End of days

It had to come sometime, but by anyone's estimation this is too soon. Returning from Mcleod Ganj on a long but good bus ride, we pulled into Chandigarh to find ourselves in a great room. Nauseous and unimpressed by Indian night life, we turned in to get up early for the next day. All was well, but with storm clouds on the horizon. It came out during the night that Lucy had had enough; the only choice was whether I'd join her right away on the return to England.

The Nek Chand rock garden the next morning was odd in all ways. Mcleod Ganj has such a heavy Tibetan refugee population that we'd gotten unfamiliar with the staring ways of India's youth; at the Nek, the long, smouldering looks returned. Unfortunately, they were given entirely by malnourished but clearly privileged and callow young men, with all eyes on poor Lucy. I took a bit of an offensive, but I think they asumed I was being friendly. Any other country would have felt I was being offensive (or at least aggressive), but in a country where young men always hold hands and will often sit on each other's laps, I think they just thought I was trying to make friends. If anything, they just got more bold. Damn horny kids; don't they know to look at hot chicks out of the corner of their eyes?

The Nek Chand Fantasy Rock Garden was worth staring at. It started slowly, with a couple of short corridors of normal rock/cement walls, but quickly got freaky. All the doorways are a good foot too short, many of the passageways are narrow enough to make you turn sideways, and after a couple minutes of aimless and fairly uninteresting walking a corner is turned and a 20 foot waterfall is directly ahead. This led to two more water features, each larger and grander than the last. With overhead walkways, fantastical cement trees straight out of Lord of the Rings, romantic bridges and small alcoves, the first part of the rock garden is probably the most beautiful. The final waterfall was the largest, easily thirty plus feet high, 20 feet across, and peopled at the top by a tiny tribe of foreshadowers (called such because they foreshadow the next section).

We'll return to the foreshadowers, as the next part of our journey was out of order. Instead of a left towards what we thought was the exit, we took a right and headed out to the third phase of the garden. Heading up a short stair case, the garden at this point widens significantly, into what can only be described as a cement park, made with the sensibilities of Nek Chand. A large stage with surrounding amphitheater to the left, aquariums (dingy glass and uninteresting fish), a zoo (unpopulated) and carnival rides (out of order) dominate the right hand side. Past all this clearly kid oriented nonsense but still within the large enclosure were a bunch of horse statues on top of a large unreachable walkway winding its way in and around some rather fanciful architecture and sculpture installations. Hangind down at regular intervals from the walkway were forty or so swings; they were clearly quite delightful, as the handful of boys that were making us uncomfortable by finding a white chick more interesting than the amazing scenery jumped on the swings and started laughing, crying out and singing like eight-year old girls. Taking this as our cue to escape, we decided to exit the park happy but not amazed.

Taking the road previously untaken (as we thought it was an exit), we came to the final leg. Row upon row of people and animal statues filled passageway after corridor after walkway; the foreshadowers were harbingers of an enormous population if ceramic and waste rock sculpture tribe.

That being the end of the garden, it being early, the High Court being close and us not having anything better to do led to a quick trip over to the Haryana and Punjab High Court Building. Built by the same man that designed the entire city, the court-house displays the same yen for form following function and whimsy built out of tons of concrete as the rest of Chandigarh. The rear entrance was the coolest, where enormous vertical slabs of concrete painted pink, blue and green hold up a wavy concrete roof-overhang. Done with that trifle, we walked a hundred meters to the nearest park, and found an enormous statue of a stylized open-hand greating us.

That was that, that was Chadigarh, and apparently that's India. Lucy's changing her ticket back to England for a week from now, and I've decided to join her. I'd love to go on and see Ajmer, Udaipur, Jodhpur, Jaisalmer and Mt. Abu, but what the hell fun is it alone. I'd be doing it just to say I'd done it, and I'd rather be in Butt Crack, USA than the most amazing places on Earth as long as I'm with the love of my life. Besides, we've still got a month; Ireland?

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