My Trip through Punjab and Himachal Pradesh!

Here is the summary of my recent trip through Punjab and Himachal Pradesh. I'll upload pictures tomorrow!

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As some of you have already heard, I just travelled around Punjab and Himachal Pradesh with another Fulbrighter and friend—Maya. Maya and I are both studying women’s health and she is currently a medical student at Northwestern, so we both had a lot to talk about and rant about.

During my trip, I think most things that can go wrong with transit did go wrong, but I was always able to get to where I wanted to go. That’s the nice thing about India: enough people don’t have cars that there’s always another form of public transit available. It started with me getting onto my night train to Delhi and finding out that my seat was also assigned to a very annoyed woman. She kept insisting that I check my ticket; but we eventually found out that she had been automatically upgraded to a better class. Of course, by that time she had already kicked me out of the booth and set up her blankets. She did however; give the conductor as much trouble as she gave me when he told her about the seat change.

When Maya and I met in the Old Delhi Railway Station, we couldn’t find our train on the board and no one in the Enquiry Department could tell us if our train even existed. Finally, we found out that our train had been delayed 2 hours. The train didn’t get any timelier after that, and we didn’t get into Amritsar until after midnight. The most annoying part was that the train stopped right outside of Amritsar for over an hour. I can only imagine that the track it was coming in on was already occupied due to its lateness.

After that things did get a lot easier. We ended up staying in a nice hotel right across from the Golden Temple. The Golden Temple was beautiful and actually very peaceful for such a huge tourist attraction. The Golden Temple, for those who do not know, is the primary holy site for Sikhs. As with all Sikh religious sites, everything is free, but a donation is appreciated. The Temple is situated in the middle of a manmade lake. Some Sikhs bathe in the lake, and I felt really embarrassed when I saw some tourists filming men trying to take their religious baths in the water. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that tourists can be as obnoxious with their cameras as young Indian men can be.

Outside Amritsar is completely chaotic, as it is a huge tourist destination. Taxi drivers and rickshaw wallas were constantly trying to get us to go to the border with Pakistan, at which there are elaborate guard marches on the Indian and Pakistani side. Maya and I don’t care much for military displays and a friend of hers told her that it looks like a Monty Python bit, so we decided to skip it. Instead, we walked a short distance to the memorial for the Indians killed in the 1919 massacre in Amritsar. If you’ve seen Gandhi then you know what I’m talking about. In case you haven’t: In 1919 the British Government created laws that would make it legal to arrest and detain Indians without a trial. (Sounds like the United States now.) In Amritsar, there were several riots over this. But during the day of the Punjabi Harvest Festival, a peaceful meeting was organized in a park to discuss the issues at hand. A British troop came in and the commanding officer ordered his men to fire on the peaceful crowd, including women and children. The park is walled in on all but one side, so the people who attended the meeting were trapped. I learned that the officer—O’Dwyer—never slept soundly again after the massacre and eventually killed himself. That seems to be about the right amount of guilt for such an unprovoked and bloody attack.

The next day we went to Chandighar, but our train stopped for about an hour to unload some packages that had been stored on the train. Therefore, we missed our connecting train and had to take a taxi to Chandighar. Chandighar is the capital of Punjab and Haryana. It is a surprisingly ritzy city for being a place about which no one ever talks. It is the only city in India that I’ve been to which was completely preplanned. It was built after Partition to become the new capital of Punjab. Lahore, the old capital, is now in Pakistan. There wasn’t a whole lot to do in Chandighar except go to gardens and eat, which was a nice change of pace after Amritsar.

The second most visited place in India after the Taj Mahal is the Rock Garden in Chandighar. A refugee from Partition began creating art out of all the scraps and garbage created when Chandighar was being built. The government found out about his work and gave him acres on which to build his own garden. I will upload pictures of this tomorrow. It is a very interesting and geometrically amazing place. I appreciated being around some modern art after living in the mountains for so long. We also visited a rose garden, which was also pleasant, but less visually stunning and intriguing.

Probably the best part of Chandighar was the food. We had Mangalorean fish curry and Italian food as well as complimentary breakfasts at our hotel. It was pretty amazing. But it was also expensive, so we left earlier than we planned and took the bus up to Shimla.

Shimla is a hill station in Himachal Pradesh. It was the summer retreat of the British Raj. Shimla is very similar to Mussoorie, but it is far bigger and the entire state is more developed than Uttarakhand. Sometimes I forget that Uttarakhand is a new state. But seeing what Himachal has in comparison to Uttarakhand really drove home just how poor Uttarakhand is. Himachal has the same terrain, but much better roads, governmental organization, electricity and water. Although Shimla has a water crisis, I think this is largely because it is a city with the capacity of a hill station.

We stayed in a very nice hotel, which had a very friendly and helpful owner. It was the coziest place that I have stayed in so far, and it overlooked the mountains. Most of what we did in Shimla was walking around. On our second day there we did two treks. The first one was up to a Hanuman (monkey god) temple at the top of a hill. As we went up, someone told Maya that the monkeys would steal her glasses. But it was also icy around the temple, so Maya had to wear them just to walk around safely. As she was sitting down in the Temple complex, a monkey ran up to her and grabbed the glasses off of her face. Monkeys do this type of thing we they think they can get food in exchange. Everyone was telling her to give the monkey food, but we didn’t have any. I followed the monkey until it was on a rooftop, where it sat down and started eating the nose guards off of Maya’s glasses. Fortunately, some workers bought some prasad (food for the gods) and offered it to the monkey in exchange for the glasses. The monkey dropped the glasses and ran away with the food. This must be a normal occurrence, but the workers had a ladder ready to climb up and get the glasses off of the roof.

We decided to go to a less exciting place afterwards and took a taxi to a rural village close to Shimla.   It was nice to see rural Himachal Pradesh, which is also much more developed than rural Uttarakhand. It was also very nice to go to a place where there were no tourists and a lot of clean air.

The British built a railway that goes from Shimla to Kalka, which is in Haryana. We had been told that the train was a highlight of Shimla, so we decided to take it. We ended up getting a private compartment, which was a nice surprise. The trip down was beautiful. The best part is that the train goes so slowly that you can open the train door and look out at the mountains passing you by. The train also goes through a much more rugged and rural landscape than what the roads go through.

The train was also late, but we still made our connecting train in Kalka. Unfortunately, the original schedule that we saw said that we would get into Delhi around 5:10; but in reality we got in around 6:30. That meant that I missed my train to go to Dehradun. We took a taxi to the Interstate Bus Terminal, only to be told that it was the other ISBT that has buses going to Dehradun. The next bus station actually did have Uttarakhand state buses leaving from it. I got a deluxe (meaning it has AC) bus to Dehradun that left at 8:00 AM. All the conductors were very confused as to why I was going to Dehradun instead of Rishikesh. Rishikesh is where The Beatles went to learn about eastern religions, and it is where white people flock to this day for the same reason. It is an hour from me and I’ve never been, because I’m a snobby academic that way.

I was exhausted when I got back to Dehradun; but I was also excited to get back to work. Traveling in India is trying and I feel that I at least have a good grip on my work now. I am glad that I was able to see other parts of India and get to talk about my work and emotions with another American researcher. Right now, I am adjusting to being immersed in another culture again. I feel awkward talking to my Indian friends after being with an American for so long. But I’m sure that I’ll get over it soon enough. I’m making dinner for some of my friends here in Dehradun on my birthday. I’m looking forward to breaking the ice a little bit more. Let me know if you have any dinner suggestions!