We took an awesome and memorable 10 day road trip (17th May 2019 - 27th May 2019) from Chandigarh to Amritsar via Himachal Pradesh. These are the notes taken every night from that vacation. I will publish them one day at a time for the next 10 days
26th May 2019 Day 10
Last night we stayed in Raja Ka Bagh @Nurpur which is a boutique hotel. The hotel also hosts live music on Saturday nights. Party and music went on till 3.00 am which made it difficult to sleep in time. We somehow managed to get some sleep.
As we got up, we had to figure out the plan of the day. I wanted to visit the partition museum in Amritsar in addition to our plans of catching the Beating Retreat ceremony at Atari Wagah border and visiting the golden temple. As we checked various places on the map we realised that partition museum is closed on Mondays, which meant we had to visit it today. We also had to attend the ceremony at Wagah today, given that it happens around sunset time. So we decided to skip Nurpur Fort and drive to Amritsar post breakfast. The restaurant at the hotel looked pretty slow so we rushed out and got some breakfast at a dhaba on the way. We then drove non-stop to a coffee day in Amritsar. After having a green tea, we parked our car in a public car parking next to partition museum.
This museum is 2 years old and tells the story of our independence specially focusing on partition. It covers a few years post partition and how it affected the politics and lives of the people of both Pakistan and India. It captures the story of the biggest migration in the history of the world and it is the first museum in India which I felt is done beautifully and was badly needed.
We could have spent half a day at the museum, however as we had to go to Wagah border we had to rush through the museum. We decided to take a cab to Atari as we thought it would make it easier for us to attend the ceremony instead of trying to find parking. We took a cab for Rs. 1150. There was heavy traffic and we were a bit late. We anyhow managed to reach the border at around 4.45. The crowd and the queues were humongous. They separated the men from women for the security and there was no way to figure out how to meet after the security. The BSF people were not allowing us to stand and wait and moving wasn’t really an option. Phones were not working and if we had moved then there was no way for Richa to know that we have moved to the stadium. Once we found Richa back we had to jostle through the crowd to enter the stadium. There was no easy way to get in and people were pushing all around. After a while we managed to enter the stadium and there was no place to sit. The ceremony was good. They played some songs, made people dance on the road inside the arena. There was a lot of slogan shouting. And the BSF did an orchestrated show of aggression and brought the flag down. On the way back we were stuck inside the parking for 1.5 hours.
The ceremony felt a lot longer then what it is as we had to stand all through and had to carry Reyansh on my shoulder for around an hour.
As we reached back towards golden temple, we checked in to hotel City Park. We can now say that we changed 9 hotels in 9 nights in this vacation. After check in we decided to have dinner, however on the way to dhaba we decided to visit golden temple instead. It felt crowded on the heritage street (street around temple). As we entered the temple complex we decided to not go inside the temple owing to the crowd. As we moved towards the langar it had the same kind crowd to get food. We decided to not have langar either.
After a round inside the temple complex we had chole kulcha on a shop next to the temple. The chole tasted nice. In the past 9 days We have had too much junk and no work out :(. After dinner we came back to hotel via our car parking.
Richa went for some quick shopping while me and Reyansh took all our stuff from car to the room. We need to pack everything we have in 3 bags tomorrow morning.
Richa may try to visit the temple from inside tomorrow however I only intend to return the car to zoomcar and then fly back home.
Signing off Day 10
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