AMRITSAR-DALHOUSIE. 19th-21st October

Sunday. (Leaving Amritsar for Dalhousie). Am up about 9.30ish, and enquire of a rickshaw man outside my room about buses to Dalhousie. He says the bus goes at 1 o'clock, and he can take me at 12.30. Have a leisurely breakfast, and end up going early. Instead of getting the 1 o'clock bus, I get railroaded onto another leaving at 12.15, which is going to Pathankot, where I'm supposed to get another bus to Dalhousie. The bus is three quarters full, and more backpackers on it than Indians, and I think that I'll just follow them when we change at Pathankot. However, when we do arrive, it turns out that I'm the only one getting off, and I'm unceremoniously bundled off in a hurry. I expect that the bus was going to Dharamsala. I ask for Dalhousie at an enquiry kiosk, and am directed to bay number eleven, which doesn't look quite right. So I go to another kiosk further up, to ask again. The fierce-looking Sikh man there is busy counting up tickets, and is very terse with a couple of people who barge up and ask him something. He completely ignores me, and after a couple of minutes it becomes a challenge, and I resolve to wait until he acknowledges me. This happens after another 3 or 4 minutes, when he has finished recording everything about the tickets, and when I ask him, he comes out and walks me the whole distance of the bus station to make sure I get to the right spot. The bus arrives soon after, and we are away by 4.30.

From Amritsar to Pathankot has been through totally flat country, but we are now soon up in the hills, a fast ride, with constant bends in the road, usually a sheer drop to one side, and the driver on the horn, non-stop, swerving to avoid oncoming traffic. Not long after dark , we stop for about half an hour, and everybody gets out and buys food. I decide not to eat anything until after the bus ride. The bus conductor is a rather erratic old guy ; for instance, not long after we took off from Pathankot, he went down the other (3-seat) side of the bus taking the fares, but completely omitted to come back down the other (2-seat) side (where I'm sitting). Figuring that I've already given 4o rupees to the rickshaw, and that a guy who grabbed my big pack and put it on the bus put his hand out for 20, I resolve to enjoy what will probably be the only free ride of my travels. The bus stops occasionally to pick up people etc, and at one stop a guy gets on and sits at the back. An altercation soon develops between this guy and the conductor, both of them going at it hammer and tongs. Then it will simmer down for a while, and the conductor goes up front. Then he'll decide to come back down for some more, and so it goes on, becoming more heated and acrimonious each time. A couple of times the conductor blows his whistle twice and the bus stops altogether. There are fluoro tubes all along the aisle of the bus, and these stay on for the entire journey. As if this wouldn't be enough of a distraction for someone driving along the edge of a precipice in complete darkness, the driver spends more time looking in his rear-view mirror at the argument than in watching the road. We survived however, and reach Dalhousie at about 8.30.

I had rung Dalhousie this morning from a shop near the hotel. I first tried the youth hostel, not that I haven't had enough of them, but because LP said it was only 200 metres from the bus stand. Unsurprisingly, the man says that a hostel-full of schoolkids is arriving tonight (don't the little xxxxxxxS ever actually go to school?), and that they only have two single rooms, and the school might need them, but to come and check when I arrive. Classifying this answer as somewhat sub-standard, I had rung my second choice, the Hotel Crags, which is about a kilometre from the bus stand, and sounds as if it's more out of the way than most of the other places. As I alight from the bus, a small dark man approaches me flashing a 'Hotel Crags' card, and asks if I had rung the hotel this morning. We set off, after I'd poo-pooed his suggestion of a taxi, and refused his offer of helping me carry my stuff. He sets a cracking pace, and as it's all uphill my heart is soon thumping against my rib cage, and I feel thankful that I had a heart-stress test just before I left, which alleged that all was 100% a-okay. I deliberately lag behind to slow him down somewhat, but we are soon near the hotel. The 'Crags' is literally built into the side of a cliff, with a hundred or so large and erratically-placed stone steps leading down to it, and I begin to wonder if I've accidently blundered into some sort of commando training ground.

I'm shown a room at the front overlooking a large valley, where you can lie in bed of a morning and take in the view, if you're so inclined. AND, as it's the off-season, the 400 rupees a night is subject to a 50% discount. So it's 6 bucks a night, including cable tv and hot water. It's a hard life, I tell 'ya, but I'm now feeling rather glad that the youth hostel wasn't a goer. The kitchen is still open (just), and I have a saag masala and dhal, with chapati's, in the dining room. My tum gets to pay for it next day though, as the dhal was a bit too spicy (and possibly undercooked), and I should have had rice as well. The only two people I've seen here are Ganesh (who met me at the bus), and Samil, who cooked my meal, and as I make my way to my room, I realise that I'm probably the only person staying at the hotel, which, given its remote location, begins to take on a sort of Norman Bates feel, but I'm soon abed and asleep.

