The weekend before that...

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Weekend on my own

On the weekend between the old group leaving and the new volunteers’ arrival nobody was up to much really but I couldn’t bear the thought of staying in the house. I decided to take a bus and see where I ended up with a vague aim of heading towards a ruined temple which according to Lonely Planet resembles Angor Wat. The first bus took me to Dharamsala bus station where I then headed out to a tiny place called Gaggal where there was a wedding going on. Here the final bus didn’t seem to be making any move towards leaving, and I got slightly concerned about getting the bus back with enough time to make all the connections back to Palampur. Instead, I took the bus back towards Palampur but got off at a place called Yol I’d liked the look of on the way there. I walked the length of Yol Canntonment, a tiny town and army camp where the mountain-tops could be seen through the barbed wire topping high walls along the roadside. Somewhere that no-one would visit normally as a tourist but beautiful in a dusty, desolate way. Interrupted occasionally by the popular ‘beep when you see a foreigner’ car game...After a considerable walk I reached the temple I’d always admired from the bus. There actually turned out to be two temples next to each other - one dedicated to the God of work and the other to Lord Shiva. I was told this by the man who owned the shop opposite it and invited me in whilst I was waiting for the bus - proudly informing me it inspired him in his job. The first temple was sunken-level and when I went down the man who kept the temple appeared and opened a little side shrine for me, giving me a handful of sweet temple rice. I then went up to the Shiva temple, where there we several different shrines as well as a balcony looking out over a grassy area. Included in the shrines was one to the popular modern deity with an afro who I still haven’t quite figured out. The temple keeper came to see me and invited me in to his room at the side of the temple for tea. He then enthusiastically took me to his ‘library’ in the room on the opposite side of the temple a room with a long table down the middle and glass cabinets full of an entirely random but methodically organised selection of books. One side seemed to be entirely text books, apparently for the entire Indian school system, and the other contained quite a few English titles, ranging from classics and poetry to entirely random old popular fiction…He spoke to me in a mixture of English and Hindi, although I think his first language was another Indian dialect. What surprised me most is the fact you always imagine the temple-keepers to be really spiritual and un-materialistic, but although he was dressed in traditional clothes and a shawl, he had a big TV in his living quarters. After we’d drunk our tea I went to make a move, despite the fact that the man was very keen to offer me a place in the lodgings beneath the temple, saying they has all facilities and I could have meals there as well. Everyone in Yol asked me when I would return, and I did say I’d try to come back as I think it would be an amazing experience. When I was speaking to the man in the shop about India and Himachal I told him about how I loved all the spirituality and visiting all the temples, and he told me that Himachal is ‘The land of the Lord’ because of all the temples. This seemed very apt for the state where alongside Hinduism, Sikhism and Buddhism have their presences as well, as well as for India as a whole. When I asked what the stop was called, I thought they were saying Nirvana , but it turned out to be Narwana when I asked them to spell it out for me - the shop keeper must have thought I was a bit strange when I asked him for paper so I could take down everything he told me about the temple and Himachal Pradesh.

(sorry if this is hard to read - when I paste it onto my blog any paragraphing seems to be lost and it all becomes one big chunk of text, not to mention the fact I can be partial to overly long sentences etc. anyway...)

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