India roundup part one - Amritsar

Apologies to all, it's all been a bit hectic and internet access has been a bit hit and miss. Since our last post we flew to Amritsar, airport security is a bit full on at Indian airports. They don't let you into the terminal until your flight is ready to go through security. This was a good thing at Jaipur airport though that we were sitting waiting to get the okay to go through and the security guard came over and said that our driver was here and needed to talk to us (they don't let drivers or anyone else inside the terminal either without a boarding card) I had a look and said, no it's not our driver, the security guard insisted I go outside to talk to the man. It turned out that it was the porter from the hotel we'd checked out of that morning, he had brought my debit card that I'd left when we'd paid the bill. The poor guy had driven 13km out to the airport to reunite me with it. Can you even imagine that happening in the UK? At Amritsar we met our new driver, Morari. It turns out that he is Anish's best friend (Anish was our previous driver who took us up to Jaipur) and he has been told all about us by Anish. Not sure if that was a good thing or not! We went straight to the hotel, the Heritage Inn. We left our things there and headed straight out to see the place that was the main reason for our visit - the Golden Temple.


Our hotel was adjacent to one of the gates so it was a really short walk away. Everyday, anyone can get a free meal at the temple and there was a huge crowd queuing. It transpired that we'd arrived on a special day for Sikhs, the birthday of the Tenth Guru of Sikhism Guru Gobing Singh. A guy came out from behind the food tables and brought us sweet masala tea and some kind cheesy spicy bread. The sad thing about our experiences over the last week is that we have become extremely cynical about people's motives for talking to us, especially Liam, as usually we're being sold something (luckily our time in Thailand has shaken off that feeling). But this really wasn't the case at the Golden Temple. Cliff said that we didn't want to jump the food queue, there were 100's of people there, but this guy was insistant that we didn't queue, he told about what was happening, what to expect inside the temple grounds and even a few words of Punjabi. We left our shoes (for free, unheard of India!) and went inside. The temple itself is truly breathtaking. 400kg of gold covers the top part of the structure and it sits on a base of marble on this beautiful stretch of water, which is holy for Sikhs; we saw men immersing themselves in it during both our visits. The other thing that struck us, apart from the feeling of peace there, was the sheer friendliness of the people there. We lost count of how many people stopped us, shook our hands, told us their names, asked for our names and were generally amazingly welcoming. Again, we were the subject of many family photos.



The low point of the evening was when Cliff had to ask the hotel to change the sheets on the bed as they had blood stains on them. Ugh.