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...