So a gang of us – my roommate, a colleague, her friends, and friends of friends - decided last week on a weekend trip to Amritsar, a city on the India-Pakistan border, famous for its Golden Temple, a pilgrimage destination for Sikhs around the world. By the time we decided on Amritsar, train tickets had sold out. Some decided to grab a cheap flight getting there Saturday morning and leaving Sunday morning, but my new roommate, Clement, and I decided to go the cheapest way possible and – despite all kinds of warnings of how painfully uncomfortable it could be – decided to take round trip overnight coach buses to and from Amritsar.
Friday night, Clement and I journeyed over to Old Delhi to catch our bus. You can choose between an AC coach bus with slightly reclining seats, or a non-AC sleeper bus with bunk beds similar to train berths. We went for the AC bus, and it actually wasn’t so bad! We had heard that the roads would be terrible and bumpy (reminiscent of some of the tough bus rides I’ve had in West 
Africa), but the roads were fine. The only trouble was that you can’t lie down so your legs start to ache after a while, and I always start swinging around when I sleep in a moving vehicle, so I must have slammed my head into the window at least 5 times. And rest stop area toilets are always kind of frightening, and we were a couple hours late. But we finally made it to Amritsar, 10 hours later, and got in a cycle rickshaw over to the Golden Temple to meet the rest of the group that had flown over in the early morning. At the temple, you must cover your head with a scarf and check in your shoes at a kiosk, then wash your feet in a shallow pool before entering. Once inside, you see the Golden Temple in the center of a large pool of “immortality-giving nectar,” surrounded by white marble walkways and shrine halls all around. It is really a stunning and serene space. There are some foreign tourists, but there are thousands of Sikh pilgrims who have come to pay their respects. We walked all around, sometimes getting stopped or followed for a bit by Sikh visitors who wanted to explain their religious principles to us, or just wanted to curiously stare at us foreigners. In fact, several times during the day, Indian people came to us to take their picture with Clement, who is French. At one point, despite my attempts to politely refuse, a middle-aged Indian woman got her picture taken with me. I had thought that people in Amritsar would be used to seeing a lot of tourists come through, but someone in our gang explained to me that some Indian visitors may have come to see the temple from areas where they never see foreigners like us. So indeed we are part of the tourist attractions.
Amritsar was HOT. As hot as Delhi, about 95-100 degrees. Especially when you need to be dressed conservatively and keep your head covered in the temple. We were all just drenched in sweat non-stop for the entire day. After we left the temple, we cooled down in a café while we waited for a driver (the boss of someone in our party is from Amritsar and insisted on arranging a driver to take us around for a bit) to take us to a difficult-to-find dhaba (outdoor Indian fast food joint), famous for its stuffed kulchas (fried flatbreads). After lunch, we headed back towards the temple to go to the Jalianwalla Bagh memorial park, which commemorates a terrible massacre by the British army against thousands of nonviolent protesters in 1919. A beautiful park, though a little odd to see children smiling and posing with highlighted bullet holes in brick walls.
Later that afternoon, we got in a car to head to the Wagha border crossing, for a ‘changing of the guards’ ceremony. When we got to the border, about an hour from Amritsar, we had to enter into a pretty vicious stampede of hundreds of people – some foreigners but mostly Indian visitors – 
and a gauntlet of security to get to this spectacle, so popular that they have built a small stadium of bleachers for the audience, facing the road that leads to the border gate that separated us and another set of stands on the other side for Pakistani spectators. We sat in a special section set aside for foreigners – otherwise, the rest of the bleachers are separated for men and women. For over a half hour, pairs of people line up on the road to take a run back and forth with giant Indian flags. They blast Hindi hit music on speakers, and ladies come down to the road and have a little dance party. A hype man dressed in all white leads the audience in several bouts of “long live India” chants. Finally, a gang of border officials in full uniform appear and go through a series of ferocious stomping and kicking back and forth down the road, and the border gates are opened while soldiers on both sides take the flags down. It is really a bizarre and unique spectacle that they do every evening, and the crowd loves it!
Once we got back to Amritsar, we got a delicious north Indian dinner, then Clement and I left the group to try to catch a glimpse of the temple lit up at night. We were really cutting it tight, getting to the Temple a couple minutes before 10 pm, when our overnight bus to head back to Delhi was leaving at 10:30. We quickly checked our shoes, covered up, and ran inside to grab a few photographs. Then we hopped into a cycle rickshaw to try to find our bus loading zone, which proved to be super difficult to find in the dark – our cycle rickshaw was going all around until we decided to hop off and run around to try to find it. Poor Clement, the voice of reason and calm, had to listen to me freak out and shout all kinds of panicked obscenities, thinking we wouldn’t find our bus and had missed it. He suggested we call the number on our receipt – very good idea – and a couple minutes later a guy from the bus company showed up on a motorcycle. We squeezed on and he took us to the bus. So on the way home, Clement and I had decided to experiment and try a non-AC sleeper bus. My word of advice – if you take buses in India, they’re really not so bad – but DO NOT take non-AC buses in the middle of summer. Turns out after all my panic, the bus left 45 minutes late anyway, leaving us sweating in a hot bus. Once we got moving, we could open the windows and that kept things relatively cool, but in exchange for getting all kinds of road dust, pollution, and maybe some
bugs all over you. So exhausted from a hot day in Amritsar, I passed out pretty easily, not even realizing that we had stopped for at least a half hour in the night when the bus broke down and had to replace a tire. We finally made it back to Delhi 11 hours later. Increasing relief was felt at every step when we got off the bus, walked to the metro, got on the metro southbound, hopped in a rickshaw home, and finally made it back to the apartment. After a 38-hour journey, round trip overnight buses, profuse sweating, and minimal teeth-brushing, it seemed like the best shower of my life.
No time to nap though – I headed out to meet my friend, Jade, for an afternoon bus tour of Delhi. We first stopped at Red Fort, a large area of regal buildings from the 17th century Mughal Empire, fenced in by a tall, red brick fortress. It was painfully hot out in the sun though, and I was really starting to feel the dehydration left over from my day in Amritsar. I took full advantage
of those ubiquitous popsicle/ice cream carts, and got through another super sweaty afternoon. After Red Fort, the bus took us to Rajghat, which I had already seen while Andrews was in town, and then finally to Humayoun’s Tomb, which I had most wanted to see in Delhi before leaving India. Built for the Mughal emperor, Humayoun, the tomb is a striking 16th century garden mausoleum and precursor to the Taj Mahal.
It’s been a scorching whirlwind of a weekend, but a great opportunity to see some fascinating and uniquely Indian places.
Three weekends left in India! Next stop this coming weekend – the Taj Mahal!
:)
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