Sipping coffee in Delhi this morning after four nights on the road. A beautiful, sobering trip up through Amritsar and on to Dharamshala. After settling in at the Hotel Exotic Thursday afternoon, we paid our respects at the relatively new Partition Museum just a few minutes walking from both our hotel and the Golden Temple. The Golden Temple, a Sikh pilgrimage site, is the city's main tourist attraction, but the Partition history also runs deep. Amritsar is a mere 17.4 miles from the India-Pakistan border and just 29 miles from Lahore, Pakistan--once a major cultural and literary center of pre-Partition India. Images at the museum show overcrowded trains running between the two cities in the weeks and months after the British withdrew, leaving a hastily drawn border and unimaginable chaos in their wake. Some of those overcrowded trains arrived without any living passengers aboard as rioting and communal violence proliferated in fractured Panjab. I'll spare you more dark history here, but I'd highly recommend a visit to the museum to anyone passing through Amritsar. The history is hard to stomach, but the exhibits are beautifully pieced together.
From the Partition Museum, we proceeded down the street to the Golden Temple just as the sun was setting. I've seen a lot of monuments, mandirs, and pilgrimage sites in North India, but the Golden Temple is truly without equal. It's beyond words, so I won't even try. We perambulated clockwise around the man-made pool, pausing to take in the sights and sounds with a nearly full gibbous cresting over the horizon. Live kirtan and chanted recitation pumped through the sound system as thousands of tourists and pilgrims milled around the complex. We opted not to enter the temple that night, due to the size of the crowd, but returned Friday morning and waited in line for an hour in the morning sun to glimpse the interior. The best surprise--beyond the awe-inspiring workmanship--was seeing the musicians playing inside the temple. With the music being broadcast professionally through the entire complex it had been hard to tell where the musicians were actually located. After waiting in line and sweating with thousands of Sikhs (there were numerous fans, at least), we finally caught a glimpse. Hiding in plain sight.
(Simon gets a photo credit for this one)
On Friday, the drive up to Dharamshala took longer than expected given a choreographed exchange of vehicles and drivers somewhere shy of Pathankot and the sorry state of roads heading up into Himachal Pradesh. They were at least passable, though we did get stuck for a few minutes ascending from Dharamshala to McLeod Ganj and had to wait for a bulldozer to grade and repack the road so we could pass through. Although Dharamshala proper is considerably larger than McLeod Ganj, it seems to me McLeod Ganj is what most people are referring to when they speak of Dharamshala. McLeod Ganj, a smaller village up the mountain from the main city, is home to the Tibetan Government-in-Exile, the Dalai Lama Temple, and the bulk of the Tibetan refugee population.
From our base at Heaven's View BnB we enjoyed a weekend of cool weather, occasional rain showers, abundant momos, excessive cappuccinos, numerous hikes up to the central bazaar, and yes, breathtaking mountain views. Saturday morning, on our first descent back down Temple Road, we stopped off to pay our respects, and take shelter from a quick cloudburst, at the Dalai Lama Temple. It felt quiet and empty compared with the bustling Golden Temple, though it sounds like the place really fills up when His Holiness is in town.
Everything is a hill in McLeod Ganj, and the climbing really piles up after awhile. Saturday we enthusiastically ascended the kilometer trek from our hotel to the market on three separate occasions. The second of those took us more than three kilometers up to Bhagsunag Waterfall, where we ordered masala chai and a hookah at Shiva Cafe, a hip little hideout tucked away above the falls. By Sunday evening we'd had entirely enough walking and resorted to hiring taxis to and from town. The locals seem to mostly use motorbikes, which they coast quietly down the mountain in neutral.
Following our final Dharamshala breakfast and one last round of cappuccinos at The Other Space, we set off for Delhi. To maximize time spent in the mountains and rest time on this end, we opted to squeeze the ride back to Amritsar and the six-hour express train to Delhi into a single day. Some thirteen hours travel time had elapsed as our auto from the train station dropped us in Hauz Khas last night, but everything unfolded without a hitch.
Today and tomorrow we rest and catch up on work, laundry, and practice. We'll probably sneak over to Humayun's Tomb this afternoon for a spell, and possibly visit the Gandhi Museum at some point tomorrow. I'm doing what I can to cram a week's worth of business into roughly 48 hours. Then off to Jaipur early Thursday morning with Si while Allie holds down the fort in Delhi. No rest for the weary.
It's a mongoose! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_grey_mongoose Loved everything about this post and the people in it.
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