Llew Wanders the World

My return to India snapped me right back into the differences between that country and Pakistan. I had to bargain for several minutes for the rickshaw ride back to the bus stop, and fend off several taxi drivers at the same time.

I caught the bus back into Amritsar and headed to the train station to try and book a ticket to Delhi that night. (My extra night in Peshawar had meant that I needed to cut out a day somewhere, and I decided that it had to be Amritsar, since I needed to get my plane tickets replaced and didn’t want to limit the available time to do that in Delhi.) After waiting in line for the better part of an hour, I learned that the trains were all jam-packed-full and my chances of getting a ticket were poor.

From that point on, however, things took a big positive turn. I managed to book a seat on an overnight bus with little difficulty, and even got a good enough feel from the booking agent that I was willing to leave my pack in his shop while I made my quick tour of Amritsar.

My previous visit to Amritsar had been confined to a single night, and some of you may remember that the only photo I included of it was of a garbage pile near the railway station. I’ll attempt to redress that here.

Amritsar is the largest city in the Indian state of Punjab, and the holiest city for the Sikh religion. This is due to the presence of the Golden Temple, which is the centre of the Sikh faith and reputed to be one of the most beautiful religious buildings in the world. The Golden Temple was to be my first stop.

I walked through the streets of Amritsar, and followed the signs pointing to my destination, reaching the Golden Temple’s entrance with little trouble. I picked up a headscarf from one of the many nearby vendors (as with many other places I’d been in India, this was a big tourist site, though primarily for domestic tourists.) After washing my feet (and belatedly realizing that there were headscarfs available to be borrowed) I headed inside.

While the Golden Temple might not have been the most impressive building from the exterior, it made up for it in spades on the inside. The main portion of the temple consisted of a large pond, surrounded by a marble walkway, and ornnate whitewashed walls and towers. In the centre of the pond was the real highlight, the golden inner sanctum. Around this central area were several subsidiary ones, such as the pilgrims’ hostel, where anyone who wishes can stay free of charge (or at a very reasonable rate if you wanted a private room.) Then there was the kitchen and dining hall. Every day, thousands of meals are served up by temple volunteers, once again, free of charge for anyone who wants to partake. I figured that since this was an essential part of the Golden Temple experience I would have to join in.

I joined the line in front of the kitchen and picked up my tray and utensils. The line snaked up the stairs and into the dining hall. Once inside, we were directed to an empty row and sat down with trays in front. A few minutes later the chapatti man came by, delivering the unleavened bread to us, followed by another with drinking water and still another who portioned out dal onto our trays. Everyone sat cross legged on the ground, eating their meals, then picked up utensils and tray before walking down to the exit where they were all handed back to the atendants, soon to be washed and used once again. (except for me, who, unthinking, handed my utensils to a woman who I later realized was collecting them for use at home or perhaps re-sale.) It was a remarkably efficient process, and given the number of people fed at the temple every day, it had to be.

My meal complete, I returned to the central area of the temple for a walk around. All around the borders of the pond, faithful Sikhs bathed themselves in the waters of the pond. At each corner there was a stand providing huge volumes of purified water, yet again free of charge. This was fortunate, as it was a very hot day and I hadn’t been drinking enough recently.

Hot as it was, it was the PERFECT time to be visiting the golden temple. The sun shone brilliantly off the inner sanctum, and even the whitewashed sections seemed positively to glow.

I continued my walk around, past the long, long line of adherents waiting to enter the sanctum and make offerings. The air was alive with their voices and with the readings from the Guru Granth Sahib (the Sikh holy scripture) that are continued in the temple continuously.

Just before leaving the sanctuary, I had to step quickly aside for one of the many squeegee men at work. Not THAT kind of squeegee man, of course. These fellows spent their days pushing giant versions of the devices around the marble floors of the outer walkway, keeping it dry and safe for visitors. An essential task, when you consider how slippery wet polished marble is, and how many people bathe in the pond each day.

My visit to the golden temple complete, I decided to spend the remainder of the day wandering around the town a bit. I headed back in the general direction of the railway station, taking turns more or less randomly. The first of these led me into a narrow street where the dropping sun shone strikingly on some of the city’s old (and/or old looking) buildings.

Soon after, I was walking down another similar street when I was invited in for tea by a young man at work in a motor repair shop. I sat talking with him and his brothers, uncles and fathers, all of whom were hard at work keeping the family business going. Taking my leave of them I carried on through busy shopping districts, and streetside bazaars, taking a few minutes at one of these to size up and price the variety of mangos for sale (mangos are immensely popular in India, and there are dozens of different varieties to choose from.)

