the road, but fewer than in the Vale of Kashmir. We climbed another mountain pass, with pines along the route, and finally reached predominantly Hindu rather than Moslem villages on the other side. We continued through hilly country until we reached Jammu about 4:45, nine and a half hours after our departure from Srinigar. We found a hotel and then went to the main Hindu temple in town, the Rajunath Mandir, with thousands of ammonites (one guy told us 33,000,000, but I don't think there were quite that many) encased in cement in rooms around the main temple. It was nice in there, but with a little too much bell ringing. Jammu is mostly Hindu, Kashmir mostly Moslem and Ladakh mostly Buddhist, so there are some that want to split the state along these lines (especially the Ladakhis).
We left the next morning a little before 8 on a bus bound for Chamba. First, we crossed the flatlands between Jammu and Pathankot and then headed back into the hills on a very curvy road lined with wildflowers. Jammu and Pathankot are both only a little more than a thousand feet in elevation, and we climbed to more than 5000 feet before descending and traveling along the Ravi River, now dammed, with a big reservoir beneath steep brown mountains. We got passed the reservoir, crossed the now whitewater river and climbed the cliff above it to reach the town of Chamba, on a bluff several hundred feet above the river, at about 3200 feet elevation. We arrived about 5, after another nine hour trip. Chamba is one of India's oldest kingdoms, dating from the 10th century. In the center of the town is a large grassy area called the Chowgan, where townspeople gather to meet and talk, or to exercise, or to play soccer or field hockey. I didn't see anybody playing cricket, though, which is the sport you see most often in India. Above the Chowgan is the white former palace, dating from the 18th century, of the former maharajah. It's now a college. Also above the Chowgan is an even earlier red palace, smaller and stouter.
The next morning we looked around town. Early on, the Chowgan was filled with soccer players and people doing morning callisthenics. After breakfast, we walked up the narrow medieval lanes above the Chowgan to a series of six temples, called "hut-style temples" that rise to maybe 3 or 4 stories. The oldest dates from the 11th century and they had some good stone carvings on them. We went into the now quite dilapidated former palaces and up to three other temples on the mountainside above the town, with great views below of the town, the river, and the surrounding mountains. After lunch, we visited quite a good museum, with some wall paintings from the old palace and many of the miniature paintings that India is famous for, especially during the Mogul period. The ones in the museum were mostly from the Chamba school, which was particularly active during this time. There were also some great photographs of Chamba a hundred years ago and more.
About 2:30 we left on a crowded bus heading further up the valley, to Bharmour, about 40 miles away. The road was narrow and dusty, and the scenery became quite dramatic as we got further up the valley, although marred by recent hydroelectric building. At one point we had to wait about 20 minutes while a bulldozer cleared away a landslide. You could see where an entire hillside had given way, leaving a long slide of rock ready to slip further down at any time. The rock slide went all the way to the river's edge. In the river below the slide was an orange truck, a victim of the slide. After the bulldozer cleared the way, we hurried past the slide area.
We reached the junction of the Budhil and Ravi Rivers about 8 miles before Bharmour and made our way on a road cut into the rock above the high, narrow gorge of the Budhil. The road was cut into the rock in such a way that the rock hung over the road in places. The valley widened a bit and there were remarkably steep agricultural terraces built into the very steep mountainsides. I don't think I've ever seen such steep terraces, even in the Andes. Bharmour, which we reached just after 6 and just before dark, is in a beautiful location. We checked into a surprisingly good hotel and walked up to the temple area at the top of the town. There are several temples, most of the same style as in Chamba, and some dating from the 7th century. Bharmour was the capital of the Chamba principality before the town of Chamba became the capital. We watched the local people praying at the temples and talked to the inquisitive children. The temples are set in the midst of a wide plaza, and off to one side was a huge flock (I would say 300-400) sheep and goats, tended by mountains folk. They culled the littlest lambs and took them off, perhaps to a warmer place to spend the night. I was surprised to see such a large group of animals near the temples, but I've read that these temples are the main place of worship for these herdsmen. About 8, after most of the shops had closed on the lane from the temples down past our hotel to the road out of town, I heard and saw the goats and sheep being driven down that lane.
Bharmour is at about 7000 feet and it was chilly the next morning when I walked up to the temples at 7:30. There were a few worshippers in the early morning and I watched a priest open one of the temples with a smoky censor and prayers. The sun came up over the steep mountain to the east before 8 and I took a walk to the eastern end of town, with great views up the narrow valley. An old man was smoking a water pipe in front of his wooden home. Another man was shelling peas and invited me into his nice home to have a cup of tea, with milk he told me he had milked from his cow half an hour before.
