Day 9: Amritsar

"So affections fade away, or do adults just learn to play the most ridiculous, repulsive games?”
-The Shins, “Turn on Me”

Locations: Amritsar (Punjab)

Photos: http://princeton.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2046768&l=b3aac&id=1101094

Temperature: 97

Morale: 7

Spinning: The Shins - Wincing the Night Away, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah - Some Loud Thunder (both these albums are a lot better than people have given them credit for—Chutes Too Narrow and CYHSY are very difficult albums to follow), The Arcade Fire - The Arcade Fire EP (always a classic)

Reading: Lonely Planet. Still no time for anything else.

Talking: In aggravatingly-slow English with this Italian woman with whom I traveled in Amritsar. Would rather have been talking to myself.

What's next (I think): Chandigarh (Punjab)

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I finished my last update at around 11:30pm and walked back to my guest house in McLeod Ganj, expecting an uneventful night and an early rise the next morning to catch my bus to Amritsar. No such luck. When I got to my hotel, the gate was locked for the night, and though I banged on it so loudly that the entire neighborhood woke up, turned on their lights, and stared out their windows at me, no one from inside the hotel came to let me in.

Finally someone called out their window that the hotel owner had gone home for the night, and that I had better wait until morning. I explained that that wasn't going to work, because a) I wanted to sleep in the bed I had paid for and b) the hotel owner probably wouldn't even be back in time for me to get my pack out of my room and catch my 5am bus (the only bus all day to Amritsar). So after a few minutes of pleading the guy agreed to call the hotel owner, and half and hour later he came to let me in.

I asked him why he had locked me out, and he said that he thought he saw me come in earlier that evening. Nope, dude, you didn't, but thanks for checking to see if I was actually in my room before you locked up and went home. Great hotel. Then I asked him if he had made a taxi reservation for me at 4:30 the way I had asked him to, and he said, "4:30? I thought 5:30!" Dude. Not cool. So I called the taxi place myself and changed the reservation to 4:30. If you ever go to McLeod Ganj, do not stay in the "Hunted Hill Hotel." Is that "Haunted Hill Hotel" misspelled? Probably.

Anyhow, I went to bed in time to get a touch less than four hours of sleep, and caught my 4:30 taxi without a problem. The taxi to Dharamsala (10km) cost Rs 200, which was Rs 75 more than the six hour bus ride to Amritsar cost. What a rip off. But because the bus from McLeod to Dharamsala didn't start running until 6am (or so my hotel told me), I didn't have much choice.

I got to the bus station around 4:50 and waited in the terminal. Just before 5 an Italian woman approached me and asked where the bus to Amritsar was. I told her that it wasn't here yet, but that I was planning to take the same bus. We started talking, and it turned out that she had just arrived from McLeod on the McLeod-Dharamsala that started running at 4am, not 6. Hunted House Hotel, I loathe you.

In any case, the difference in price between the McLeod/Dharamsala bus (Rs 7) and taxi (usually Rs 150, but Rs 200 at strange hours, like 4:30am) is worth noting. Essentially, no local would ever take a taxi between the two places, so they can charge tourist prices. But locals take the bus all the time, so it has to be dirt cheap. I will say, though, that the presence of two parallel markets (local and tourist) is less pronounced here than in, say, Egypt, where you just have no hope of getting the local price for most things.

I talked to the Italian woman until the bus came—she was at the tail end of her trip, having spent the last month in India, and primarily in Rajasthan. We exchanged stories and discussed our traveling styles, and she said that her travel philosophy was that she had to do it cheaply and suffer as a result because that was part of being in India. Fair enough—and if that's what drives the Israelis too, that's cool. But I would argue that you’ll suffer regardless of what you do in India. Better to spend the extra Rs 10 and make your life tolerable.