After a brief stop to chow down on my purchases (they were delicious!) I returned to the train station. I was still fairly early, and took the time to head up the road to a typical Indian bar (there aren’t many of them) and enjoy my first beer in well over a month. (This was partly a celebration of my return to India, and partly a warmup for my upcoming trip to the Netherlands which I feared might involve more beer drinking than I was presently able to handle.)

I spent my last hour in Amritsar hanging around the bus stop chatting with the fellows who worked there. Every now and then they’d pluck a handful of rice snacks (either cooked, pressed and dried grains, or puffed rice-crispy-like things) from a nearby vendor’s cart and hand them to me. They were very amused when I purchased a 500g bag of the crisps to take with me on the bus journey (and if you consider the volume occupied by a half kilo of rice crispies you’ll probably be amused as well.)

I was sad to be leaving Amritsar so soon. Its beauty, and the friendliness of its residents had made it my favourite Indian city, despite only a few hours within its confines. But I did have to press on to Delhi.

The trip wasn’t particularly restful and I was quite tired upon arriving in Delhi at 06:00 or so. As with my arrival in Lahore, a few days earlier, I was put in a difficult situation. This time, I knew where I wanted to go, and how much rickshaws should cost for most trips, but I had no idea where I WAS. Once again, I climbed aboard and did my best to bargain like I knew what I was doing.

I was dropped off in the Paharganj Main Bazaar. This area is the budget accomodation centre of Delhi, and while not quite as flashy, bears a number of similarities to Khao San Road in Bangkok. Checking into a hotel I’d had reccomended to me, I took a nice long rest until 10:00.

At that point I had business to attend to. I headed down across town through the gigantic roundabout of Connaught Place. Consisting of two concentric circles, CP is the heart of Delhi’s shopping district, and, in some ways, the heart of New Delhi itself. My business, however, was on the far side. I made my way to the Lufthansa office where I hoped to have my airline tickets replaced (my flight was about 90 hours away at this point) and was very distraught to find it closed. It was Sunday.

I headed back to the hotel and spent the rest of the day resting, catching up on my sleep and trying to keep cool. I spent the night up on the roof of the hotel, eating dinner with a pair of young men who owned a carpet shop nearby, and despite the bad reputation salespeople in Paharganj have, actually found it very pleasant. They were both wonderfully friendly, and I had a long discussion about the situation in Kashmir with them (one was from Kashmir, the other from Pakistan.)

The next morning I headed out to Connaught Place once again. The office didn’t open until 10:30, so the sun was already pretty high in the sky once I departed.

The heat in Amritsar and Lahore had been a shock after the mountains in Pakistan, but it had nothing on Delhi. Those places had been hot, but they were hot in a way that could be described as “hot weather.” The only appropriate words for Delhi were ones like “sauna” and “furnace.” On my last two days in the city, the mercury climbed to 44C!

Similar to the weather, traffic in Lahore and Amritsar had been a bit chaotic, but once again, they had nothing on Delhi. Delhi was the epitome of subcontinent driving, and a perfect illustration of the difference between crossing the street in southeast Asia and the subcontinent. In both cases, no one really paid any attention to the road rules. In SEA, however, people at least paid attention to YOU. So long as your intentions are clear, drivers would swerve around you. Un-nervingly late, sometimes, true, but they’d get out of your way. Not so in India and Pakistan. There, the pedestrian’s life was his own responsibility, and if you didn’t get out of the way of bicycycles, rickshaws, cars, and buses, they were simply going to run you down. This made my repeated trips back and forth from Paharganj to the far side of Connaught Place difficult. The only saving grace were the frequent underpasses and the fact that CP was under construction, limiting traffic somewhat.

When I finally made my way through the traffic and climate, the Lufthansa office had just opened. When I finally got to see the agent I was informed that even though it was a Lufthansa flight, I had to have the tickets replaced by Air New Zealand, since they’d issued them originally. Very well. It was fortunate that the ANZ offize was not far away.

Once there, I was informed that they needed a police report (this struck me as a bit futile since, for all I knew, the tickets could be in any one of five different countries) as well as some additional information from the ticket issuer in Toronto.

I gave her the info for my travel agent and went out in search of my police report. I managed to find a station not to far away, and was quickly directed to the place where reports were issued. Unfortunately I wasn’t quite fast enough on my feet when they asked where I had lost the tickets. I knew enough NOT to say “well maybe it was in Nepal, or maybe Pakistan, or perhaps in India, but theoretically it could even have been in Thailand or Bhutan.” But I did make the mistake of mentioning somewhere outside their patrol area. My efforts to make up for this, saying that I MIGHT have actually lost them on the street right out in front of the station didn’t quite work. Though it did get a smile out of the officer (I think he was amused by how quickly I’d worked out how to deal wihth hthe bureaucracy of the police service.) The officer asked someone to take me over to the nearby Connaught Place station, and advised me to tell them that I’d lost my tickets right in CP.

