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Published: September 29th 2012
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Leaving our peaceful houseboat in Srinagar, we have taken trains south and then east. It has been a whirlwind of religions and languages – Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs speaking Ladahki, Kashmiri, Hindi and Punjabi. Keeping up can be tricky, but luckily most people speak some English.
Jammu was just a stop on the way. We did visit a temple, suicide bombed in 2002, and a market which seemed to specialise in walnuts, blankets, cricket bats and dentistry. Our hotel was the only smart one in town and the best on the trip. A posh rooftop restaurant meal, with our first alcoholic drinks for days, cost just £16.
Jammu station was dirty and busy and so was our train. Looking out, the mud on the window made the world sepia tinted. We were into the low flat Punjab, skirting the edge of Pakistan (again!).
Our next stop was Amritsar, famed for the Golden Temple, the centre of the Sikh religion. The temple is stunningly beautiful, white marble walls and gold domes set in a large lake. - the holy “pool of nectar”. We queued with pilgrims to cross the lake and see the holy book, which is being
read by an old, bearded guru. All around there are pilgrims, tambla music and melodic chanting. The atmosphere is truly uplifting.
The temple kitchens feed more than 60 thousand pilgrims every day, for free – although donations are welcomed. An army of volunteers chop garlic and onions. Our young guide is a regular volunteer here and we are allowed to go into the kitchens. Huge vats of lentil daal, onions, rice and curry simmer – a chance to give it a stir could not be missed but it is more like rowing than stirring. At the end is a chapati machine from which plop hot, cooked chapatis at an amazing rate. It is all remarkably clean and smells good. In the double storey dining halls, pilgrims sit cross-legged eating from stainless steel plates. Beyond they join in with the washing up – very noisily.
At dusk we went to the Pakistan – India border to see it closed. Thousands of us sit on grandstands around the border gates to watch. The Indian army are dressed in absurd uniforms straight out of a “Gilbert and Sullivan” operatta. They goose step up and down and pull faces at their opponents
across the border, cheered on by the Indian crowds as if at a football match. The Pakistan guards do the same on their side of the gates, equally strangely dressed and cheered on by their own fans. It was somewhere between fairground and farce but at least it was fun between two countries who find each other difficult neighbours.
Off the next day, we were on another train, this time to Chandigarh. This new city was planned by Corbusier and is built on a grid system – India's very own Milton Keynes. It is a strange place with a bizarre garden full of sculptures made of rubbish … very amusing and full of young India couples. We are not sure whether they are on honeymoon or have slipped away from watchful parents. We are frequently stopped and asked if they can take a photograph of us with them, a strange request we are now getting used to.
Onward again, this time on the toy train up to Shimla. We twist and turn up the hillside in our little carriage climbing 1500 metres in five hours at 12 miles an hour. Climbing a hill side in a train is
a strange experience, especially in a little wobbly carriage – the railway only has a 2' 6” gauge. At times we could see the track below and above us as we snaked back and forth up the hillside, crossing over 800 bridges and going though 103 tunnels.
Shimla is a holiday town, established by the British in the early 1800s. Every summer, the elite of government used the toy train to retreat from the hot plains up to the relative cool of Shimla. Moving not only their households but also their offices, they ran India from this remote outpost.
Even today, the centre of town is all olde worlde England, with Tudor half-timbered buildings and a cream church dominating the landscape. The town is built on a ridge so we are always walking up or down hill – it makes Porlock feel pretty flat! Most of the newer building are built into the hillsides and our hotel is no exception, giving our room a huge view across the valley below.
Shimla is busy with tourists, almost all Indians. We have realised, everywhere we have travelled, that domestic tourism is a much bigger business than catering for foreigners.
Indeed, there are so few of us that we greet each other when we meet in the street!
On Monday we will start to back track to Delhi and then move on, flying to Kathmandu and Nepal. We plan to post another blog when we can from somewhere in Nepal.
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