The Italian woman (it seems her name was Cristina) spoke little English and wasn’t particularly interesting, and I spent far more time with her over the next day than I wanted to, but there was one piece of information that she gave me that I found useful—she said the flood waters in Uttar Pradesh had gone down. That might mean I can visit Varanasi, which is on the banks of the Ganges about halfway between Agra and Calcutta. I had originally wanted to go there but had scratched it when the worst floods in ten years hit the region. Anyway, we'll see—I'll ask around once I get to Delhi and see if it makes sense to go.

The bus to Amritsar was “public” (as opposed to my “lux bus” from Manali to McLeod). But, how bad can a bus be? I figured it wouldn’t be too uncomfortable. Of course, I was wrong.

Initially, the bus was only half full, and that meant Cristina and I could keep our packs on the seats (rather than on our laps). But as we got closer to Pathankot (the only major city between McLeod and Amritsar) the bus started filling up. Cristina and I would quietly cheer every time someone would get off, and groan every time someone jumped on. In the end, though, it was a losing battle—I ended up pressed against the window with my pack cutting off the circulation in my thighs.

I noticed that the passenger flow on the bus was not unlike the passenger flow on the morning subway ride from Brooklyn to midtown. The train slowly filled up as it approached Pathankot (financial district), and then to everyone's relief half the people got off at Pathankot and everyone got to sit down, but then the train filled up again after Pathankot until, by the time it reached Amritsar (42nd Street), it was crowded, uncomfortable, sweaty, and combative. To everyone's relief, everyone got off at Amritsar, but it didn't matter anymore because, well, everyone has already gotten off.

Anyhow, public buses in India, if they are not full, aren't actually that bad, except for one thing—they have no shocks. No shocks means no sleep, because even small bumps feel like small mountains. So I sat in my seat from 5am to 11:30am, wide awake, feeling every crack in the road.

A couple things I noticed on prior drives on north Indian roads that I failed to mention until now:

1) The Indian government, or at least the Ministry of Transportation, has a surprisingly keen sense of humor. There are road signs all over the place in northern India that say things like "Driving After Whiskey Is Risky" and "Drive Like Hell and You Will Be There" and "Mind Your Brakes or Break You Mind" and, my personal favorite, "Make Love Not War, But Nothing While Driving." Also, on a bridge between Leh and Manali I saw a speed limit sign that said, "DEAD SLOW." Come on, that's funny!

2) Roads in northern India are horrendous. The main problem is that most have huge potholes, so you have to drive painfully slow though those sections, and then when you reach a stretch of road that is pothole-free and you start speeding up, all of the sudden you get to a stretch of road that is not-so-pothole-free and you break yourself.

Also, no roads in northern India are actually more than one lane. They only seem to have more than one lane because of the line painted down the middle of them. One discovers this when coming around a blind turn to find the entire road occupied by vehicle that should presumably be taking up only one lane. Anyhow, the one-lane crisis is resolved by one car pulling off the side of the road (preferably not the cliff side) while the other passes. That seems easy enough, but nothing in India is actually easy, so beware. The trouble is with deciding which car will pull off the road. But never fear, the Indians have come up with a foolproof solution for resolving this crisis. The criteria is:

a) which driver is more macho?

b) but more importantly, which driver is more stubborn?

The solution, though failsafe in the long run, can take a while to work itself out. The record so far that I've seen was about a minute, on a bridge. Frustrating, yes.

For those of you who think you have seen terrible roads before, I will admit that maybe Indian roads aren't the absolute worst in the world. For instance, roads in Senegal were much worse. But last time I checked, India wasn't too keen on being compared to the "dark continent."

Anyhow, just as I was pressed against the bus window and thereby rendered totally immobile, the sky decided to open up like there was no tomorrow; or, if you aren't a fan of clichés, as if the already-saturated soil actually appreciated the extra moisture.

I closed the window, which made things rather hot, but still I was thankful that I was under cover. Then I realized that the roof was leaking.

And where was the leak? Naturally, right over my head.

