India - Shimla and Chandigarh.. or is that Hereford & Milton Keynes

On the way to Chandigarh, we broke the journey up with a stop in the old English hill station town of Shimla, set on top of a mountain a few hours down the valley. Shimla started out life as a summer retreat for the English during the British rule of India, to escape the searing heat of the low lands though quickly became pretty much a year round base for the ruling Brits due to its far more agreeable climate. As such, the majority of the buildings, the general town layout and the overriding look and feel of the place is British. You could almost be wandering through some hillside town in Herefordshire or somewhere.

We only stopped a couple of nights here and had hoped to take the narrow gauge mountain railway from here down to the capital city of the Punjab state - Chandigarh, though our luck was out again and all tickets for the train were booked out. So we jumped on the bus again instead and 10 hours later arrived in Chandigarh.

Chandigarh is another strange place. It is set out like Milton Keynes with touches of Basildon in places. All grid system roads separated up into ‘Sectors’ with typically British style ’60-70s architecture and pedestrianised shopping squares. Apparently it was the first ‘modern’ city to be put in place post Indian independence and was supposed to be a vision of the future for India, with structure & order replacing the haphazard chaotic cities that defined the rest of the country. 60 years post independence though and the majority of Indian cities are still chaotic haphazard places from what we have seen – though all the better and more full of character for it as well.

There were only two redeeming features of Chandigarh as far as we could tell – a fantastic restaurant called ‘The Copper Chimney’ which served some of the best Tandoori chicken & Tandoori cauliflower (weird – but strangely good!) we had in India, and the second being a strange place called ‘Nek Chand’s Rock Garden’.

Nek Chand was sent to Chandigarh from Pakistan post independence to act as a road inspector. When he was initially struck by how much waste was being generated as all the old traditional villages were cleared to make way for the new modern Chandigarh, he started collecting up the waste, taking it back to his home just outside the city & recycling it all into sculptures and art. It was 15 years and many tons of recycled waste later when the government discovered what he had been doing, all of it on unauthorised state owned land. Thankfully though instead of destroying it they encouraged Ned to continue with it, now acting as India’s largest recycling scheme & the countries second most popular tourist attraction after the Taj Mahal.

It is a strange & surrealist place which is still being added to today and feels somewhere between a living Salvador Dali painting and a fantasy film set. He not only used the rubbish from the city, but also all the disused local rock & stone that once was the walls etc of the old villages. It would’ve been even better if it hadn’t be 45 degrees as we were strolling around it – oh for the temperatures of the mountains again, cold is so much more bearable than heat!

It was from Chandigarh that after 14 months & countless good times we said our farewells to Leanne, as she headed off to catch her flight to Mumbai then back to London. We on the other hand had another 6 hour bus trip to Delhi and an overnight train journey to arrive in our next destination, the holy city of Varanasi.