Amritsar

Amritsar is where we are,
We took a bus here, very far,
So now we're here,
but do not fear,
We'll soon move on to 'splore some mar'.

Amritsar-- city of over a million people, not that that is a special distinction in this country.  I looked up some figures out of curiosity, and Delhi has over 12 million, Kolkatta (Calcutta) over 14 million, and Bombay (Mumbai) over 16 million.  Almost 17.  So there are some larege cities here.  Packed places.  From my perspective on the ground, so far, any reasonably big city seems pretty much the same.  The market streets of Amritsar that I have walked so far have not felt significantly different from the market steets of Delhi.  If anything, they are a little wider, and a little cleaner, because for some reason there are no cows here, possibly because of the large Sikh population.  Not to say that the cows fled from the Sikhs.  I am just guessing that the Sikhs might not worship cows quite as much as Hindus, so they might not feel any compunction for kicking any large grass eating, field-dwelling animals out of this area designed for fried-food eating, asphault dwelling humans. 

Amritsar has a golden temple.  It is a major-- the major-- place to go for Sikh religious pilgrims.  It is the Mecca of Sikhism, I think, roughly.  It houses a book which I can only talk about as a book because I am not Sikh-- for the Sikhs, this book is essentially the soul/eternal presence of Guru Granth Sahib, the last of ten Gurus (early religious masters of Sikhism) and writer of the book some 500 years ago.  This book is put to bed every night somewhere else in the temple complex, and brought back out to the golden temple every morning to resume presiding over the Sikhs. 

The temple itself is in the middle of quite a large, squarish pool that is closer the size of a small lake.  The temple is accessed from a narrow walkway on one side-- otherwise it is protected by its wide (and beautifully reflective) mote.  And, of course, the temple is entirely plated in 24k gold.  Around 530 kg of the shiny stuff, according to one source.  So, the temple is pretty exciting looking. 

I came to the temple thinking it would be something exciting to see, and it was...  But I turned out liking this temple, and Sikhism, from what little I know of it, more than I thought.  One aspect of the Sikh faith, or at least the Sikh tradition regarding this temple, that I appreciate is that everyone is fed for free.  Everyone, and anyone.  The temple complex  serves 60,000-80,000 meals per day.  Meals have included Dal (spiced lentils in their own sauce), a potato dish, chapatis (unleavened bread disks), rice, and a rice pudding (Josh is telling me right now how much he loved the pudding).  The meals are served simply-- we sat cross legged with our plates in front of us, in an array of around a thousand other hungry temple-goers, while volunteers walked around with pitchers and vats of food, slopping onto the plate of anyone who was interested.  More is served to anyone who wants it-- you sit until you have eaten your fill, then you bring your plate, cup, and spoon to more volunteers collecting dishes.  The dishes then go to the volunteer dishwashers.  We worked washing dishes yesterday for 30 or 40 minutes, in line with over a hundred other people diligently washing dishes.  I was in a soap line, where I scrubbed dishes-- Josh was in a rinse line, where he washed dishes off before putting them on racks to go back into use.  I probably scrubbed several hundred plates, seceral hundred bowls, and several hundred spoons standing there in that line, no more than a few seconds to each item, then chuck it on, surrounded by turbaned and bearded Sikh men and colorfully shawled Sikh women.  I enjoyed it-- it felt good to give back, and to help out, seeing as I was touristing there holy temple, but it was also peaceful to just do something, to become one of them for a little while, equally washing and splashing soap and cramming dishes onto packed racks.  It wasn't the kind of work that your mind is in, though, so before long I was thinking about home...