Up late, and after taking in the magnificent view, have a very leisurely breakfast in the dining room. They seem to want you to have your meals in your room (all you have to do is press a buzzer), but I prefer to sit at a table. After, I set out along Garam Sarak (the 'Hot Road') from Subhash Chowk (near the hotel) to Gandhi Chowk a kilometre or so away, where there is a market. There are two roads, the other is Thandi Sarak (the 'Cold Road'), the difference being that the 'Hot Road' gets the sun. From there I follow a road out of town a couple of kilometres to a good lookout. There was a fairly basic sort of food stall there, and I asked for some chai. They brought some up in a beaten metal cup, and it tasted of evaporated milk. The place seemed to cater for workmen, and they were busy cooking up a large wok of something. An old man talked to me for a while, and we smiled a lot, but neither of us could understand the other. When I left, they refused to accept any payment.

I returned to Gandhi Chowk, and feeling the urge to further stretch my legs, I tried to walk up to a Tibetan village a few kms out. A lot of Tibetan refugees have settled around Dalhousie. The road winds up through numerous buildings of the exclusive Dalhousie Public School, and by the time it flattened out at the top I realised there was still a way to go, and I decided to turn back by a different road. It's quite high up here, and walking takes a lot more out of you than it normally would. I stop for a Sprite at a convenient roadside stall, and the small son of the lady who runs it comes out to chat. He knows some English, and we discuss the relative merits of the Indian and Australian cricket teams, most of which I have to ad lib, but he is a really gung-ho fan.

Back at Gandhi Chowk, I return by the 'Cold Road' for the sake of variety. Judging by the addresses at the front of some of the hotels, I imagine that both the 'Hot' and 'Cold' roads were originally one circular 'Mall,' where the sahibs would no doubt take their morning and evening constitutionals in years gone by. My mother sometimes used to talk about times spent at Dalhousie getting away from the summer heat of Delhi or Amritsar, which is the main reason I thought I'd come and have a look.

The hotel appears to have gained some guests in my absence, :Vicky and Malcolm from New Zealand, in the room above mine, and, opposite me, Shifan, a tourist from the Maldives. I eat dinner alone upstairs, as I think everyone else is taking advantage of the room service, and I get stuck into my book. I succumbed to reading while still in Delhi, scoring a couple of books from the hotel's collection : Philip Roth's 'The Human Stain' which was a good read, and my current book 'If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things' by John McGregor, which I am a bit ambivalent about, despite the rave reviews on the dust jacket ' best book of this year' etc., and his innovative way of writing. Also he made two mistakes in his research, one automotive-related, and the other regarding military medals, which was a really glaring error, because a large part of the actions of two of the characters in the book are nullified by it. Later a young hippie-looking guy comes and sits in the dining room to drink some tea. This is Lev, 22 years old, originally from Russia, but has spent most of his life in Israel. He is a very interesting person to talk to, with an attractively direct gaze, and we chat until Ganesh throws us out at 10 o'clock. Lev is going to be travelling for 18 months, starting all around India, and then going through China, Manchuria, Mongolia and Russia. It seems like half the people I talk to are on these epic journeys, expressly designed to make me feel inadequate. He travels with a guitar, and is heavily into Pink Floyd.

The following day I lie abed quite late, and laze about in my room till late in the afternoon, trying to convince myself that I'm suffering from altitude sickness. I'm just stepping out of my room when I bump into Vicky and Malcolm, who are returning from exploring Dalhousie. Vicky and Malcolm are in their late fifties, it is their first time in India, and they succumbed to hiring a car and driver in Delhi. Now Vicky wants to rest, and Malcolm invites me to go and see a waterfall a few kilometres away, which Ravinder, their driver, recommends. The two of us walk up a fair way to the falls, but Ravinder stays behind to wash the car, as they won't let him do it in Dalhousie, because of the water shortage that plagues everybody who lives on hilltops. Malcolm has done quite a bit of mountaineering in New Zealand in his time, and his father was a climbing mate of Edmund Hillary's, so we talk a lot about our common ground - hiking. The next day they are going for a day trip to Chamba, and he invites me along.

The next day we leave at 9 am, and drive to Kajjiar, a popular plateau where people can go for pony rides or go zorbing, whereby they are locked inside large transparent spheres, and are rolled along, hamster-like. We go for a walk along a track, and come to a school, where the kids have just finished an open-air sort of morning assembly. Vicky starts talking to the teachers, as she used to be a teacher herself, and we get invited for a tour of the school, and meet all the teachers. We motor on to Chamba, a town well off the tourist track, where there are a number of former palaces of local Maharajahs. We just have time to spend an hour in the town museum, which houses a unique collection of miniature paintings, plus weapons, carved fountain slabs, and rumals (the local embroidery). Unfortunately the power is off, so we resort to using our torches to see some parts of the collection. After, we mount a fruitless search for an emporium where rumals can be purchased, and then return to Dalhousie by a different and less precipitous route along the Ravi River.

Lev and Shifan are my tea-drinking companions when I have my dinner. As there is no university in the Maldives, Shifan has spent 7 years at uni in Britain, first in Durham and latterly at Bath, where he gained his PhD in some branch of biology which is searching for a cure for diabetes. He has applied for 3 different research jobs in England, and is travelling around before starting work in February.

Vicky and Malcolm are travelling on to some place between Dharamsala and Shimla tomorrow, and have kindly offered to drop Shifan and I off near Dharamsala ; an offer I'm glad to accept, as I think I'm getting too comfortable for my own good in Dalhousie.