Quirky garden in Chandigarh

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We woke in Shimla to foggy misty rain which the man at the hotel told us was monsoon in Shimla - the next two months would be like that. There was no view as the fog shrouded everything and even though the light rain lifted later in the day the white foggy look over the mountains remained. It was pleasantly cool however. We had a busy day as we had many small jobs to do. First we found a doctor who owned a local pharmacy who gave us another 3 months supply each of our malaria medication - hopefully they drugs aren't counterfeit. The pharmacy was very busy with local trade so obviously was trusted by the locals. Next I bought some fabrics and scarves which I took back to Bandbox to be wrapped by a tailor. All parcels posted in India have to be sewn into calico and covered in sealing wax before the post office will accept them. Postage is very cheap here - it only cost us $35 AUD to post 5 kilos airmail to Australia. Hopefully it arrives! Then the friendly staff at Bandbox organised bus tickets to Chandigarh for us and train tickets from there to Bickaner in Rajasthan Next morning Sanju came to take us to the bus station which was the usual frenetic chaos. Our biggest problem there was hanging onto our luggage us all the porters through we had just arrived and kept trying to take us to hotels or rickshaws. You get swarmed sometimes in India and feel like shouting 'GO AWAY!' but you just have to keep calm.
The trip to Chandigarh down the mountain took four fairly unpleasant hours as half the Indians in the bus were travel sick from all the bends and one man had been sick all over the floor - he was seating right in front of us - so it wasn't pleasant! They kept collecting the sick bags and throwing them out onto the road. We weren't sorry to reach Chandigarh and Jerry found us a hotel room across the road from the bus station. Lovely room, cheapest in the hotel at 1200 rupees (Chandigarh is an expensive city) but with a door that was only about 5 foot high which we had to go through to get to the bathroom. The city is a planned city - the government is based here - so has very wide streets and lots of trees but really was pretty uninteresting. It was also very hot! The main reason we were there was to visit the Garden of Nek Chand. I think it has been featured on ABC in Australia since we left. It was built out of discarded rubbish by a road inspector who collected it all over a 20 year period and took it to the garden site on his bicycle. He built it secretly for a long time before Government officials discovered it and opened it as a tourist attraction many years ago. Since then he is allowed to build it and get paid for building it. We were looking forward to seeing it. He is often at the garden and we think we saw him sitting on top of one of his stone creations directing people in the right direction - surveying his empire is another way of putting it! . The rest of the day was spent at the shops were were set around four large squares and covered a very large area. The squares were particularly large but strangely there were hundreds of shops and no cafes! We found a great book shop and also a shop which sold imported suitcases as we needed a new suitcase lock. We had left one behind in Naggar, already replaced it with a Chinese one which lasted 24 hours!
That night we relaxed in the hotel air conditioning which cut out at regular intervals due to power blackouts - a very regular occurrence in India. It was quite funny to walk down the street from the hotel and see the dozens of high tech mobile phone shops all operating in candlelight. There are dozens of mobile phone shops here - even the smallest village will have a few of them. India is also covered in advertising for phone companies or cement companies. The sides of houses and all the pull down metal garage doors which cover the shop fronts at night are painted with advertising for those companies. One town will be covered with red and white cement signs and the next village with yellow and black signs for the opposition cement company.
Next morning we decided to read in our room before midday checkout and after lunch caught an auto rickshaw to the gardens. We had sleeper tickets booked on the train to Bickaner at 10.30pm that evening. We loved the gardens - they were really quirky and a little weird. The fun started when Jerry tried to buy the entry tickets - he had to get down onto his knees as the booth was so low! The garden was a series of narrow walled pathways with separate areas all entered via low arches so there was a lot of bending (bowing to the garden gods!). The walls were lined with all sorts of items - hundreds of light sockets, millions of pebbles, old mattresses, tea cups, clay pots, toilet bowls. The newer area of the garden was the most fascinating as it was full of hundreds of figures made from pottery and broken glass pieces. All the pieces had different faces and included many different animals. My favourite were the sari dressed ladies made form broken glass bangles that the women here wear by the dozen. They sparkled in the sunshine and were vividly coloured. Many of the figures stood 3 or 4 foot high. Whilst in the garden we were constantly approached by Indian tourists asking if they could have their photos taken with us. The garden was fabulous though and we're really pleased we went out of our way to visit it. The rest of the day was spent using the wifi in the hotel restaurant where we had our photo taken by the local newspaper as they were doing a feature on the hotel.
The train trip was bearable though neither of us slept well. We were travelling in first class sleepers - 2 tier sleeping berths - with another 4 berths in each compartment. We were provided with sheets etc but the train was pretty jerky and I had a very stiff neck by the time we arrived in Bickaner. It had been a 13 hour trip. We were on the edge of the desert and we had passed some really interesting villages. Very different from anywhere else we had seen in India - mud bricks, circular houses with thatched roofs and lots of camels. And so started our adventure in Rajasthan.

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