The first day (11th November, Sunday) was spent on settling in and in the evening we had dinner in Ranjit’s Svaasa which is where Siim lives. The Svaasa seemed even more amazing than on my last visit and the food was delicious.
The next day was a mixture of discussing our lives in India and playing cricket. Before going to the dinner we went to Costa coffee where I ordered a big coffee. The trick is that they have no indication to exactly how big the coffee is. It turned out that it was a 600ml cup. This time we had dinner at Max’s house which (although it was no Svaasa) was magnificent. I suppose what made the evening special (better than the night before) was Max’s host-father who was once again overwhelmingly friendly.
As Max’s family owns a school which is on the same property as their house, we were able to play cricket which was great.
In the early morning of 13th November we went to see the golden temple and specially the ritual of taking the Guru Granth Sahib from the Akal Takht to The Harimandir Sahib.The ritual itself was nothing special, but I liked my visit to the temple more than I had before. I suppose the absence of heat and sunlight (which normally reflects from the white marble rather annoyingly) made the difference. There was a great rush to the Harimandir Sahib and therefore I (along with Mr. Ian, Sam and Siim) decided not to go there. I wanted to show the others the Sikh museum (which I had already seen) but it was closed until 7 AM (by the way, we went there around 5 AM). Therefore me and Sam went to have langar instead. Little did we know that at this time of the day, langar is merely tea, a very good tea, but tea nevertheless.
the 13th November was our departure date from Amritsar. We set off to Dalhousie around 9 AM and arrived in the afternoon. The second I stepped out of our car, I fell in love with the place. The air was clean, unlike the Punjabi air which forces me to take a shower 3 times a day. Dalhousie is such a peaceful place that it is hard to believe that it is India. The contrast between Punjab and Dalhousie is tremendous.
We had our lunch in a nearby restaurant and dinner at one of our rooms.
Next day we started our small hiking trip. Halfway through we took a different path with Sam. Our trail was moving up and it seemed more interesting, in fact it was more interesting than the other path and we raised couple of hundred meters from our initial road. The view to the mountains was even more excellent than it had been from down below and I think we made an excellent choice. This separate path had only one negative point to it: we missed the market where everybody bought their shawls.
When we reached the hotel, we took an hour to rest and headed to a place which was called mini Switzerland. As it was rather far from our hotel, we had to take the cars. The place itself was a large empty field in the midst of mountains (not exactly a valley). We all went horseback- riding which was good but could have been excellent if the horses would’ve been more obedient. I suppose they were just trained that way to make things safer for the customers.This time we had our dinner outside and it was an amazing meal. I was so full when we left the restaurant that I found it hard to move.
We took off early the next morning. Our car went through Amritsar and the other through Chandigarh so half of our journey was together and the second half, not. I was back home by 4PM the same day.Looking back I find that it was a great event and I wish to go back to the hills for some hiking.
The students and Sukhbir
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