A New Religion

---

At the end of my last entry, I was pulling in to Amritsar, home to the holiest temple of the Sikhs. This was a bit of an unexpected detour - I had thought I was going to go straight for the mountains, but I figured that the Golden Temple had to be on the cover of the Eyewitness Guide to India for a reason. After some inquiries, I learned that it could be arranged to make it a stop on the route to the mountains, and it's always advisable to make a stopover on a bus trip that would otherwise take 24 hours.

I had to bring the full force of my bargaining skills to bear to get the autorickshaw driver to take me to my hotel for the perfectly-reasonable price of 30 rupees. He started at 60, went down to 50 (insisting that this was below his cost but that he would do it for me), then stuck at 45. It wasn't until I started walking away to see if the other rickshaw drivers agreed with his price that he agreed to my offer of 30. This might sound cheap or exploitative to the western ear, knowing that the savings was just 75 cents, but it is important to remember that tourists accepting inflated prices makes it harder for locals (the drivers would obviously prefer to take the tourists who pay much higher rates) and causes inflation in prices in goods and services that are shared by tourists and locals. I'm not saying that this is the only reason I bargain - I don't like to be overcharged, period. Most things we do have multiple reasons.

After that satisfying bargaining session, I checked into one of the less awesome hotels I've had the good fortune to stay in, but which had the virtue of being just a few minutes walk from the principal site of Amritsar, the much-talked-about-by-me Golden Temple. In its favor, it also had a very nice dhaba (this is India's take on a diner - cheap, good local food, patronized mostly by local residents) on the ground floor which made a mean dal fried (lentil stew) and nice pakoras. Pleasantly full with yellow dal and rice, I took a stroll around the city towards the centerpiece. The first thing I noticed about this place is that the vendors and rickshaw drivers are less aggressive. When you say "no thank you" or "I'd rather walk the next two blocks" they accept that you really mean that. In some parts of Rajastan, they will keep chasing you until you give in or raise your voice.

The Temple Complex, or Harimandir Sahib, is a masterpiece of architecture. The golden temple is a small, intricately carved jewel box that dazzles the eye day and night with gilding that covers every inch of its exterior. The roof is in the form of an inverted lotus flower, a pervasive religious symbol in much of South and East Asia. It is situated in a large rectangular water tank called the Pool of Nectar, which provides a stunning canvas for the glittering temple. A gracious walkway forms the perimeter of the pool, and at the edge of the the walkway, the central complex is bounded by an elegant array of white marble buildings that enclose the area, giving it a quiet, almost coocoon-like calm. Adding to this is the soothing chanting, accompanied by drums, of several men in the temple, that is broadcast throughout the compound by speakers.

Sikhism (if you are curious about this religion, as I was, check out the quick synopsis here in wikipedia) is a relatively young religion, founded in the early sixteenth century. It is very different from the Hindu religion that dominates most of India. Adherents believe in a single omnipotent diety and discourage the reclusive and vagrant lifestyles advocated for holy men in some other major religions. I wasn't really sure what I'd be permitted to see, or if I would even be allowed to the Harimandir Sahib, as holiest temples are sometimes closed to tourists at special times of day. But it turns out that another principal of the Sikhs is to allow all people into their houses of worship, provided they comply with a few rules. All that is required is that visitors remove their shoes and don a headscarf (and, snap, they can't drink or smoke while there). Oh, and wait in line, as there is a large number of people wanting to see the central temple chamber, which houses the book written by the very hands of the Sikh holy saints. You walk thorugh this nifty depression in the paving stones that is constantly flushed with fresh water to clean your feet as you pass through the archway beneath the clock tower. It's a little like going to a water park.

You can spend hours just sitting at the edge of the pool, feeling the water between your toes and watching the bright orange coi fish that swim there beneath the reflection of the Golden Temple. Yes, dipping your feet in the water is allowed, as is swimming in the pool, which is believed to have curative properties. The whole experience gives the impression of a practical religion unburdened by an excess of rules, though I think I would have a tough time with the prohibition on cutting hair. It is nice that the religion is accepting of people who have not yet adopted all the requirements of the religion. Incidentally, another requirement for Sikh men is to wear a Kirpan, or ceremonial dagger, which I think is one of the most fascinating religious symbols I've seen in the world, with its potential violent applications.

I hung out, walked around, and drank in the serenity for a few hours. Then, I decided I would try to eat some of the free food that they offer in their epic cafeteria - anybody is welcome to dine on rice and lentil soup, and they won't even pester you for a donation, though they do accept them, and it the Sikh diety would probably approve of your charity. It is said that they serve 35,000 meals a day! Tragically, I got there at the wrong time and was too hungry to wait until the next meal time, so I had more dal at my hotel's delicious dhaba.