It seems silly to complain about getting dripped on, but having a drop of dirty, rust-coated water hit your head, or neck, or arm (at least it's a surprise!) every few seconds is amazingly annoying. I sat there and took it for about an hour, and then the person sitting in the aisle seat got up to exit the bus. Like Cosmo Kramer on the NYC Subway, I fought to get my ass in that seat, knocking over men, women, and children in the process. As I told Jatinder the other day, I'm nice, but I'm not that nice.

Happy that I had a seat away from the leak, I turned on Some Loud Thunder and tried to enjoy myself for a bit. Of course the rain stopped a few minutes later.

Some guys who were sitting across the aisle from me, and who had been watching me get dripped on with sympathetic expressions (finally I turned around and said, “Hey, you get what you pay for, right?” I don't think they understood), were now sitting only a couple feet from me, curiously looking at my iPod. So I decided to give them a sample of American music, and I carefully picked out "Underwater (You and Me)", because it's a great song, and also maybe because it was the song that was currently playing (am I this lazy?). I thought they would appreciate the unconventional vocals, tambourine-led rhythm, and carrying bass line as much as I did. Apparently, they didn't, because they handed back the iPod 1:13 into the song.

At that point we were almost to Pathankot, and the bus was at capacity. But as we neared the city, we came to a sign that said, "Bridge Washed Out—Deviation This Way." What it should have said was, "Good road out of order. Take very bad road—this way."

In most cases, bad roads are agonizing while you're on them, but then you make it through and the pain is over. Sure, you’ll most likely have some rear-end soreness the next morning, but overall the damage is limited. In this case, we popped a tire on a huge rock.

Providentially, we popped the tire right next to a tire store. Cynically, maybe the tire store had placed large rocks in the road to drum up some extra business.

We got the tire fixed and continued on to Pathankot, which is the first town in the state of Punjab (we had just left Himachal Pradesh). We passed a sign that said "Welcome to Punjab" but it was barely visible because the sign was covered in mud. From what I've heard about Punjab, that's fitting.

Traffic slowed down as we approached Amritsar, which was annoying because it got hot but useful because I was able to take some pictures from the bus window of Sikhs riding around in their rickshaws. This is the India I had seen in photos. Kashmir, Ladakh, and Himachal Pradesh are a different beast altogether.

We finally arrived in Amritsar, and Cristina and I got a cycle rickshaw to a place called the Tourist Guest House, which sounds lame but is actually quite nice. It was once a British mansion, but now it's been converted into a cheap guest house for backpackers. Unfortunately, they had only one room available, which meant I had to share a room with the Italian woman, who seemed just fine with the arrangement. Ugh.

I took a quick shower and then walked down the road to find some food. I wasn’t really in the mood to sit down after the long bus ride, so I got some street meat from a cart (chicken, I think). The food was fantastic—so spicy that it made my mouth sweat, and served with naan so I could wipe up all the extra sauce and eat it when I was done with the meat. A group of locals was standing around the cart eating the food when I walked up, and they all looked at me like I was from Pluto when I asked if I could have some. The meal cost Rs 7.

In the time it took me to walk from the food stand back to the guest house, I realized that there was no way I could stay in this city for more than one day—it was just too hot and dirty. So I walked to the bus station and found a ticket to Chandigarh for the next morning.

I walked back to the guest house, and by this time my shirt was totally soaked through with sweat. This day may have been the hottest I’d ever experienced—even hotter than the Valley of the Kings in Luxor, Adam and Ian.

I rinsed off (by the end of the day, I had taken 4 showers) and left my shirt wet to give me an extra few minutes of comfort, and then the Italian and I caught a cycle rickshaw to the Golden Temple complex.

Before going in we had to cover our heads with these smelly orange headscarves, and leave our shoes with an attendant. Then we washed our feet in pools of water that were cut into the marble, and walked into the temple complex.