I came back to the temple area, now filled with school kids ready for school. Some were very inquisitive and friendly. There were no other foreigners around. There were several varieties of school uniforms on display. The schools started at 10, and we watched two groups of schoolkids line up in the temple plaza for their opening ceremonies. There were chants and speeches and singing. At one point they raised their arms straight out in a sort of fascist-style salute and recited patriotic slogans. Then they marched off to school.
We had a late breakfast and then caught the noon bus back to Chamba, though now I wish I had spent the day in Bharmour,a very nice town. After another crowded but scenic journey, we got back to Chamba about 3:15 and boarded the 3:30 bus to Banikhet, retracing our journey in part from Pathankot. We got to Banikhet about 5:45 and boarded the bus to Dalhousie, only about 4 miles away, arriving about 6. Dalhousie is a former hill station, established in the 1850's to escape the summer heat of the plains, like Shimla and other places. It is named after the Governor General of the time. It is at about 6500 feet, with steep hillsides covered in pine, oak and rhododendrun. We made a steep hike to a pretty good hotel and then looked around a bit in the dark. There are lots of Indian tourists here, but few foriegners. It was the major hill station for Lahore, but since partition and Lahore's placement in Pakistan it has been less visited and so is a relatively quiet place. Still, it is said to have over a hundred hotels, some of them from the colonial days.
I spent the next day walking around, with some great views over the thickly forrested steep mountainsides. I visited several old hotels and took a walk out of town a mile and a half or so to a memorial to freedom fighters. It was a lovely walk. It was very sunny in the morning, although with haze, but clouded up in the afternoon, with clouds drifting up the mountainsides. It is quite a pleasant place.
We followed the Drass up past the camps and memorials and a village or two till the valley widened, with trees and agriculture before we arrived at the town of Drass about 4:30. We had a tea stop there till 5, with views of pyramidal, snow-capped Tiger Hill, where fighting took place in 1999. After Drass the valley scenery became much more dramatic, with rocky, snow-capped mountains on either side that seemed to rise almost vertically. We crossed the Zoji La (Pass) at 11,600 feet at about 6:30. The view on the other side was quite dramatic, with three long switchbacks leading down into another valley, which was almost 2000 feet below. Unfortunately, the light was fading, so we made the three long switchbacks down for the most part in the dark. It was quite a narrow road, too, with lots of trucks. I'm surprised the jeep drivers don't leave a littler earlier so they can do that road down the pass in the daylight. Hundreds of trucks were parked along the side of the road, in several different places. That, and the oncoming trucks, made getting down difficult. But we reached the town of Sonamarg, at about 9000 feet about 8, and had a 40 minute dinner stop, for some greasy mutton and rice. The last two hour drive to Srinigar was pretty strange, with almost no traffic but a few trucks and our group of three or four jeeps. In the towns we passed all the shops were shut, with shutters down, and I don't think I saw more than 10 people on the streets, and most of those were at police checks on the way. Entering Srinigar, we passed Dal Lake on its eastern shore and our jeep took us to a hotel just southwest of the lake. We had to wake the proprietor to get in, as everything on the street was shut. I took a shower and got to bed just after midnight.
The next morning there was some, but not a lot of activity on the street near our hotel. We got out about 8 to look for a houseboat. When the British first came to Srinigar they were not allowed to buy land, so begin to stay on houseboats on the lake, which has become a tradition. There are more than 1400 of them now, I've read. The streets nearby had quite a few troops with batons and rifles, and checkpoints with concertina wire. There were Kashmiris on the street, though. We walked to the Houseboat Association office and there met Mohammed Taba, who took us in a jeep to his houseboat, a trip that again took us along the east side of Dal Lake and then to Nagin Lake, just northwest of Dal Lake. There we met his brother Habib and looked over their sumptuous boat, the Palace Heights. It is 105 feet long, 15-20 feet wide, and filled with beautiful furniture, of walnut for the most part, Kashmiri rugs and cedar carved wood interiors. There were easy chairs, tables and a desk and even a television and a refrigerator. It had three bedrooms, each with its own bathroom, a dining room, a sitting room and a balcony off the back. It was definitely a deluxe class houseboat, and we got it for about $15/day each, which included breakfast and dinner. Tourism has been hit hard by the disturbances in the valley, and it definitely is a buyer's market. In fact, I saw only one other western tourist the entire time I was in Srinigar.
