Chandigarh

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We ended up staying in Srinagar for a few days longer than we planned when we got back from the trek, partly because we were tired and partly because we were dreading the 12 hour jeep journey back to Jammu. If it was 12 hours of driving it wouldn't be so bad, but most of the time you're sat still in traffic. Which again wouldn't be so bad if there was a reason for the traffic, other than Indians not being able to drive. The road is a windy one, through the mountains, at sections it's a few hundred metres drop from the side of the road to the river below, and people think that overtaking is acceptable. There's enough traffic on this road to fill a motorway back home, lined up on both sides of the road. As soon as a little gap would appear on the other side because nothing was coming that way cars would fly off our side of the road and start overtaking the static traffic, inevitably a truck or car would appear, everyone would slam on on both sides, cars would try to get into next to no space on their side of the road...and this continued for 232km. When you did get going the guys were overtaking on blind bends and flying round corners! It's wonder more people don't die.



Eventually we plucked the motivation to get the jeep back to Jammu, it's a share jeep for 700rs per person, but we bought an extra seat so we could have the back seat to ourselves. The way Indians pile into jeeps and the way they sit on trains etc...I've decided most of them must be morally opposed to comfort! They definitely don't know what personal space means! They seem to be quite ignorant to each other too, pushing past on trains, slamming a bag into your legs, and this gets me the most; Getting onto the train in the middle of the night when everyone's asleep they talk at a normal volume to each other instead of whispering and turn the F*cking lights on!



We wanted to head to Amritsar to fit an extra place in, but being sick of travelling between places we headed straight for Chandigarh where we were getting the train to Delhi from the day after.

Looking in the guide book it wasn't really up to much, with the layout of the city being the most interesting aspect. It was designed by a French guy and it's set out in a grid format, it reminds me of America in places. Some of the buildings were definitely straight from England though. Imagine a generic shithole at home with boarded up run down shops, the shop parades looked like that. Some of the housing estates looked like standard council estates, it's a weird city. Most of the city seemed residential, there wasn't really a “city centre”.

The sections of the grid layout were called “sectors”, one sector would be as described above, the next would have HUGE! Houses. Massive beautiful structures!



We arrived at 5AM, consulted the guide book and headed for the cheapest place. The first of which said they had no rooms at all, even though it was massive! And clearly would've had rooms available. The next place looked either closed or...we just didn't want to check it out. It was above the bus station, which also looked like the aforementioned council estates... (Not that there's anything wrong with council estates, these were more like the ones you avoid in Salford or something though)

Struggling to communicate with the tuk-tuk driver because he spoke none of the Queens, I pulled out the Google translate app out for the first time. It turned out to be really useful, it translated to Hindi and he read that we wanted a cheap room.

He took us to a place on “Motor Market Road” for 800rs per night, not the best and not the worst.



Just to focus on the road name for a moment. All over India there's rows of shops selling the same thing, on this street for example there's loads of mechanics, in Mumbai we saw a street with a row of electronic shops...and so on.

Obviously as a business this makes no sense, why would you set up shop next to all these other shops selling the same product. We've come to the conclusion it's either because of the complete lack of business sense from the majority of people...or there's some kind of rule about where certain shops can be...which makes more sense than you'd think.

With our corporations and chain stores ask someone in England where to get a laptop for example, you'd point them to Currys/Pc World or something...

Here they don't have shops like that, so it could be “go to electrical street”....you get the picture.



Chandigarh's home to India's apparent second most visited attraction behind the Taj. Having seen the rock garden I'm not too sure about that fact. The concept it quite good but as with a lot of things In India the presentation doesn't live up to the billing.

Designed by Nek Chand it's meant to be a trippy garden...it's all right at best. For 20rs entry I can't really complain...it had so much potential when we read about it.



There's a set path you have to follow around, which is obviously crowded by people constantly...it then opens up into a big space with swings etc and that's the end. It takes about 20 minutes to walk through! The guide book said it spans 25 acres! I was expecting a big park with loads of weird stuff.



That night we went for a wonder for some food, and got lost. We could've gone back the way we came, but saw a market street heading in the same direction. How the next thing happened I’ll never know...we walked down a fairly straight road for about 10 minutes and came out in the exact same place we started walking down the street! Clearly, we slipped through a wormhole into another dimension and got spat out in the past.



With only a few days left in India (thank god, I think three months is sufficient in one go) we had a day of travelling...three and half hours to Delhi, a few hours there then the night train to Varanasi.

We thought we'd be high flyers and pay extra for the A/C carriage to Delhi, definitely worth it.

We had a few beers in Delhi and Dave had a head enlargement, then we jumped onto the train to Varanasi!



I hated Varanasi on my previous visit...let's see if it can live up to expectations this time!





P.S. In the previous blog about Srinagar, I was taking the piss about Dave. He was sick and fair play for getting to where he did. It was all meant in good humour with sarcastic tones. Apparently the sarcastic tones weren't obvious enough for Dave and he cried a little bit.

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