The Golden Temple itself is in the center of a pool, which is in turn surrounded by a white marble walkway (effectively the entire complex is white marble, except for the copper and gold gilding on the temple itself). We followed the walkway around the pool and admired the temple from different angles—it really is beautiful—and then we got in the queue to go inside. I got some great photos of the temple from the walkway, but unfortunately photography isn't allowed once you're on the causeway that leads from the walkway to the temple (and certainly isn't allowed in the temple itself, which is too bad, because the craziest scenes were inside the temple).

We finally made it inside the temple, and, wow, it was eerie. Pilgrims (we were the only foreigners there that I could see—everyone else was an Indian pilgrim who had come to worship) were kissing the floor and throwing coins into a receptacle, and four Sikh priests were chanting verses from the Guru Granth Sahib (Sikh holy book) in Punjabi. There were flowers everywhere, I think, although it's kind of all a blur now. But I remember the inside of the temple, where the priests were sitting and chanting and playing the keyboard and tapping on drums, being very colorful.

Upstairs there were more priests, this time surrounding the original copy of the Guru Granth Sahib, which was covered in a pink shroud. One priest was fanning the book with what looked like a big feather duster.

After a climb up the final flight of stairs we were outside on the roof looking at the golden dome that sits on top of the temple and is shaped like an inverted lotus flower, which is supposed to symbolize the Sikh goal of living a pure life.

We went back down to the main floor and exited the temple. On the way back to the causeway, we passed four or five Sikh men dunking buckets into the pool and dumping the water into buckets held by little kids, and the kids in turn dumped the water onto the marble walkway on which we were walking. The water from the pool is holy according to Sikh beliefs (the pool is called the Amrit Sarovar, or "Pool of Nectar," and that's also where the name of the city comes from), which meant nothing to me, but it felt good hitting my feet. I wondered if the marble walkway might get slippery from the water, but it didn't, most likely because of the grime from everyone's feet that now coated the marble.

Back on the walkway surrounding the Amrit Sarovar, we walked around the pool to the opposite side of the temple causeway, where the Guru-Ka-Langar (basically a big dining hall) was.

This place was almost as odd as the temple itself. As you walk in a Sikh dude hands you a metal plate, bowl, and spoon. Then you file into this huge room and step over a few rows of pilgrims until you find an open row. In the process you step in all the dal (lentil) soup and kheer (essentially, rice pudding) that's been sloshed all over the floor. When you find an open spot, you sit down on the wet, nasty, food-covered floor, and hold up your plate waiting for another Sikh dude to come by and slosh some dal soup, kheer, and a couple chipati (flat bread) on it. Most of the food misses the plate and ends up on the floor, or on your pants, or, in my case, on your shirt.

It's quite an experience to eat there with all the pilgrims. Apparently this place feeds around 30,000 visitors each day, and that’s credible given how many people I observed going in and out. Also, for the first time since Peru, sitting there I felt like a celebrity (albeit a celebrity who sits on the floor, in a pool of lentil soup): everyone wanted me to take my picture and have their picture taken with me. Strange. I think it was because a lot of these people are Sikh pilgrims from small towns in India that tourists don't visit, so they don't see Westerners except on TV. Anyhow, I got some more great photos.

On the way out you give your plate to some other dudes and they dump any leftovers in the big tub of mush (photo here). I'm not sure what they do with the mush, but I'm guessing swine are part of the equation.

The Sikh dudes who were collecting plates saw me taking pictures of the mush and started yelling and waving their hands. I thought they were freaking out because they thought I was about to expose to the world the unsanitary conditions of the place. Instead, they just wanted me to take a picture with them. I happily acquiesced to their request.

After the strange meal (and by the way, the food was surprisingly good. I still have not had a bad meal in India), we stopped by the temple complex dormitories, in which I actually could have stayed for free (the place is specifically for foreigners, with no requirement that the foreigner be a Sikh). The place actually seemed somewhat pleasant, and I probably should have stayed there. Ah well.

