"New, strange, uncharacteristic experience, coming at the needed moment, is sometimes as necessary in a person's life as a plow in a field." -Katharine Butler Hathaway
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Day Five - Post Wedding Adventure (I'm not done blogging about it yet...)
Where do you go after four days of wedding ritual? Why, to Amritsar, of course! Site of the Golden Temple. Most of our group had never been there, and everyone was excited. We climbed into our friendly bus for what we thought was a three hour tour. A three hour tour that took six hours just to go one way.
The rickshaws in the Punjab area were so wonderfully individual.See how small they are? This will be an important fact to remember toward the end of this blog post.
I love the Punjabi trucks. So much color and different designs, but all saying "Blow Horn" on the back. This is partly to provide the truck driver with notification that you might be passing him, but also it serves to wake them up on those long lonely drives through the countryside (or so I was told).
Finally we stop. It's still daylight (barely), and I think we've arrived in Amritsar, but no. It's lunch time at Kulcha Land just outside of Amritsar. Kulcha (and especially the Kulcha here) is one of the most delicious snacks we had on our trip. It's a stuffed thin bread, served with beans that were kind of salsa-like. I'm still dreaming about that meal.
I looked over to see Rochi sitting in a buggy, motioning for us to join her. There are 60 people in our group and not a lot of buggies. We hop onto the buggy as if it were our only hope of survival.
As we pull out, we wonder how the rest of the group will get there. But we trot off, still clueless. Grateful to be wedged in next to someone who speaks Punjabi.
It was dark when we arrived at the Temple gates. Apparently the Chief of Police had been waiting for us since 2 pm. He wanted to greet our group. We left our shoes by the gate and those that didn't have head coverings were given bandanas.
After walking through a shallow pool of water to cleanse our feet, this is our first view of the Golden Temple. Yes, it's covered in actual gold. It is the holiest of holiest places for the Sikhs, and it's about as lovely a holy place as you could imagine. The reflections, the chanting broadcast on loud speakers, the countless turbans... Everyone was in awe.
The temple was completed in 1604 and has been under attack several times since. There are still bullet holes from the siege in the late 1980's when extremist Sikhs were hold up there while being shot at by National Guard commandos. That was the incident which eventually resulted in Indira Ghandi being assassinated. The Temple has four doors which symbolizes that people from all religions are welcome to come and worship there. Hard to imagine anything bad happening here.
Below is a two minute video of our walk up the pathway to the Temple. Halfway there we were told we had to sit and wait for the chanting to end. Then we got up and moved forward with the music, until a Sikh man told me I couldn't videotape anymore.
We walked through the Temple, tried to avoid being sprinkled with too much holy water since even if it was holy, we weren't sure how clean it was. We kneeled in prayer with other worshippers, some of whom were in tears. We watched the man who waved the large white feather duster over the men who were chanting. And we watched the man who stuffed all the donation money into the collection box. There is a Golden Temple channel on tv which shows the whole thing 24/7.
Okay, this is where we thought it couldn't get any more interesting. But we were wrong. This is the point at which we realize that we needed to get back to the bus, and then remembered that we'd arrived at the Temple in horse-drawn buggies. And we had no idea where we'd left the bus. So we climbed into the first rickshaw we saw. At one point there were FOURTEEN of us in one rickshaw, but fortunately for us and for the rickshaw, two left (one an infant), leaving TWELVE of us. Keep in mind that in Mumbai, only THREE people are all that are allowed in one rickshaw. I took this photo before the full horror of the ride overcame me. You can see how we had to not only hold on for our lives, but also cover our faces for all the fumes and dust. Once the truly frightening part of the drive was over, Rob was able to take a short video of the not-so-scary part.
This black box below doesn't look like much but actually it's the video Rob took once he was able to peel his fingers off the rickshaw frame. It was taken looking back through the small back window. We didn't dare look forward. Click on it. It's short. It's way better than having to endure that ride.
Then the weary group of 60 men, women, and children piled back on to our now familiar bus to head back to Ludhiana. It had taken us six hours to drive to Amritsar. When I got home, I google-mapped the distance between the two cities. It worked out to 87 miles. Six hours to travel 87 miles.
At one point, someone had said she was disappointed because the original plan was to make a stop at the Pakistani border to watch the changing of the guards. Rob and I weren't disappointed at all. We'd had enough excitement for one day...
If you look at the map below, you'll see that the two cities are indeed not far from each other and just a hair's breath from Pakistan. And only several hundred miles from Kabul. I'm glad we were clueless. Yet again, India has caught us off-guard. Delivering way more than we ever dreamed...
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