We had breakfast in the boat's dining room and then rather than go back to our hotel by jeep to pick up our things, we took a shikara, a gondala-type boat with a canopy. We were paddled across Nagin Lake and through the waterways connecting it to the southwest extention of Dal Lake, passing houses and farms and other shikaras on the way. It was quite an interesting trip as we lounged on the boat. At the southwestern part of Dal Lake are hundreds of houseboats, and this was where I had stayed in 1979. Habib and Mohammed said they moved their houseboats (they have six) to Nagin from Dal to avoid the congestion, and it is much less congested on Nagin than on Dal Lake. It was quite different in 1979. The build up of hotels along the lake since 1979 is quite disappointing. We docked and got our stuff and then were paddled back to our houseboat, another beautiful trip, each way taking an hour and twenty minutes or so. There don't seem to be any motor boats on the lakes and waterways, which is nice.
Back on the boat, we spent the rest of the afternoon relaxing, mostly on the balcony on the rear. It was beautiful on the lake, and very peaceful. Sunset was just after 6 and it was great to watch the lake grow dark. The mosques' calls to prayer began soon after sunset and echoed across the lake, with some of the romance that I remember when I first heard them in Istanbul 30 years or more ago. Now I have to admit I mostly find them irritating, especially early in the morning. Unfortunately, they amplify them, usually on pretty poor sound systems and they amplify not only the call to prayer but the continued wailing of the guy leading the prayers, which can go on for a long while. Venus set in the west about an hour after the sun, and another planet (Jupiter? Saturn?) rose brightly over the high mountains to the east. We had an okay dinner on the boat.
I got out about 7 on the balcony to watch the lake in the early morning. The sun rose over the high mountains just east of Dal Lake a little after 7. There were kingfishers, with irridescent blue backs, herons, hawks, small red-faced ducks, some other type of duck, and other birds on the lake. Fishermen on canoes sat patiently fishing, catching fish about a foot long. There is a lot of green duck weed on the lake, appearing only over the past 7 or 8 years, I was told. It is bright green and said to help cleanse the lakes, which are fed by springs. The water is quite clear.
Kirsty left after breakfast, to fly to Jammu, as she had to leave India in less than a week, and Phil and I left about 10:30 on a shikara ride that took us, after more than two hours, across Nagin and Dal Lakes to the eastern shore near Shalimar Bagh (Gardens), built by the Mogul Emperor Jehangir in the early 17th century for his wife, Nur Jahan. The gardens had beautiful flowers, fountains and a somewhat derelict pavilion with the remants of a fine painted ceiling. We spent about half an hour looking around and then walked a short distance to have tea with the boatman's brother's father-in-law, a very friendly gentleman. We then took the shikara south along the eastern shore to another Mogul garden, Nishat Bagh. It is right on the lake, but not as nice as Shalimar Bagh, I think. The long trip back took an hour and a half, into the setting sun. We got back to the houseboat just after sunset, at 6:15.
The next morning Phil and I walked into the old town, southwest of Nagin Lake. We left about 11 and it took us an hour or so to get there. There weren't many shops open, though there were pedestrians and cars on the streets. There were quite a few police with rifles and batons, and roadblocks with concertina wire. Nobody stopped us and the people were friendly. There were posters of Khomeini, Khameini, Achmadinejad and Nasrulllah (the Lebanese Hezbollah leader) along the way, in what was obviously a Shia part of town. Most Kashmiris, I've read, are Sufis, a gentler form of Islam. We also saw "Go Back India" and "Go Back Indian Dogs" graffitti.
We passed through an old city gate built by Akbar, who conquered the valley for the Moguls in the 16th century, and up to a ruined 17th century mosque and a Sufi shrine just below the massive fort (closed to the public as the army still uses it) that sits on a hill above the town. The Sufi shrine, with graves of two Sufi holy men, was very nice, with friendly people. One man had a goat, which peed and then pooped on the carpet. I saw a woman scoop up the poop, but didn't stick around to see what happened to the goat pee.
The giant Jama Masjid was closed but we did visit a couple of other Sufi shrines and mosques, one of which, the Shah-i-Hamadan, was quite beautiful, with papier mache decoration inside and out. We stopped by the Rozabal Tomb, claimed by some to be that of Jesus, with a sign quoting the Koran about how Jesus was not crucified. The streets became quite full and most shops were open as the afternoon progressed and we wandered the narrow streets of the old town. At the last mosque we visited two friendly little girls showed us their dyed hands. We got back to the houseboat just after sunset and on the way back the roadblocks and soldiers were gone. We did see a bunch of them boarding buses at one location.
