Langar at the Golden Temple

Sometimes you can smell a restaurant before you get there. With the langar hall you hear it first. Imagine the din of thousands of metal trays clanking and banging. You take your metal bowl as it's handed to you then your metal tray then you can fish a spoon out of a giant tub as you're moved down the hall and, in our case, up the stairs to the massive dining hall. You don't dawdle here, they've got the system down pat and if you slow down to look around you're likely to get plowed down.

On the floor are long jute runners which indicate the designated seating area. You move in and sit down on the floor with your tray on the floor in front of you. You have to be quick because the guys who are racing around with huge metal buckets of food are hustling and they clearly haven't trained in Lausanne to become waiters. If anything they may have practiced at San Quentin because you're left with a feeling that this might be what it's like in prison.

Ladleful of watery rice pudding ... slop, ladleful of dal ... slop, scoop of veggies (that day it was some kind of pumpkin) ... plop, roti ... catch it. Despite the brusque serving style, the volunteers (every bit of work in the temple is done by volunteers) are smiling and the atmosphere is congenial.

Once you get over the shock and dig into the actual food you'll find it actually quite wholesome and good. It's free, it's all-you-can-eat and the buckets keep passing by offering seconds or thirds.

Despite us gringos clearly holding the starring role as "dinnertime entertainment" there's no lingering over the meal here and it's pretty clear that there won't be any after-dinner coffee coming when they start splashing buckets of water on the floor in front of you to clean up for the next "service". It's time to move on.

On the way out you deposit your bowls and spoons in big tubs and give your trays to guys who's job it is to whack them as loudly as they can on the side of a huge waste container to knock off any residue and pass them over to the crew who number in the hundreds and must suffer permanent hearing loss after volunteering for washing up duty. The clanging noise is incredible!

Everything is on a massive scale here from the dal cooked in kettles that would easily double as jacuzzis in a suite in Aspen, the assembly-line production of rotis to the mountains of vegetables that groups of pious peelers are laboring away at on the floor.

Unfortunately we took no pictures to share with you...but thanks to the miracle of Google images I found some online!

Amritsar - A Trip Back In Time

After our early morning visit to the Golden Temple and about the worst breakfast I have ever had we decided to explore the back lanes of Amritsar.

Off we went, not really knowing where we were going, brushing off offers of a chauffer-pedalled rickshaw tour - we preferred to walk in the 105 degree heat! So walk we did through the crowded streets filled with shops selling every imaginable object with the face of Guru Nanak on it, swords, steel bracelets, special Sikh underwear, turbans, wool-trimmed fly swishers, leather slippers and, of course, the ubiquitous "pashmina" shawls.

Somehow we ended up way off the beaten track and found ourselves transported back to the middle ages down a quiet, narrow lane lined with blacksmith shops where the smiths were bent over their fires hammering out hoes, trowels, plows; printshops with the guys setting the actual pieces of metal type with tweezers; and small mills grinding flour between stones. 

These were the most interesting things I saw that day, even more meaningful to me than the riches of the golden temple. It was a simple glimpse into the lives of real people and it felt like a trip back in time.

Amritsar - Golden Temple

With our bellies full we settled back for the long drive to Amritsar. Unfortunately the Grand Trunk Road is undergoing a major overhaul with flyovers being built at each village and town it crosses.
That means that every 2 kilometres on average (just about the time you hit a decent cruising speed) you're diverted onto a bumpy, dirt road to bypass the work. Between the 800 bypasses and the 15 mile narrow, 2-lane stretch where you play chicken with oncoming 10-ton trucks the 280 mile trip took well over 8 hours.

The biggest highlight on the road was passing through Kurukshetra, the scene of the epic battle between the Pandavas and the Kauravas and the spot where Krishna and Arjuna had the heart-to-heart immortalized in the Bhagavad Gita.

There is pretty much only one reason to go to Amritsar - to see the Golden Temple - the equivalent of the Vatican for the Sikhs. Outside the temple walls the city is filthy and crowded, like any other north Indian town.

The Golden Temple itself is spectacular. I was expecting a very serene, peaceful place from other people's descriptions but found it crowded and busy with people staring and pushing just like in Chandni Chowk.

We got up very early to avoid the massive lines to get in to the actual Golden Temple and see the holy book. It still took us almost an hour to make our way through the line (the people shoving their way past us in line didn't help either).

I found the chanting beautiful and hypnotic but once inside I have to admit I was a bit put off by the guy right in front of the holy book scraping up money and stuffing it into a box with a sword as fast as he could. I don't know why I expected this holy place to be different from any other...

Grand Trunk Road - Gulshan Ka Dhaba

A trip to Amritsar with visitors gave me the chance to try out some dhabas along the Grand Trunk Road.

Punjabis love to eat and the more desi ghee the better! They load it onto everything from paranthas to their dal. Makes me wonder what the average cholesterol reading is in the region.

Our first stop was Gulshan ka Dhaba in Murthal about 60 miles north of Delhi. We were early for lunch so the place was pretty much empty when we got there. The long, family-style tables in the open restaurant each hold a bucket of mixed pickle. We placed our order for some stuffed paranthas and dal - the classic dhaba meal.

The paranthas here are baked in a tandoor (unlike the fried paranthas in the Paranthe Wali Gali in Old Delhi). Don't let that fool you into thinking they're any lighter though. They're served with a big spoonful of snow-white desi ghee on top. The ghee comes from water buffalo milk which is why it's white instead of yellow like the butter we're used to. While we were waiting for our food we wandered back into the open kitchen to see how the paranthas are made.

We preferred the potato/onion parantha to the cauliflower (which we had to get because they didn't have any murli or radish) and the paneer options. The dal makhani was creamy and good. Not the best I've had but not the worst...

Served with homemade yogurt on the side to cool things off (notice the copious amounts of green chiles in the paranthas), mixed pickle and a masala lassi to wash everything down we walked out of there ready for the rest of our trip on the Grand Trunk Road. Little did we know that the decent highway was about to end about 10 miles further down the road...