Hotel Heritage Inn Amritsar

... follow the road further down to Gilgit, but as the road gets worse, we travel even more slowly. It takes us the whole day to get to Karimabad, only 100km in 9 hours! We are in Hunza valley, surrounded by high mountains and decorated by beautiful autumn colored trees and bushes! We find the perfect parking spot at one of the hotels. The manager is bored stiff because of lack of customers nowadays, so invites us for a tea. Even recommends us to stay bit longer so we can ...

... wouldn't believe how many people turned up to see the ceremony, must have been 4,000 on the Indian side alone! The crowd's on both sides did their bit to sing and chant louder than the other side throughout the ceremony and created a pretty good atmosphere (especially compared to the Reebok these days!).<br> From the border we headed back for another look round the Golden Temple at night, it's possibly even more spectacular at ...

... low**ing I have witnessed.<br><br>Then I'm back to the temple. Its good to see it at diff**ent time of the day. Just sit and watch the routines. I discov** that the constant singing is not a recording and I see the band/scholars once I cross the marble walkway ov** the lake into the inn** sanctum. Its a wond**ful place. And to be quite frank makes the Hindu Silv** Temple just across town look like a v**y ugly sist**. I visited this in the morning along with anoth** Lonely Planet ...

... dining area where anyone can come in and sit on the floor with the Sikh community and eat free food. It's one way that Sikhism seriously devotes itself to community service, and every gurdwara (Sikh temple) does it, even the one in Orlando (which you should visit). Probably our favorite thing about the temple was that 24 hours a day a chant is maintained from inside the temple, and it's blasted out throughout the whole complex through loudspeakers. This combined with the extreme ...

... perscription and by the end of day 3 things began looking up with the headache recinding and eventually going that night. Sarah was excellent looking after me and the amount of phone calls from home and Sarah's home as well as Sarah's aunts in Chicago who are nurses who between them rang 6 times was well appreciated. Hopefully we will be able to return to see the Golden Temple tomorrow morning and then go see the Indian Pakistan border closing ceremony which is supposed to be hillarious.

... of that they started playing some Indian pop music. The women and children all began dancing and looked like they were having a fabulous time. The Pakistan side looked almost empty...with only about 100 spectatpors or so. The Indian side was fully packed. At 6 PM the ceremonly began. It consisted of the Indian soliders marching to the gate...while kicking their legs ridiculously high (I guess all that yoga helps) and then staring down the soliders on the Pakistan side. All this with ...

... and humility - as people of all ages are wrapped up and lying close to one another for warmth. The most interesting part was hopping over the family which had decided to sleep in front of our doorway (see photo)! The next day, a bit tired of the constant traveling we decide to head for the mountain towns of Dharamsala and McLeod Ganj! Travel Advice: Stay at the temple accommodations for the experience...but it's loud!