Walking around the city, I also learned about one of the darker days in the history of British colonialism. On April 13, 1919, British troops willfully gunned down 1000-2000 peacefully protesting Punjabis with automatic weapons, without provocation or warning. The British investigated and found that the commander, Reginald Dyer, acted inappropirately. He was discharged from service but never punished. The incident fueled the political movement lead by Mohandas Ghandi to end the British occupation. There's a somber memorial garden in the center of the city with an eternal flame in memory of the tragedy.

That night, I watched a beautiful nightly ceremony in which the priests meticulously wrap up the holy book and carry it in a festive procession to its nighttime resting place, accompanied by a rising crescendo of hypnotic chanting.

The next morning, I visited the museum of Sikh history, a grizzly affair featuring paintings of Sikh saints, either praying, or in the process of being martyred (or both), the latter accented with generous depictions of blood. A few are shown just after beheading, with head lying on the ground, a geyser of crimson spurting from a freshly severed neck. If this wasn't enough, further along, there is a photographic exhibit of about 17 sikhs killed in a 1978 conflict with the Indian government. Each martyr is pictured post mortem (I would say a day or more "post") with a pre-mortem picture inset. I would suggest that you not look at these unless you have a strong stomach. To quote W. Somerset Maugham in The Razor's Edge, The dead look so terribly dead when they're dead. It's quite rare to see such frank, undoctored photos of people who have died violent deaths. The eyes, especially, are utterly blank, lifeless, unmistakably dead.

Enamored though I was with Amritsar, one is not really a traveler if one stays in one place, and I felt the call of the mountains getting stronger as I got closer to the foothills of the Himalayas. My next resting place was to be Dharamsala. I had been a little hesitant about going there - I had skipped the nearby town of Rishikesh, as I wasn't interested in the sanitized versions of eastern philosophy/religion offered by many ashrams in the area for consumption by western spiritual tourists, and I was concerned that Dharamsala would be the same. However, it was said to be just a six hour bus ride from Amritsar, which was appealing, and it houses the Tibetan government in exile, which is the permanent home of the Dalai Lama. It also offers mountains, comfortable weather, spectacular views, and, by most accounts, a comfortable, laid back atmosphere. I inquired about the schedule of buses to Dharamsala and was told that I should take a three hour ride to the city of Patankot at the foot of the mountains, then transfer to one of the very frequent buses that pass through Dharamsala after a three and a half hour ride.

I left Amritsar at about 2:45 PM, but when I got to Patankot at 6:00 PM, I learned that I had arrived too late to catch the frequent service to Dharamsala, and the next bus didn't leave until 9:30 PM, which would drop me off at 1:00 AM. I took advantage of the generous layover to call a hotel at my destination and find out if they would be able to accommodate me if I arrived at this ungodly hour (many hotels in India lock their doors at 10:00 PM). I was assured that all I had to do was knock on the gate to be let in. I whiled away the time scribbling in my journal under the harsh-yet-romantic illumination of a few bare incandescent bulbs near an outdoor tea counter and fruit shop in the bus station parking lot. There wasn't really an indoor part anyway.
The bus ride was a typical Indian public bus - it started out lightly filled, but quickly filled to sardine can density. The Indian boy sitting next to me insisted on chatting about culture for a long time, in broken English, then fell asleep with his head on my shoulder. The bus dropped me (and only me) in Dharamsala at around 12:45 at night. I walked to the taxi stand and found about a dozen parked minivan cabs that appeared to be empty. Stopping for a moment to consider this impasse, it occurred to me that there were cab drivers asleep in the cabs. I knocked on a cab window, woke a driver up, and convinced him to conduct me to my hotel. Like most of the hotels in the area, it is in the town adjacent to Dharamsala, called Mcleod Ganj after a British Governor. The taxi chugged its way up dozens of steep switchbacks in the road, then dropped me at the gate of my hotel in a narrow, winding, steep street and bade me goodnight. I pounded on the gate and waited for somebody to open up. And waited. And pounded. And waited.

