Amritsar - part 1

We arrived in Amritsar on Monday morning, following an overnight 8hr flight from Birmingham. India is 5hr 30m ahead of UK time. We’d expected to be tired on arrival, so hadn’t organised to do anything on the first day. Fortunately our room was ready and we were able to check in and grab a couple of hours sleep. After a swim in the hotel pool, we headed out for dinner - a 20 minute Uber ride to the outskirts of the city, to a restaurant in a beautiful garden. Delicious food.

Today, Tuesday, we’d arranged a private guide for the day who collected us from the hotel at 09.30. First stop, the Golden Temple. Our guide was a Sikh, so he was able to give us a real insight into the history, including the storming of the temple by the army in 1984, and tell us lots about Sikhism itself. Whilst there were plenty of people about, it didn’t give the feel of being crowded and actually felt like a bit of an oasis of calm in a busy and noisy city.

The temple complex is massive and we spent quite a bit of time exploring the Langar - the community kitchen/dining facility which forms part of the complex. Here food donated by farmers is prepared and cooked by an army of volunteers and served free to 100,000 people a day (200,000 at weekends). The scale and organisation is amazing. Some of the cooking processes are more modern, eg a semi-automated chapati-making machine and the use of LPG, but a lot of the processes are manual and much of the cooking is done over wood fires.