After two weeks in the Himalayas we decided to move off the mountains and look for something different. Originally we planned to go directly to Dehra Dun where my vipassana meditation course took place but we very advised not to miss Chandigarh, the capital of "Punjab" (a state of India). So we left Manali two days earlier to make time for seeing this city.
But our journey was everything but without problems. Out bus left in the afternoon and it got to Chandigarh in the early morning. (In India even the distances that seem short can mean a long journey, because of the average speed of ~40 km/h. Especially in the mountains.) The rain was pouring the whole day and the whole night so we couldn't see the scenery. Then we slept but around 1AM we woke up because the bus had stopped. We didn't really understand what was going on, then after an hour people started worrying, when in the end someone figured that a big landslide had buried the road in front of us, and now no car can move either way. So we waited for about 3 hours in the dark, in the rain when finally something happened and we could continue. After a few days we heard this thing was even in the news in Delhi so it must have been some unusually big landslide.
But this would have been alright. The real problem rose when we arrived to Chandigarh: our bags, which were put to the trunk of the bus were soaked. But literally, the water was flowing from my bag. Alas I was too tired at 5-6AM to fo anything about it, and also it was a private bus so it just dropped us off on the street, there was no bus station or any office to complain. Se we left the place without any fight, we took a rickshaw to find a hotel where we could hang our stuff to dry. (By "stuff" I don1t mean just clothes, but sleeping bags, books etc.)
A quick tip for budget backpackers visiting Chandigarh: don't believe Lonely Planet, the price for hotels is not six times more than in other cities. It's just two times more (double room 600 RS at the time of writing), you can find a cheap place if you're willing to walk(/ask) around an hour.
Interruption: a strange thing I saw on the main square of Chandigarh:
And people were queuing for this thing... Whatever.
I'll show you the city in pictures rather than text, but still, a few words: Similarly to Islamabad, this is a planned city. The square blocks it's made of are called "sectors", there are a total of 40 of them and (more or less) each of them serves a different purpose. It's a nice green city (compared to other cities of India for sure), it's inhabited by Punjabi people, who mostly believe in the Sikh religion and they wear turbans. Oh yes, and the city was planned by Le Corbusier, and if I was an architect I could tell you hours about it but I'm not so I really hope our friend Zoli writes something useful about this in a comment :)
And finally the pictures, 34 in total, so it's not a big gallery, just the essence.
