Bye Bye Mundane Life!!: Chandigarh & Amritsar

First stop out of Delhi, after nearly 6hrs sat on a particularly uncomfortable bus, was the city of Chandigarh. This is described by the guide as India's cleanest and greenest city, having only been built back in the 60's it is also India's newest city. After the hovel that is Delhi we had high hopes for this place...but our excitment was soon dampened after we tried to find some cheap accomodation! Apparently they didn't plan budget accomodation into this 'new city' - fed up we booked into a real overpriced dump with some of the dirtiest & smelliest bedsheets ever! Having walked the entire length of the highstreet on our hunt for cheap accomodation we discovered that this place has all the new city charm of Milton Keynes...so we promtly left again the following morning!
Another gruelling arse numbing bus journey onto the city of Amritsar (another 5hrs), this is the home of the 'Golden Temple' a very sacred site for the Sikh religion. We had hoped to spend maybe afew days here hoping for a more chilled out vibe and more modern city - but we were wrong! It was much like Delhi but on a smaller scale, walking the streets left you with a thick coat of dust and grime, a migraine from all the horns blaring and the occasional turd dangling from your shoe! The Temple itself was very interesting as it was full of pilgrims rather than tourists who were in full going about about their worshipping, we too had to remove our shoes and don a fashionable head scarf in keeping with religious rules. The one thing we had noticed in delhi, but more so here was all the men and some of the women seem to stare at the pair of us as if we were Posh and Becks out in London, Chris thought the men were staring at me and I felt sure they were staring at him (? mistaking him for some football player or something!) - which is strange as many foreigners frequent this place to visit the Temple. It gets quite annoying at times, especially when they start to follow you around rather too closely, but the one exception was a group of young Sikh men inside the Temple who seemed genuinely excited to come up and speak to us to the extent of asking us to pose for photos with them and asking for our e-mail addresses...bizarre behaviour but they seemd so pleased we couldn't deny them such simple pleasure (although the e-mail address was false, of course). Two days was unfortunately enough time in this place, which meant getting back on another one of the horrendous buses for 7hrs - this time heading up into the foothills of the Himalaya to McLeod Ganj home of the exciled Tibetan government and the Dalai Lama! We pray that this place will hold us for a little longer - we cannot cope getting on another bus for quite a while! Fingers crossed!!