We spent the next day relaxing on the boat, planning to leave the next day. But the next day was a Friday (when demonstrations often occur after Friday prayer service) and the day after the High Court in Uttar Pradesh State had issued a decision about the future use of the site of the Ayodhya Mosque, which was destroyed in 1992 by Hindu activists claiming it was built on the site of a former Hindu temple where Rama was born. Habib said the authorities were expecting trouble, had imposed a curfew and no jeeps were going to Jammu, our next destination. So we spent the day on the houseboat. We did leave about 1 to walk to the nearby Hazratbal Mosque, a gleaming white 20th century construction on the shore of Dal Lake, to see the Friday prayers. There was a security check, with police frisking people. I was told there would have been many more worshippers there but for the curfew. We infidels weren't allowed into the mosque, so contented ourselves with watching all the activity outside. Afterwards, we watched a man making big paranthas, about two feet wide. He flattened out the dough on a wide disk and then tossed it into a vat of oil for about a minute. I had about half of one with some delicious pumpkin filling. It was all delicious, but greasy. Nearby, I had some potatoes (French fries) and peas and onions fried in batter. Perhaps not the most healthy meal.
We spent the next day, too, on the houseboat, Habib told us the curfew was still on and no jeeps were going to Jammu. We were beginning to wonder if that were true or if he just wanted to keep us paying customers on his houseboat. Still, it was very pleasant on the houseboat, watching the morning and late afternoon activity. It is chilly in the mornings, with temperatures in the 50's. Srinigar is at about 5700 feet. I watched three fishermen just beyond our boat that last morning. One guy caught eight fish in a little less than an hour, while the others caught none. One guy gave up and moved to another part of the lake.
We did leave the next morning. Habib took us in his jeep through town past several check points where he had to show his pass and I had to explain we were going to catch a jeep to Jammu. The police were not uniformly friendly. We boarded the jeep (already with several other passengers) about 7:15 and set off for Jammu. We saw hundreds of police as we traveled south through the Vale of Kashmir, mostly concentrated in the towns but also along the road in the rural areas. Also, about ten buses were carrying troops south. It took us a couple of hours to reach the mountains at the southern end of the valley, passing lots of wheat fields being harvested. We had a breakfast stop at a little town and then went into the mountains and through the Jawaharlal Nehru Tunnel, at about 7500 feet. We passed through mountainous scenery thereafter for several hours, going along the Chenab River for a time. We passed very large flocks of sheep and goats, herded by fierce-looking mountain people in shaggy beards and clothes, wearing turbans and with very dark, sun-burnt faces. They move their flocks from high mountains pastures to lower regions this time of year, and it takes some time to pass the flocks on the narrow mountain roads. There were still troops along the road, but fewer than in the Vale of Kashmir. We climbed another mountain pass, with pines along the route, and finally reached predominantly Hindu rather than Moslem villages on the other side. We continued through hilly country until we reached Jammu about 4:45, nine and a half hours after our departure from Srinigar. We found a hotel and then went to the main Hindu temple in town, the Rajunath Mandir, with thousands of ammonites (one guy told us 33,000,000, but I don't think there were quite that many) encased in cement in rooms around the main temple. It was nice in there, but with a little too much bell ringing. Jammu is mostly Hindu, Kashmir mostly Moslem and Ladakh mostly Buddhist, so there are some that want to split the state along these lines (especially the Ladakhis).
We left the next morning a little before 8 on a bus bound for Chamba. First, we crossed the flatlands between Jammu and Pathankot and then headed back into the hills on a very curvy road lined with wildflowers. Jammu and Pathankot are both only a little more than a thousand feet in elevation, and we climbed to more than 5000 feet before descending and traveling along the Ravi River, now dammed, with a big reservoir beneath steep brown mountains. We got passed the reservoir, crossed the now whitewater river and climbed the cliff above it to reach the town of Chamba, on a bluff several hundred feet above the river, at about 3200 feet elevation. We arrived about 5, after another nine hour trip. Chamba is one of India's oldest kingdoms, dating from the 10th century. In the center of the town is a large grassy area called the Chowgan, where townspeople gather to meet and talk, or to exercise, or to play soccer or field hockey. I didn't see anybody playing cricket, though, which is the sport you see most often in India. Above the Chowgan is the white former palace, dating from the 18th century, of the former maharajah. It's now a college. Also above the Chowgan is an even earlier red palace, smaller and stouter.
