Amritsar

Well, after the trauma of the last couple of days, today completely made up for it.  We left the hotel at 6am for a six hour train journey up to Amritsar.  After lunch and a couple of hours rest we headed off to the Golden Temple.  I've seen photos and videos of it before but none of them do it justice in the least; it just has to be experienced.  We arrived at about 5pm while it was still light and walked around the complex.  We visited the Langar; the world's biggest free restaurant which is open 24 hours per day, staffed entirely by volunteers and serves up to 100,000 meals per day.  I've added extras showing the kitchen cooking the meals, ladies making chapattis and the washing up hall where the noise was deafening.  Everyone is welcome to eat but we simply had a cup of chai and a lovely crispy, sugary biscuit.

By the time we came out of there it had gone dark and we saw the temple in all its glory; a stunningly beautiful sight.  We were able to walk all the way around it and take it in from every angle. It was an incredibly moving experience.

While walking around we found that the ladies in the group, W included, who had blonde or white hair attracted attention, particularly from children, who had not really seen women with other than black hair before.  One young man with a beautifully dressed little daughter who could only have been around two or three years old asked if he could take a picture of her standing with us!

I've mentioned the traffic before but the drive back to the hotel was amazing.  The only rule of the road seems to be that if there is the tiniest space, you fill it.  Cars, tuk-tuks and motorbikes were literally coming at us from all directions, pedestrians and people pushing handcarts also vying for a space, and at one point we came to a roundabout which appeared to be in total chaos with traffic everywhere.  Right in the centre of this was a cow, calmly standing on the road oblivious to the traffic and putting its head through a fence to eat the grass on the roundabout.