This worked a trick, and within a few minutes I had my police report which I had copied and walked back to the ANZ office. The walk back to Paharganj took a bit more time off the day, and when I finally arrived I concluded that there really wasn’t much daylight left for sightseeing, so I sat down and caught up with my writing. In addition, I sent a very desparate e-mail to my travel agent requesting that they forward the info as soon as possible, and even went so far as phoning them, and was assured that it would be done.

The next morning I headed out to the ANZ office once more. When I arrived, they told me that they just needed a few more details from their office in Toronto, but that they’d only be a few hours and that I should come back at 13:00. It was now 10:30. T-minus 16 hours for my flight departure.

Trying to make the best of the situation, I took a walk back to Connaught Place and did some shopping. I’d already had clothes made for the wedding I’d (hopefully) soon be attending in the Netherlands, but was missing some accessories such as shoes and suspenders (I harbour an Ideological dislike of belts.)

I returned to the ANZ office at the appointed time and lo, the tickets were there, ready and waiting. I paid the penalty fee with a smile (due partly to the fact that I now knew I hadn’t bought travel insurance for nothing) and rushed back to CP to catch a rickshaw, hoping to get at least a BIT of sightseeing in before departure that night.

The trip to old Delhi was a fascinating one. It was so incredibly different from Connaught Place, yet still not disimilar. The age and appearance of the buildings were different, but both shared a crowded and bustling nature that made them exciting places to be. This crowdedness went a bit too far, I’m sad to say. The traffic was SO bad in Old Delhi that I had to give up on my hopes of visiting the city’s famed Red Fort and climb out of the rickshaw when we were still immobile several kilometres away. On the bright side, this allowed me to have a bit more of a wander through Old Delhi as I walked back to Paharganj. In the end, I was delighted with the choice I’d had forced upon me. The markets, streets and alleys of Old Delhi were swarming with activity, and despite its ancient and run-down appearance was perhaps the most ALIVE place I’d ever been. Anything a person could want was for sale, and from a dozen different retailers, so long as you knew the right alley to dive down. Perhaps best of all were the shops selling dried fruit and spices. They were delicious to smell, and almost just as pleasing to the eyes.

On the way back to Paharganj I picked up a few more fresh mangos that the great kitchen staff at the Star Paradise turned into delicious mango shakes for me. I spent the evening sitting on the rooftop, enjoying the sounds, atmosphere and yes, even the heat of Delhi.

I took a taxi out to the airport and was soon confronted with a problem. I’d arrived at 20:30. Passengers weren’t allowed inside the terminal building until 3 hours before their flight, and weren’t even allowed in the exterior waiting room until five hours before. My flight wasn’t until 02:25. I had some time to kill.

I decided to head to the airline offices and see if anyone was around. This would serve the dual function of giving me an air conditioned place to wait and letting me make reservations for the final legs of my journey.

Thankfully (for me, and in this particular context at least) flights leave and arrive from Indira Gandhi Internation Airport at ridiculous hours. Thus the folks at the Air Canada office were around to make a reservation for me, and even to offer me a cup of tea and some biscuits as we sat chatting about their training trips to Toronto and Montreal.

The same went for the folks at the Lufthansa office. Indeed, they were even more engaging. We sat and talked for several hours about my experiences in India and Pakistan, about Indian culture, the Hindu religion and all manner of other subjects. Before I’d left, they’d even told me that the flight was overbooked and they’d see if they could ensure that I was one of the economy passengers who would be bumped to business class to make room. Score!

I did finally get in the airport, which, while pleasantly cool, was a bit of a depressingly non-Indian place, made moreso by the Subway sandwich that was my last meal in the country (though at least it was a “Chicken Tikka” sub.) I usually enjoy sitting around in airports, but the lateness of the hour made this wait a bit taxing, so I was happy when my flight was called and happier still when I got to the gate and was handed my revised boarding pass confirming my upgraded seat.

It might have not been the “Indian” way to leave the country (that would have been by rickshaw, or perhaps in a crowded sleeper car on a train) but at least it was a comfortable goodbye to the Indian Subcontinent.

Thanks are due this time to the folks at the ANZ office in Delhi and at the Adventure Travel Company in Toronto who worked miracles in ensuring that my laziness in getting around to replacing my tickets didn’t cause REAL problems.

They’re also due to everyone in Amritsar and Delhi. My first sojurn in India hadn’t been a particularly wonderful one, and I wasn’t really that excited about my return, but the four days spent with the sights, sounds and people of those cities changed and I’m now very much looking forward to another, longer visit.

Tags: India

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 28th, 2005 at 12:28 pm and is filed under India. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.