After about 20 minutes of pounding and waiting, it started to dawn on me that I wasn't getting get in, but that I was about to have a good story for my blog (blog fodder, I read it is called): I would sleep on the front stoop! I pulled out my sleeping bag and started to get comfortable on the concrete porch of the hotel with my new friends, a population of about five (seemingly friendly) stray dogs, who were engaged in an ongoing dialogue with the neighboring canines. Just as I was about to tuck myself in, a group of three men came walking down the desolate street. I probably should have been more concerned about people hassling me at night on the empty street, but because I had psyched myself up for a crappy night, it didn't really worry me. Anyway, I was probably lucky, because they turned out to be police. I explained my problem to them and they expressed to me their misgivings about me sleeping on the street, and attempted to find someone at the hotel to let me in. They did find someone who seemed to be responsible, but, oddly, all he did was tell me to bang on the door of another hotel (again, to no effect). Finally, the police walked off, seemingly content to let me sleep in the street. I tried to ignore the barking dogs and catch some sleep on the hard surface. Just as I was getting to sleep, the cops came back. Pack my bags, they declared in broken English. They had found a hotel for me! I walked with them back along the road towards the central square, a little disappointed that the patrons of Hotel Green wouldn't unroll their metal shutters in the morning to find me asleep at their feet - an experience which would give me a deeply satisfying sense of guilt induction (there is probably a German word for this feeling - something like schaudenguilte).

Instead, they took me to what was probably the fanciest hotel in town. I was planning to pay 250 Rupees, $5.50 for a night in Dharamsala. The cheapest room at this place was 770 Rupees, or a whopping $17 for a room. I declared that I couldn't possibly spend that much, but the desk clerk, recognizing the weakness of my bargaining position, gave just enough to appear polite - my room would cost 700 rupees, about $15.50. This stung, as this was one night for the price of three or four at the rate I had been going. But I decided that a good night's sleep was worth the price to enjoy the day tomorrow, so I hauled my bags up the marble staircase, along the whitewashed halls with shiny tiles and handsome tropical potted plants along the walls, to my reasonably comfortable room.

The next morning I awoke to a day that was brilliant with sun, yet delightfully cool and breezy, a little like the few weeks of nice weather that blows through the New York region in the spring and fall between spells of oppressively hot and equally and oppositely cold weather. I yelled at the people at Green for their failure to answer the door last night, but nobody took responsibility. I took a tour of the Tibetan Government-in-exile compound, which hosts a beautiful, exquisitely peaceful Buddhist temple with some glorious nine foot tall Buddhas.

One of the coolest things about Dharamsala/Mcleod Ganj is that although it is almost entirely tourist-oriented, the tourists are of a fairly socially conscious inclination. I was thrilled to find multiple stores that sold boiled filtered water for less than half the price of bottled water. Though I am pretty cheap, it was not the cost of the water that concerned me here. It was the fact that I went through about four liters a day, and therefore was throwing away at least two plastic bottles daily in a country where the notion of centralized waste collection was as alien as drinkable tap water. I bought almost no new bottles in the five days that I stayed here.
Dharamsala is built around about three densely packed streets with restaurants, grocery stores, souvenir shops and produce vendors. There are dozens of hotels and tons of grungy travelers wearing every manner of local Indian attire. Since it's a fairly new town, it doesn't have the depth of monuments that many of the big cities in India offer, so I started to feel like I was running out of stuff to do after a few days. There are some great day hikes that can be made straight from the center of town, though. One day, I went on a long, rambling walk up to a murky little lake about five miles uphill from McLeod Ganj. Along the way, I met a delightful man from Luxembourg who helped clarify for me some of the important concepts in Buddhism. The next day, I went on a very challenging seven hour hike to the summit of a nearby mountain called Triunt. The well trodden path clings to the side of a gorgeous wooded mountainside, ascending slowly at first, then precipitously near the end, to a beautiful grassy ridge with sheep grazing. Conveniently, but also disconcertingly, there were several tea and snack stands at the top, as well as two along the path. Once again, we are reminded that in India, you are never alone. At least a dozen hikers were enjoying the well-earned view after a tough hike. There was no snow on this ridge, but the next row of mountains, just a mile or so to the North, were blanketed and spectacular, even with their summits swaddled in clouds. One group of hikers brought a digeridoo and drums to the top!

On the way down, I started to feel a bit nauseous. It was a feeling I had encountered before, but I didn't know what it was, only that it was different from the usual bacterial stomach infections that I had felt. It seemed to rise with the physical exertion of the hike, and I felt pretty worn out by the time I got back. Well, I figured I would let it work itself out, so I carried on with my travel plans. I started to feel the itch to move on, so that night, I took a bus ride to Manali, the adventure sport capitol of the Himalayas. It was a 10 hour bus ride, which basically takes riders all the way back down to the Indian lowlands before mounting the steep road that follows the valley of the beas river, where Manali nestles at a bend at about 2000 meters. The bus ride was one of the worst I had taken, as my stomach still wasn't feeling any better, and the bus driver shaved two hours off the ride by maneuvering around the switchbacks as if here were driving a low, road hugging sports car. Needless to say, I was exceedingly relieved to get off the bus at 4:30 AM in the ravishing mountain town of Manali, snow capped peaks peeking over the verdant valley walls in every direction.