The next morning we looked around town. Early on, the Chowgan was filled with soccer players and people doing morning callisthenics. After breakfast, we walked up the narrow medieval lanes above the Chowgan to a series of six temples, called "hut-style temples" that rise to maybe 3 or 4 stories. The oldest dates from the 11th century and they had some good stone carvings on them. We went into the now quite dilapidated former palaces and up to three other temples on the mountainside above the town, with great views below of the town, the river, and the surrounding mountains. After lunch, we visited quite a good museum, with some wall paintings from the old palace and many of the miniature paintings that India is famous for, especially during the Mogul period. The ones in the museum were mostly from the Chamba school, which was particularly active during this time. There were also some great photographs of Chamba a hundred years ago and more.
About 2:30 we left on a crowded bus heading further up the valley, to Bharmour, about 40 miles away. The road was narrow and dusty, and the scenery became quite dramatic as we got further up the valley, although marred by recent hydroelectric building. At one point we had to wait about 20 minutes while a bulldozer cleared away a landslide. You could see where an entire hillside had given way, leaving a long slide of rock ready to slip further down at any time. The rock slide went all the way to the river's edge. In the river below the slide was an orange truck, a victim of the slide. After the bulldozer cleared the way, we hurried past the slide area.
We reached the junction of the Budhil and Ravi Rivers about 8 miles before Bharmour and made our way on a road cut into the rock above the high, narrow gorge of the Budhil. The road was cut into the rock in such a way that the rock hung over the road in places. The valley widened a bit and there were remarkably steep agricultural terraces built into the very steep mountainsides. I don't think I've ever seen such steep terraces, even in the Andes. Bharmour, which we reached just after 6 and just before dark, is in a beautiful location. We checked into a surprisingly good hotel and walked up to the temple area at the top of the town. There are several temples, most of the same style as in Chamba, and some dating from the 7th century. Bharmour was the capital of the Chamba principality before the town of Chamba became the capital. We watched the local people praying at the temples and talked to the inquisitive children. The temples are set in the midst of a wide plaza, and off to one side was a huge flock (I would say 300-400) sheep and goats, tended by mountains folk. They culled the littlest lambs and took them off, perhaps to a warmer place to spend the night. I was surprised to see such a large group of animals near the temples, but I've read that these temples are the main place of worship for these herdsmen. About 8, after most of the shops had closed on the lane from the temples down past our hotel to the road out of town, I heard and saw the goats and sheep being driven down that lane.
Bharmour is at about 7000 feet and it was chilly the next morning when I walked up to the temples at 7:30. There were a few worshippers in the early morning and I watched a priest open one of the temples with a smoky censor and prayers. The sun came up over the steep mountain to the east before 8 and I took a walk to the eastern end of town, with great views up the narrow valley. An old man was smoking a water pipe in front of his wooden home. Another man was shelling peas and invited me into his nice home to have a cup of tea, with milk he told me he had milked from his cow half an hour before.
I came back to the temple area, now filled with school kids ready for school. Some were very inquisitive and friendly. There were no other foreigners around. There were several varieties of school uniforms on display. The schools started at 10, and we watched two groups of schoolkids line up in the temple plaza for their opening ceremonies. There were chants and speeches and singing. At one point they raised their arms straight out in a sort of fascist-style salute and recited patriotic slogans. Then they marched off to school.
We had a late breakfast and then caught the noon bus back to Chamba, though now I wish I had spent the day in Bharmour,a very nice town. After another crowded but scenic journey, we got back to Chamba about 3:15 and boarded the 3:30 bus to Banikhet, retracing our journey in part from Pathankot. We got to Banikhet about 5:45 and boarded the bus to Dalhousie, only about 4 miles away, arriving about 6. Dalhousie is a former hill station, established in the 1850's to escape the summer heat of the plains, like Shimla and other places. It is named after the Governor General of the time. It is at about 6500 feet, with steep hillsides covered in pine, oak and rhododendrun. We made a steep hike to a pretty good hotel and then looked around a bit in the dark. There are lots of Indian tourists here, but few foriegners. It was the major hill station for Lahore, but since partition and Lahore's placement in Pakistan it has been less visited and so is a relatively quiet place. Still, it is said to have over a hundred hotels, some of them from the colonial days.
I spent the next day walking around, with some great views over the thickly forrested steep mountainsides. I visited several old hotels and took a walk out of town a mile and a half or so to a memorial to freedom fighters. It was a lovely walk. It was very sunny in the morning, although with haze, but clouded up in the afternoon, with clouds drifting up the mountainsides. It is quite a pleasant place.
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