Temples, Sexual Harassment, and Public Transport

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The day started well with a visit to the Golden Temple, a truly stunning temple situated in a vast man-made lake, plated in gold (a present from, or perhaps to?, the Maharja in the 1600s). It was our first Sikh temple, but we came prepared (well, Jason forgot, and had to buy a rather fetching orange headscarf with "Golden Temple Amritsar" emblazoned on it) with our headscarves and ready to leave our shoes at the door. Our attempts to figure out the best ways of wearing our headscarves (there are many options) and Jason's inability to tie his own were met with amusement by the crowd that seems to follow us everywhere. There may even have been pictures taken, but not by us. The temple was amazing, and thankfully not overcrowded, although we refrained from walking out to the temple, as we couldn't figure out where to get the necessary tickets. There was a museum attached to the temple, and recommended by the guidebook, so we headed in to find out more about Sikhism and the Golden temple. Let me just say that the Sikh martyrs, and the pictures of their martyrdom that filled the museum, put Christian martyrs to shame. I have never seen such a collection of horrific paintings in my life. Feeling ill, I actually had to make Jason leave the museum with me, long before we'd finished looking at everything. And that was just the paintings, not to mention the photographs of dead Sikh martyrs. Flustered, and nauseous, we headed out into the streets of Amritsar, barefoot, in search of our shoes. I had the misfortune of running into a guard who took the opportunity, being in a crowd, to manhandle me... I was so unbelievably disgusted that I yelled at him, ran across the street to get away, and didn't stop fuming about the whole incident until well after lunch.

After lunch, and a short stop inside to avoid the hottest part of the day, we headed out to the Mata temple, described in the guidebook as a "cave temple". Filled with images of the stalagmite grottoes in the Boboli Gardens in Florence, we headed out in search of an underground, ancient temple. Instead, we found a building, a little bit like our hotel, and a cage system like we had seen in Hardiwar. But it was not with disappointment that we walked, or rather, were ushered around the temple; Jason and I couldn't help but notice the similarities with a carnival funhouse. The floors slanted upwards, and the downwards, there were stairs up and then down for no reason, the ceilings slanted and then rose, and at one point we even had to get down on our knees and crawl through a tunnel. Just for the hell of it. It was a one-way system, of course, so once you were in it, you were in it for good. The tunnels and walkways opened up in a huge room, tiled from floor to ceiling, and then across the ceiling too, in tiny many-coloured mirrors. There were pillars tiled in the same way, so in walking around them, you were momentarily confused as to the way out. It was beautiful, but being a temple, we couldn't take pictures. And then it was down into the basement, where they had fashioned the walls and ceiling to look like a cave. A shiny cave, coated in black paint. Clambering over the rock entrance, we had to wade behind the other pilgrims in a fake river (steadily getting cleaner as we neared the hose providing the water) and were then ushered back out into the large temple entrance we had come in. Smiling, and feeling refreshed by the experience, we grabbed our shoes, and headed to a taxi to get to the Pakistan border in time for the border-closing ceremony.

We caught our bus, and endured an hour and a half journey out to Attari, where we caught a rickshaw out to the border in time to see everyone leaving. Having missed it, we determined to try again tomorrow, and caught a taxi back to town (having had more than enough of public transport for one day!)

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Photos

Outside of the Mata Temple
The only bit we were allowed to photograph (note the uneven floor)

Comments

[Karpri]

No tickets needed
Hi, Just wanted to say that you do not need tickets to get into any Sikh Temple. cheers.

[lucyjason]

re: No tickets
Thanks for this, but everyone was holding pieces of paper that looked like tickets, and we didn't have them, and therefore didn't feel happy wandering up to the temple. I don't know what they were, so it's perfectly possible that we were mistaken