Down and out in Amristar and McLoed Ganj

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We flew from the IT city of Bangalore, Alice had the bad luck to come down with food poisoning mere hours before we started the all day taxi-flight-wait-flight-taxi. The flight itself was fortunately pretty uneventful and after a very long day we got to the town of Amristar.
Amritsar is the most holy place in the world for Sikhs and contains the famous golden temple (you can see the photos on the facebook album). It was very unfortunate that Alice was recooperating at the same time as getting out as much as possible in order to see the temple.
We met a man from Delhi who decided that the best way he could volunteer was to act as a guide to western tourists. So we were lucky enough to be shown around the workings of the temple and the massive free communal kitchen which feeds something in the region of 75'000 meals a day all for free. The philosophy being that when someone arrives after a pilgrimage they need to eat, sleep and bathe and therefore all these things are free. They are manned by hundreds of volunteers washing dishes, rolling chipaties, handing out chai and taking your dirty dishes off you. Its an amazing place.
The temple itself is a 2 or 3 story building covered in approximately 750kgs of gold in the middle of a huge pool, although during the day there are tourists everywhere we were lucky enough to go at night with the stars above us and the temple reflecting in the water, it was incredibly beautiful and one of our highlights of India.
After a few days there we got a bus to the twin towns of Dharamsala & McLeod Ganj probably the most holy town in the world of Bhuddists as its the home of the Dalai Lama and Tibetan government in exile. Unfortunately Chris came down with food poisoning the day after we arrived which wiped out the first 2 days.
The town itself is very different to the rest of India because of the number of Tibetans in exile who are living here, this, along with the much cooler climate attracts large numbers of backpackers, giving the town an international and multicultural feel absent in the rest of India.
We had two days of wellness before Alice was struck down again by food poisoning. In this time Chris managed to get to some conversation classes in order to improve the English of Tibetan refugees as well as do a little yoga.
Now we are feeling much better and rested and are hoping to get the bits and pieces we want done here before moving on.
Unfortunately Alice found a cockroach in her omelet this morning so wish us luck...

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