At this point it was flaming hot (unless I tell you otherwise, assume my shirt is fully soaked through with sweat, because it was for 90% during the rest of my stay in India), and the Italian was whining, so we sat down in the shade under the arched overhangs, and while Cristina napped I took photos of people walking in front of the temple on the walkway.

In the end, it’s difficult to express the splendor of the Golden Temple in words; luckily, I took a lot of photos, so have a look.

We left the complex at around 4pm and found a shared minibus to the Pakistani border at Attari/Wagah, where we would watch the extremely theatrical daily border closing ceremony. The minibus cost Rs 75 roundtrip; Attari is about 30km from Amritsar.

Cristina and I were the only foreigners in the minibus—the others were Indian tourists. Two of them were from Bangalore (now Bengalooru) and were very curious to talk to me. In case you're not aware, Bangalore is the IT capital of India, and it also has many call centers for American companies. These guys were chemical engineers who worked as "quality assurance managers" at a battery manufacturer called Eurocell (which, one guy told me, basically means they test the batteries after they are made to make sure they work).

Anyhow, they talked a lot about what they perceived as differences between India and America—these guys definitely saw Americans as risk takers (read: stock/housing market speculators) and big spenders, whereas they said that Indians were more conservative in investing, usually buying gold because it can function as both a store of value and as jewelry and saving far more of their money in cash.

They were also interested in how much money I planned to spend during my month in India. I made up a number for them to work with—$2,500, which came out to around 100,000 rupees, or one lakh—and they said that one lakh was also around the amount of money most Indians assumed they would need to spend on a trip to another country. These guys were hoping to travel somewhere soon; Australia was a frontrunner.

The border ceremony was quite a spectacle. A few thousand Indians and Pakistanis show up for the event (every day!), and each nationality sits on its side of the border in concrete grandstands and chants its country's name (for India the main chant involved "Hindustan," which is generally the name used to describe greater, pre-partition India) and cheers on its soldiers, who are dressed in ceremonial military garb, with big Spartan-like fans on top of their hats.

The ceremony was fascinating at first, but by the 176^th Hindustan chant I was more than ready to go (plus my shirt was soaked through with sweat, again). It was interesting, though, to look across and see the Pakistanis, with the head-scarved women all on their own side of the grandstand (the Indian men and women sat on the same side—risqué, I know). And it was also kind of cool to be sitting right on the Indo-Pakistani border.

Finally the chanting gave way to the actual ceremony, which involved lots of goose-stepping, saluting, flag lowering (very slowly, so as not to let one country's flag be higher than the other's), and, most notably, handshaking between the officers of the two sides. The whole thing is obviously just a big show, but I guess it can't hurt Indo-Pakistani relations to have the border guards shaking hands.

After the ceremony ended we took the minibus back to Amritsar and Cristina and I got some food at this really good vegetarian place that served all kinds of Indian food. I had palak paneer, which is cubes of cottage cheese in spinach. Might not sound great, but it was.

After dinner we headed back to the Golden Temple to see it by night. The visit was enjoyable enough, but the real magic was seeing it the first time, in the daylight. As we were about to leave, a little Indian kid came up to me and said, "Hi, I'm Saahill, what's your good name?" So I told him and then he asked where I was from, and I told him, and then he said, "You are most welcome here at our holy temple. God bless you!" Surely this whole thing had been rehearsed the night before (and perhaps written by his parents) for use on the first foreigner he came upon, but still it was adorable. By the time he was done with his spiel, a crowd of about 20 Indian kids had gathered around me, all of them wanting to shake my hand. One of them asked if Cristina and I were married, and I said “No!” and grimaced. I don’t think Cristina appreciated that reaction too much….

Seeing as my bus to Chandigarh left at 5:15 the following morning, I hurried back to the guest house and went to bed. With the fan turning at full speed, the room became just cool enough for sleep. But not quite cool enough to avoid waking up in a pool of sweat.