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Published: October 29th 2015
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Buoyed by the excitement of our successful tiger safari, we carried on through Rajasthan. Our next stop was Jaipur, the third corner of the Golden Triangle along with Delhi and Agra. It's another city full of great old sights, like the Royal Palace and Amber Fort; all pretty similar to other places we've seen in North India, but still very impressive and worth visiting. My favourite place in Jaipur was Jantar Mantar, which is the ultimate science geek's playground. Jai Singh II, Maharaja of Jaipur in the 1700s, was keen on astronomy and built a huge observatory in Jaipur (and smaller ones in four other cities). It was brilliant - I was pretty terrible at Astronomy during my degree, but enjoyed it enough to still get excited at this place. As well as the worlds largest sundial - accurate to half a second - it has dozens of huge instruments to measure declinations, altitudes, coordinates, predict eclipses, forecast sunsets and sunrises... My particular favourite was a huge marble bowl inlaid with the names and positions of the stars, which pivots around its axis to move over the course of the year, pointing you straight to the constellation you're looking for; an
ancient version of Google SkyMaps.
After a couple of days chilling out in Pushkar (nice enough town to relax in; uber hippy-trail), our next stop was Amritsar, the holy city of the Sikhs. The major attraction of Amritsar is the Golden Temple, the holiest spot of Sikhism. It really is lovely; you walk in through the main gates and see a huge, tranquil pool of water with a beautiful inlaid marble walkway, similar to the Taj Mahal in decoration, all around it. In the middle is the Golden Temple itself, a two storey beauty covered in almost a tonne of gold. Despite the thousands of people walking around, it's a wonderfully serene experience to wander around the temple watching the reflections in the pool - especially at night when it is lit up and looks even more gorgeous. Inside the temple is the Guru Granth Sahib, the Sikh holy book, which is revered as the eternal Sikh Guru (the 10th Guru affirmed the book itself as his successor in 1708). It's pretty intense inside the temple, with a continuous chanting kept up from the book as hundreds of pilgrims file through to pay their respects.
For me, the
greatest thing about the Golden Temple was the way it's all run. A fundamental principle of Sikhism is to generally do good for your fellow man - and unlike other religions with similar principles, Sikhs actually seem to use this pretty sound principle as a basis for their lives. One aspect of this is that the Golden Temple is totally run by volunteers (as are other Sikh sites - we even saw a Sikh volunteering at a Hindu temple nearby). In India we've got used to two kinds of tourist or holy sites; one you pay the government a load of money to get into, where you get hassled like crazy outside but it's calmer inside; or one that's free to enter but you get hassled like crazy throughout ("I watched your shoes for you while you were inside the temple, now you need to give me 50 rupees..."). There is none of that at the Golden Temple - it's free to enter, and there is an army of volunteers waiting to take your shoes for you; to guide you around; to feed you; even to house you for the night. We ate at the communal kitchen in the temple
complex, where they serve free meals to a staggering 60,000 - 80,000 people every single day. There's no obligation at all on you from it - we did leave a donation to the temple afterwards, but we had to look pretty hard and ask a few people before we could even find where to donate. Now this is a religion I can get behind!
The other temple highlights of Amritsar were both Hindu. One, the Silver Temple, was built in the early 1900s, and in true Indian style they thought 'that Golden Temple looks pretty nice - let's copy it'. It's slightly smaller but other than that is an almost exact replica, complete with pool and gold-encrusted temple in the middle (it's called the Silver Temple because of its ornate silver doors). Being a Hindu temple though, the atmosphere could not be more different from the serene Golden Temple - it's lit up gaudily, people are swimming around the pool, and there's shouting and drumming going on constantly. It was the days running up to Dussehra while we were there, over which the Ramlila runs - where the story of Rama is acted out, culminating in the burning of
an effigy of Ravana on Dussehra itself. This meant that each night at the Silver Temple there was some of the story acted out, so all the kids were brightly dressed up as Hanuman, drumming and music was all around, and dancing processions snaked around the complex, monkeys battling demons and rescuing damsels everywhere you looked. It was pretty awesome to see - we went back there a couple of times while in Amritsar to soak it all in.
Saving the best until last - the last temple we went to in Amritsar was the Mata Temple, which is supposed to improve the fertility of the women who pray there. It was, hands down, my favourite temple I've ever visited. It's a fairly recently built temple, and is absurdly, wonderfully tacky. The closest thing I can relate it to is one of those 1950s fairground funhouses - you know, like the one they sing "You're the One that I Want" in Grease in. It was a long labyrinthine trail up and down multiple storeys, during which you had to crawl through little tunnels, climb along a marble wall with water running down it, and navigate through a hall of
mirrors, among much else. There were staircases where you walked through the giant mouth of a fish, whole rooms decorated in gold and silver, two metre tall cobra statues, every room a different vibrant and gaudy colour... The list goes on. It was awesome. I'm sure that if all religious venues were like this, a lot more people would go to church... The other nice thing (for me) about it was the change in requests for photos in this temple. As Westerners, we get asked to pose for photos with Indians all the time, normally a few times a day, and while I'm sure they do also sort of want a photo with me because of my height, Tania is definitely usually the centre of attention. You wouldn't believe the number of times someone will come up to us and ask for a photo with both of us, and then ask me to step out of the shot so they can get a photo just with Tania. But at the Mata Temple, being a fertility temple, it was full of young, beautiful Indian women - and here they all wanted a photo with me instead. I suffered through it... It's
a hard life, this travelling lark.
The other must-do in Amritsar is the Pakistan-India border ceremony, which takes place at Wagah, 30km from Amritsar, every evening. It's a ridiculous event of pomp and overblown ceremony, where the Indian and Pakistani forces try to outdo one another in marching, shouting, chest beating and high stepping. And man do they high step - these guys get their legs completely vertical; right above their heads. I don't quite know what patriotic point it makes, but it's a great spectacle, like some kind of armed forces pantomime. Despite the thousands of rival Indian and Pakistani spectators on either side of the border, it's an amazingly good-natured event, when you consider the relations between the countries. The announcers on either side would smile and wink at each other then work together to build their respective sides up to a fever pitch of opposing patriotic chanting, but nothing was ever aimed at the other side. They could teach British football crowds a thing or two about non-violent partisanship (although I guess the heavy barbed wire border between the two sides also helps...).
Amritsar was definitely a highlight of our time here - on to
our last stop in India now; to the Himalayas to sample life in the hill stations and a bit of trekking.
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