SOLO SO HIGH
Travel Series, Part 4
One of the most salutary effects of travelling with, and among, strangers, is the gift of anonymity. We don’t have to impress anyone. No one judges us. The fact that once we part, we might not even see each other again, if we don’t need to, was the icing on the cake.
F5Escapes, which had organised the tour for us, took great pains to take us to the most out-of-the-way places, places not on the usual tourist routes. But no tour to Amritsar would have been complete without a visit to this exquisitely beautiful place of worship of the Sikhs, the Golden Temple. The temple looks like gold because most of it is covered with gold. The latest offering was 160 kilos of gold. Since they required pure gold, they, apparently converted 22-carat gold into 24-carat gold. Every day, in the massive kitchen food enough to feed the 100,000 daily visitors, is cooked, by volunteers, and fed to people of every religion. Everyone is welcome and treated equally. In the serpentine four-lane queues that we waited in, there was no jostling, no shoving, no jumping the line.
They are a gentle people, the Sikhs…but also one of the fiercest warriors of the land.
We had laid back breakfast, lunches, and dinners in this room without walls. The trees peaked in, birds flew by to wonder at how much we could eat, and flitted about around our feet, chattering and gossiping as they stared at us. Flowering creepers festooned the roof and dropped down to wave at us in cheerful abandon.
The paragliding flights took off from Billing and landed at Bir. The segment is said to be the second-best paragliding site in the world, and there are more foreigners there than Indians.
This is a guide and I, aloft on my very first foray into paragliding.
We went to visit a 200-year old farmhouse in Amritsar, filled with huge wooden caskets and furniture and furnishings two-century old. We were taken on a tour of the extensive agricultural fields owned by the family, on a tractor.
At the end of the trip, we bid goodbye to each other, promised to keep in touch, and went our separate ways. I don’t know what my travel companions took away from the tour.
For me, it was as if I had peeped into the forbidden reaches of a mysterious cave, beyond which lay Paradise, as if I had peeled away layers of myself to reveal the Suma has hidden there, a Suma I never knew existed. I came back with these words in my heart and mind and soul, “I can! Oh, yes, I can!”
©️ 2021 Suma Narayan. All Rights Reserved.
Shoutout to Erik Rittenberry for this very evocative poem about unthinking excess and conspicuous consumption, and FOMO!