The Amritsar pilgrimage
Shine bright like a diamond
After our time in the Golden Triangle we went back to our hosts in Delhi. We were to join them for a trip or pilgrimage to Amritsar where we would find the Golden Temple. This is a temple made of gold and built in the middle of a massive pond where people can bathe in holy water. The temple is surrounded by a white fort that leaves the impression that the temple needs to be protected from outside threats. 200.000 people visit the temple everyday, and it has been named “most visited place in the world”. As is usual in a Sikh temple, we took off our shoes, deposited them and walked on to the temple grounds. We were surrounded by people and for some reason they found it more interesting to take a picture with me than to look at the temple, I felt like some kind of celebrity walking around there.
To enter the actual Golden Temple you need to queue along with thousands of people. From far away this seemed fine but as we got closer to queue, the claustrophobia grew too. People were squished into sections and separated by wooden poles and every time they would be allowed to everyone would push and shove to get more to the front. Here I decided that there was no way that i was going to queue to get into the temple and started to make peace with just seeing it from outside. But Amar, the son of our host was unstoppable in his quest to let us see the temple from the inside. We ended up talking to some guards, who send us to an office, and they send us to another office where we would find the management of the Temple. After some small talk about where are you from? Is this your first time to India? etc., they granted us access through the back entry to the temple, not making me feel privileged AT ALL. But we did it anyways because this was a once in a lifetime opportunity. We walked past the line of these crammed up people who gave us looks that were not too friendly (which I totally get) and joined the people at the front to go inside. It was totally worth the effort as the temple on the inside was covered with gold. Everything but the floor was made of gold, sparkling the wealth of this religion onto you. It is actually a really small temple inside and there’s only space for a guy to sing, play an instrument and the people to bow down to pray. An old lady was carried inside the temple by what I assume were her two sons (they did not get the backdoor access making me feel insanely ridiculous for having complained in the first place) and they waited for 1.5h in the queue to let her be blessed by their prayers. This temple is a place of pilgrimage and that can be seen in how the whole city has been build up.
A hotel story
We stayed in Amritsar for 2 nights we arranged this hotel with the local hotel giant called Oyo. Looked great on pictures but the reality turned to be anything but. We came in the room and the sheets weren’t changed, fungus on the walls and when we got to the bathroom all we wanted to do is leave. Everything was covered in fungus, the shower head was rotting away and the toilet, well lets not speak about that. After seeing other rooms in the hotel, Amar and I decided to go and look for a different hotel somewhere near. Nicely lined up in a range of about 200m, there must have been about 10 other hotels making it likely that we would find something better. We looked at so many places and I should tell you this was probably around 12:30 at night. We woke up all the hotel owners and asked to see their rooms and we actually found one hotel out of them all that seemed better than the original, so we took everybody there after Amar had negotiated the price. Apparently in India you can walk into a hotel and negotiate a discount. We got there and I think we had been so disgusted by our first place that we had overlooked some very serious issues in our next room. The toilet was white and at first sight looked fine, but there was some brown/yellowish stuff on there that the cleaner claimed was just there because it was older. However after I paid him 100 rupees he was willing to try and get it off, and getting it off he did. Omg this was so disgusting, I seriously had to bribe the cleaner to actually do his job for the first time in a very long time. On top of that when we wanted to go to bed we realized the sheets hadn’t been changed because there was lipstick on the cover. Really there was lipstick on the cover and they didn’t change the sheets and under the cover there were a lot of hairs and dirt inside of the bed. We decided not to sleep in but on top of the bed, which ended up being one of the worst nights of my life waking up from being cold because of course we didn’t have any covers. I don’t know what it is but it seems that the body just craves being covered by something when going to sleep. It doesn’t even matter how thin.
After spending one night here we decided to not spend another night there and booked a place at the Golden Tulip. This is where we got to see Indian Bureaucracy at work. We said we didn’t want to stay there anymore and therefore our hosts didn’t want that either. However they had arranged a room through somebody they had met in the train on the way. This was a hotel run by the Golden Temple and especially for people who came there to see it. It seemed to them that we wouldn’t want to stay there and made up some lame excuses why they hadn’t thought about it even after we said we like to come with them. But once that became clear people started calling people trying to arrange us a room in a supposedly fully booked hotel. I don’t exactly know what happened behind the scenes but we ended up getting a room in the same place, kudos for that.
India’s first line of defense
Another highlight was the visit to the border with Pakistan. This is one of the most surreal events I have ever attended. There is a show here twice a day, where they in the morning put their flags up and in the evening take them down again. This is a show that is supposed to promote peace between the two nations. However this has developed into a show of strength and freedom between India and Pakistan. On the one side India is partying to loud music letting women for once just do what they would want to, and on the other side men and women in tradition clothing (read burqa) sit on a tribune looking at a boy without a leg doing tricks while another one waves a flag. When the “festivities” are finished the soldiers take over and these soldiers are smartly chosen.
The men are big and strong and I think their uniforms look better than that of any general in the Indian army, and India uses women in their ceremony just to make the point that women are allowed to have more freedoms than in Pakistan, but the question is: do they really? When you walk alone at night through the streets in any Indian city you only see men, because a woman would not be safe, and after our time here I can say that women truly do not feel safe in the North of India. The soldiers would look each other in the eyes and stare down, while other soldiers are trying to show through some kind of tribal war dance that they are bigger and stronger than the other. A ceremony that is supposed to bring the countries closer together is transformed into a entertainment, a show of force between two nations with opposed cultures and religions. In my opinion, not very productive because you can tell me anyone sitting on Pakistans side of the border went home with a satisfied feeling.
These were some big days and I am absolutely exhausted from this trip where we slept 4h every night. Now back to Delhi where our flight for the South leaves Thursday evening. We are going to the tea plantations. Something different.
Till next time!
PS: I got shat on by a bird which is supposed to bring good luck, so if you see me living it up at some resorts soon you know what happened (thanks Ula).
