The next day (which was only Tuesday, and today is Saturday, so this really is a long update!) saw us getting up at 8.30am and eating breakfast at the hotel again (it was included...). At breakfast the Palampur University promoting Indian man added his phone number to my information. We may, in fact, actually end up going to this uni at some point, we'll see.
After packing up and checking out, we walked over to Sanjauli, which was far more tiring than the night before! We got up to the monastery (up that hill again) totally shattered by the walk. We met John up there and played a bit of badminton with the monks, which was good fun even though the shuttlecock fell off the side of the building a few times. We got permission from Lekshey back at TJ to stay a night at Sanjauli, then set off for Shimla.
We caught the bus there, which was totally packed. A lady handed her toddler to the conductor who slipped him under some the bars and gave him to John to look after. In England, no one would ever trust a total stranger (never mind a foreigner) to have their child sit on the stranger's knee on a bus, but this – as you've probably realised – is not England. The bus cost us a massive Rs4 (about half a penny). In Shimla, we went to a restaurant at a hotel (the Combermere Hotel, if you wish to know). First we went to their posh restaurant, which didn't have what we wanted (and was expensive), so we went instead to their rooftop restaurant (which is street level to the main street in Shimla – eight floors or so up from the next street down), which served pizzas (how Indian...). I had a pizza which was very nice, despite its lack of tomato or tomato pureé, but didn't join the other two in having a Foster's (Rs100 a bottle is cheap, but still). After paying, we discovered that it was already 2pm, so all our plans were fairly disjointed (no big deal, really), and so we left sharpish.
After a quick stop at the HPTDC office, we walked off towards the Viceregal Lodge (and botanical gardens), after first passing a dog in the streets that was having a fit and foaming at the mouth (possibly rabid, we concluded). I should mention that, in addition to its monkeys, Shimla also has a lot of dogs, who spend literally all their time asleep on the streets (pedestrianised streets, so they don't get run over). It was a long way out, and took us longer to find than it should have done. We took wrong turns, were misdirected, had to backtrack, etc., etc. and finally ended by taking a long loop back round to the start of a road we'd previously decided not to take (which was, as I'm sure you've guessed, the correct road). Before we hit the lodge, however, we did mistake some other building for it first (it was actually part of the Indian Institute for Advanced Learning). We found it eventually (hurray!) and after paying our entry fee were just in time to tag onto a tour around. The tour was good: both interesting and short (long tours do, as you know, get fairly dull, no matter where they are). The lodge itself is a very nice building (pictures of it, and of everything else, will appear in good time) with a bit of history – it was from there that the viceroy of India ruled the whole country during Summer (Delhi and Kolkata (Calcutta) being too warm for us English types then). It was also the setting of the 1947 Shimla Conference, which discussed independence and partition and was attended by all the usual suspects – Mountbatten, Nehru, Gandhi, etc. I also found a photo in the lodge of a lady who was granddaughter of Earl Grey, so that's the Newcastle connection to Shimla. The lodge also contained photographic evidence of the British influence on the Indian mustache – and a great influence it was. At a café, we saw some of the much cooler, apparently less vicious and very camera shy grey/white monkeys. I got (that is tried to get) a couple of pictures of them, then we got ripped off for a taxi (ripped off, though still much less than a pound) to Summer Hill – a small village from where we began our search for the elusive Chadwick Falls (a waterfall, as the name suggests).
We walked for ages in every direction possible; we asked many people, who all, typically, pointed in different directions; and we eventually, as night would come soon enough and we were no closer to finding it (the last estimate from the last helper was about an hour's walk), gave up and caught a bus back to Shimla. Instead of braving the walk up the hill to Shimla's main streets, we caught a lift up (run by the HPTDC, full of adverts – mainly for their own hotels – and costing Rs7) to The Mall (the main street). We stopped at a bookstore full of antique books, which I had to resist (among them was 'King Lear' and some book called 'Theologica Moralis' which sounded like a bit of a laugh), though Mike picked one up on Hinduism.
We then walked back to Sanjauli and went for dinner at the same restaurant as the night before. I didn't quite like the meal as much this night, but it was still very good. We were told by Bobby that he takes nothing but love (when we confirmed that there was to be no tip), but that, to signal our approval, we were to ring a bell in the doorway – which we gladly did. We then got a photo of us with him, before going back up to Sanjauli.
The monks, being as they are, had gone out of their way for us, bringing mattresses, sheets, duvets and pillows for me and Mike to sleep in one of John's rooms (he can spare them, having three and all). Despite our attempts, the monks were quite unwilling to let us make the beds ourselves, so we helped as we could (i.e. not very much). We were then called on by the monks to help out with their mp4 player, after which we retired to John's flat and chilled out for the evening.
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