Maya Palace Chandigarh

I keep on travelling to different states in India. Nah, not for me to stay in hotels and burn my fingers aand pocket. Here's a nice site www.payinguests.com . Whenever I need to get hold of an aaccommodation in any city I just search. If it is urgent then I give my own SOS advt. , which aagain is free of cost. A convenient way, hats off to the concept.

Headed out of Delhi on the fast train to Kalka - in class AC Seater 2nd (Indian railways have numerous, complicated classes). Neatly uniformed staff bringing a seemingly endless number of things a newspaper, bottles of water, tea (naturally), food. All very comfortable and efficient, whizzing across the plains of Northern India. You do however see some horrible shanty towns clustered by ...

... you can spend hours just spotting them! Small plant pots with a hole drilled in the bottom and "strung" onto wooden rods to make walls.There is now a 3rd phase which is being done with the help of more people and this is on a much bigger scale - waterfall (or more accurately water cascade), much higher walls and more intricate balconies and terraces. It is impressive but I preferred the original areas. Wasnt tryimg so hard!
At the end of the 3rd phase they were ...

... only had two bags of chips and several cokes on the way up). The food was a nice change of pace from the Indian I have been eating for the last few months and I had a nice view of the snow capped mountain in the distance.

After dinner, I wondered over to a rooftop bar and settled in for a beer. On my second beer, a friendly Tibetan waved me over. When I sat with their group (a guy from France and two Tibetans), he told me whenever they see ...

After leaving Dharamshala we drove to Delhi with one bush camp in between near Chandigarh. None of us were expecting a particularly pleasant time camping because of the massive overpopulation and their tendency to gravitate towards us whenever we pull up in the truck. However, in the middle of one of the ...

... me of Canberra, the Australian capital, another planned 20th century city). From a map viewing and walking point of view it's all quite boring and very spread out, but despite its aesthetic shortcomings the city residents are quite proud of their home; it's greener, cleaner and more affluent than other Indian cities of comparable size. Oh, and they have the Rock Garden too. This place rocks The Rock Garden is a place that belies the ordered city ...

Now we are in Chandigarh. It came to be the capital of the Punjab after partition. It's a modern city designed by French architect Le Corbisier. Unlike any other Indian city it's on a grid system and pleasant to walk around. You can tell it's rich here in the Punjab compared to the places we have come from. Our bus journey from Amritsar to Chandigarh was luxurious compared to the buses in Rajahstan. They even gave ...

... then it was three, then we were held for ransom, then turned back, and then I'm in Srinagar. Without the help of my friends, the journey could have been quite scary. It took 27 hours to get to Srinagar from Chandigarh. I paid whatever the rickshaw driver asked for taking me to Residence Road. The two hotels I saw were both out of my budget and both were perfect. I filled out all the lengthy check-in paperwork over room service and basked in the hot shower. I was in Kashmir.

... we've been waved into the band with as much contraband as we could carry by the chilled out security.   Mind you, much of our time here has not really been worth it for the cricket.  When there has not been Mancunian-style rain (at least one day of play has been lost to the weather) there has been occasionally feckless cricket from England which means that with one day to go there is a half decent chance that we're going to lose the game.   The ...

... Swiss born Le Corbusier. This said Chandigarh is a great place and we enjoyed wandering around its modernist layout which gave it an almost futuristic feel..albeit a post appocolyptic one. Large wide boulivards cris-cross the city edged by scruffy, lumpy pavements strewn with piles of rubbish, not quite what Corbusier had immagined I'm sure. Our best find was the 'Subway sandwich bar' which to our amazement created wonderful european style bagettes and fresh cut sandwiches that were ...