A friendly traveler I met while walking down the road recommended a great little hotel that was not listed in any of the guide books. I checked in to a room with a balcony that had a view across the valley that was almost too beautiful to believe. Several picturesque waterfalls lept from cliffs. I had a long time to contemplate this, as my stomach pain grew, and I started to feel really run down. I looked through my travel health book and boldly concluded that I had come down with a case of Giardiasis, and so started taking the recommended treatment, Flagyl. I spent my birthday (my thirtieth birthday, no less!) laid up in bed and sitting on my balcony, reading books and longing to climb the valley wall I was staring at. Three days after I started the treatment, my stomach felt completely better. I had one day left in Manali, so I put on my hiking boots and set off to find the source of those streams that bounded down the valley walls. I had a great hike. I was on a very faint trail that eventually ended at an exceedingly steep creek that had carved a notch through a cliff. I grappled my way up mud, rock and wood for about an hour before coming upon a better path. The clouds menaced me with thunderstorms from across the valley for the duration of the hike. I set the time limit to turn back at 3:30 and managed to make it to the first snow patch, then sat down and savoured some yak cheese in a steep mountainside meadow before turning back. I think I made it to about 1500 feet above Manali, respectable for a half day hike.

The next day, I had my longest bus ride yet - 14 hours, all the way back to Delhi. I needed to get there by 8:30 AM on May 2, in order to catch a flight to Darjeeling, my next destination. I know, it is a little indulgent to take an airplane when there is a perfectly good train, but it seemed like a good tradeoff to me: a two hour comfortable plane flight for $120 versus a hot 33 hour train ride costing about $15 (or with AC for $45). All the buses leave Manali in the afternoon, between 3:30 PM and 5:00 PM. I was assured that my bus would arrive in Delhi at before 5:30 AM, plenty of time to get to the airport.

You should never leave a three hour safety margin for a fourteen hour bus ride anywhere, particularly India. As you might expect, things did not turn out exactly as expected...

This adventure will be covered in my next blog entry. Until the next one, thanks for reading. Sorry for the long delay.

Best Wishes,
Dan

---

Photos

Golden Temple
Words do not do it justice

Walkway Around Golden Temple
You can sit here and dangle your feet in the clear water of the Pool of nectar

Me 'n Golden Temple
How do you like the headscarf look?

Akal Takht
It means "Everlasting Throne". This marvelous building houses the Sikh religious and administrative leadership.

Gateway Structure
One of the gateways to the Golden Temple complex.

At Night
Nice

Amar Jyoti
The eternal flame at the garden memorial to the Amritsar Massacre

Dhaba
The bus stopped here on the way to Dharamsala. Good, cheap food.

Mcleod Ganj
The view from my hotel. The one I went to *after* my night with the dogs. The town (usually called Dharamsala) is perched on a picturesque mountain ridge.

Juxtaposition
Can you tell which is the laundry and which are the Buddhist prayer flags?

Buddha Statue on main altar
At the Buddhist Monastery in the Dalai Lama's complex. He had to be nine feet tall.

Antique Buddha Statue
This one was more belligerent looking. And huge.

Temple Doorway
I love the art of the script above the portal.

Road Construction
The disgusting smoke is coming from a road construction crew. I wish they didn't do that.

Dharamkot
A pretty village above Dharamsala. Lots of ashrams.

Another village
Above Dharamkot. I wanted to eat those clouds.

Mountains
These beauties were photographed on my first day hike.

Cemetary
There are very few cemetaries in India, since Buddhists burn their dead. This is in the yard of one of India's oldest churches.

Trees
The trees on the mountainside were achingly lush.

Doggy
This pooch welcomed me at the top of Triunt peak.

Comments

[Neeta]

As a British Sikh I read your piece on the Harmandir Sahib (Golden Temple) with much interest. The reason for this was to gain the perspective of a non-sikh regarding the temple and Sikhism, which I'd say was surprisingly similar to my views! Amritsar and Punjab in general isn't really a big holiday destination, glad you enjoyed it, if anyone gets the chance to go try the mattar paneer (its one of Punjab's signature dishes (tastes great)) at any dhaba you go to. Also try visiting Chandigarh- an up and coming city.