All of you folks in the United States of America, listen up.  You are in an amazing place.  You are in what may be the most beautiful country in the world.  You are living in a place where sooooo many worries, so many problems and issues that other people worldwide have to deal with are taken out of the way, and you don't even have to know they exist.  You are ...  This is what everyone tells you.  This is what everyone told me.  And they told me that going to India would help me to appreciate what I have in America-- warm showers, yada yada.  I kind of believed them, but for the most part I figured I was a pretty hard core character and didn't need all that pampering that America gave me (I hate calling it America, by the way, because that is the name of two continents, not a country, but here in India that is all they know it by-- say the United States, and people will ask, "what?").  Right-- I was above that, India wouldn't change me, I appreciated the States for what it was worth, which, for largely political and foreign policy reasons, wasn't much...  But I have come to see things differently.  The US is truly a fantastic country.  It is so clean, and so free, and so, so, so, so -- are you getting this point?-- so beautiful.  India is nice.  India, if you climb a mountain (Josh and I did, tell you about it in a sec) can be downright gorgeous.  And I still have a lot of India to see, so I am really not in a position to make any harsh judgments, but people-- the United states is a far more naturally beautiful place than I ever realized.  Josh and I rode our bikes down the interior valley and then down the coast, and we experienced a lot of it.  But I know that I, having grown up there, having experienced very little of the rest of the world, did not think that what I was seeing was all that special.  I did appreciate it, but... Not as much as I do now.  Having forcefully removed myself from that area, and deprived myself from it, I have come to see that it is far more valuable than I ever realized.  And that is just the natural aspect of our country.  When we start talking about the people...  Wow I miss you people.  And the voice in my head says that it is just homesickness, but I think that it is also a new value I have come to have for my relationships.  My family, my friends.  Shit guys, why did I send myself away from you all for this long?  Exploring, learning, experiencing new things is nice and all-- but people are very valuable.  And I have my people.  And I miss them.  You know who you are.  So this time in India has helped me make some decisions about how I will make other decisions in the future.  As much as I wanted to be, and thought I was, an everywhere man...  I think it is ok to be a bit tied down.  To have a place one belongs, more or less.  Mine is the Puget Sound.  I rather like it there.  And I look forward to tooling around in India for the next two and a half months...  But I also look forward to going back home. 

Alrighty then.  Josh and I climbed a mountain.  Or at least it sounds good if you say it that way. In the Himalaya, you have to be pretty well prepared if you plan to undertake climbing something that people actually consider to be a mountain.  But we climbed something tall.  From Mcleod Ganj, we hiked up to Triund, a pass right up next to the snow covered mountains.  It was around a seven mile hike up, with half a mile of elevation change.  It is hard to upload images, but if you image search Triund, you get some pictures of the place-- it is pretty amazing.  At the top, a wall of snow, ice, and rock several thousand feet high extends across your field of vision, just a kilometer or two away across a deep, forested valley.  You feel like you are there, you have made it-- you are at the Himalayas.  The ridgetop we were on felt like it came out of Lord of the Rings, just scaled up-- we treked across a landscape of short, yellow-frown scrub grass interspersed with worn, grey boulders, some the size of houses.  Some slate-shingled dwellings, unlived in for who knows how many years, were perched occasionally along the hillside.  We hung out on top for a while-- I attempted a watercolor, Josh attempted a nap (I think he may have been the most successful)-- and then we decided to take a new route down.  We had hiked up on a system of trails (we didn't actually know where we were going, but we just took any trail that seemed to be going up, and eventually we got there) but on our way down, we took a more of the mountain-goat approach.  Our destination was clear-- it was a little spec of town far, far down and in the distance.  All we had to do was get there.  So we chose a direction, and walked, slipped, fell, climbed, and otherwise professionally trekked our way down the mountain.  We made it home in successfully, albeit a bit sore. 

Then we went to lower Dharamsala.

Then we went to Amritsar.

Did I mention that we went to the hospital, four days ago or so?  Josh was clean, and I had double-- bacteria and parasites.  Giardia.  But now I am feeding them pills along with their Indian food, and I think they may be packing their bags.  I am sure I will have new organisms setting up shop in my body in no time.  What fun.

Ok, we need to get out of here.  We are splitting up, by the way, for a month or so, with plans to get back together in Kolkatta in a monthish.  From which we will take a boat to the Andaman Islands.  Hopefully.  But, yes, we are going to experience trekking it alone through India for a while, so wish us, seperately, luck.  Josh might go to Nepal, I might go elephant-back lion hunting.  Or something. 

Stay well,
Chance