24th January: Are we still in India?

Chandigarh is a 1950's vision of modern India (via Switzerland). Le Corbusier designed a city divided by dual-carriageway roads into square kilometre "sectors", each with low-rise housing and its own shops, schools, doctor, and temples. Large roundabouts join the criss-crossing highways. The result is a city that is completely different from anything else we had seen in India: clean, green, and apparently quite comfortable and convenient for living; the trade-off was that it seemed remarkably soulless.

This is not India  

For breakfast we repeated our trip through the bus depot, at this time of day rather more populated, to Sagar Ratna for a tasty South Indian breakfast of idli and dosas (served with delicious coconut chutney). We then caught a tuk-tuk over to the Fantasy Rock Garden, which apparently comes second only to the Taj Mahal for visitor numbers in India. A narrow path leads through a maze of high walls, waterfalls, and sculpture created from recycled junk (shards of pottery, broken glass and jewellery, and even electrical sockets), ending rather bizarrely in the "third phase", which seemed to be a theme park (with an impressively incongruous camel). 

Posing in front of the waterfall

Apparently I was a curiosity worth photographing; they were polite enough not to ask Clem

Slightly unnerving

Clem enjoying the swing in the "third phase"

Initially we found the rock garden rather underwhelming, but eventually we warmed to its idiosyncratic charm, in part because of the story of its creation. Nek Chand, a refugee from Pakistan following Partition, built the garden by himself over a period of 15 years from the detritus of the newly constructed city. In the 1970s the garden was officially "discovered", and he was given 50 labourers to help him expand his imaginative project. Now it allegedly receives 5000 visitors per day (although not nearly so many were there on the day that we visited, thankfully).

Bidding us farewell

From the rock garden we walked along the road to Sukhna Lake, an artificial lake where we spent a pleasant half-hour on the water in a small, swan-shaped paddle-boat. I left Clem to do most of the work, of course. I'm in entire agreement with Le Corbusier on this one: if you're going to design a city, give it a lake.

Bringing Switzerland to India...

...starting with the lake and paddle-boats

Swanning around (not much space for luggage though)

After a short ride on a cycle rickshaw, which took the large roundabouts with aplomb, we arrived in Sector 26 for a very late lunch. The food at Copper Chimney was good, and as a bonus I was able to watch Courtney Walsh and Curtley Ambrose bowling out the Australians. Apparently Indian TV wanted some old school retribution for the white-washing that the current Australian team have just given the Indians. After lunch we asked the lobby of a nearby hotel a question that Clem was pressing me to ask: whether there was a nearby barber. We were told that for religious reasons all barbers in Punjab were closed every Tuesday; thus my increasingly bushy beard lived to bristle another day.

From Sector 26 we took a cycle rickshaw to the Rose Garden, another impressively verdant part of Le Corbusier's grand design. We wandered around for an hour or so through what is apparently the largest rose garden in India. There was even a patch of Maggie Thatchers (white rather than red, of course).

English rose?

Impressive colour coordination

From the Rose Garden we walked back towards Sector 17, which holds the "city centre". This is a large square surrounded by shops, rather like an American outdoor mall but with more space in between. We browsed around for a while, adding yet more books to our burdensome bags, and then wandered back through the dark to our hotel.  Our lunch was so large and so late that we didn't need dinner (laziness might have been a factor too), so we munched on crisps and biscuits left over from our train journey.  Classy.