We had a bit of a mammoth journey from Auckland to Chandigargh involving a sleepless night at auckland airport, then a 6am 4 hour flight to Brisbane, a 6 hours waiting at the airport, a 7 hour flight to Singapore, then another 4 hours waiting at the airport followed by a 6 hour flight to Mumbai. By this point we were a bit disorientated from passing through too many time zones, eating too much plane food and generally not getting any sleep so our first challenge of getting across to Mumbai domestic terminal from the international airport at 2:30 am local time ended up being a huge challenge. We managed to get through the immigration and customs fairly quickly and in looking for the transfer bus we managed to walk straight out of the exit.
This wouldn't usually be a problem in most airports except we were in Mumbai. As we have accumulated so much junk/clothes/souvenirs over the past months we needed to store some luggage as well as getting some rupees from an ATM within the main building we had just left. Unfortunately there were two gun wielding jobsworth policemen that were definitely not going to let us back in for security reasons despite seeing us walk out seconds earlier!
After a lot of discussion they eventually agreed to let Ben back in to the cash machine and called over the staff for the luggage storage while Gwenno stayed outside with our bags. At this point we were being pestered for money, taxi rides and out of curiosity and we soon realised that Australasia has made us a little complacent and that we definitely need to get used to the Indian way of doing things! As we couldn't get back in to get the free bus to the domestic terminal we were forced to get a pricey taxi which decided to take us through a few shady parts of town with a stop or two before we eventually arrived at the departure airport two hours after landing for our next flight. This was merely another 9 hours of waiting at the airport which we were by now used to. We eventually got to our hostel in Chandigargh about 53 hours after leaving Auckland!
Lonely planet in hand, our first evening was spent trying to get our bearings which we thought would be fairly simple in the gridded city post ww2 architect designed city, however the roads within the grids were a complete shamble and it took us a long time to find anything! We eventually stumbled across a reasonable looking curry house and celebrated arriving with authentic Indian food and some Kingfisher beer. The next morning we rose early with a plan to see the three main Le Cobusier buildings in the north of the city. It was these three buildings and the contemporary urban planning of the city which had encouraged us to undertake the mammoth 53hour journey. Le Corbusier was a Swiss/French architect who along with a few other notable architects from America and Germany created the International Style in the mid 1920's and with it the concept of all modern architecture. For this reason Corb is hailed as the most important modern architect of recent time and Chandigarh was his greatest building experiment - creating an entire city (based on the human body) from scratch to house millions of Indian refugees dispersed from the land that is now Pakistan - a very noble idea but as we had found out the evening before the westernised architectural principles didn't quite work alongside the hectic Indian way of life.
We had thought that this would be relatively easy to visit the three famous buildings but after a quick visit to the City Museum for a bit of research in the city and it's development the impossible task of visiting the buildings began. We first needed to find and go to as administration building to obtain permits; the building has pretty much no signage and it took a long time to both get into the building and then find the tiny office for our permits. An hour or so of filling in forms and we had received our permits and set off walking to the Capitol Complex. When we arrived the security was very tight and we had to exchange our permits in one building, then were sent to another to wait 45 minutes for an armed chaperone to escort us around, and were then taken to another office to sit for 20 minutes while more forms and permits were filled in by our armed guard. After this we were eventually given a tour of the massive concrete Secreteriat building, first up on the roof (where some guards had literally set up camp) and then down through the curved stairwell at the front of the building. Though all Indian people we spoke to were very proud to live in Chandigargh we were really surprised to see that the famous Corb building had been unsympathetically modified and was a mess inside! Canteens had been set up in offices, there were random sofa's and bags of cement in the corridors and there were folders and sleeping people everywhere! Even chairs and desks designed by Corb which would sell for a fortune in Europe and be part of any museum collection could be seen in rubbish dumps at the side of the building. It was a real shame to see but then we felt that it shows that the Indian people have put their stamp and culture on the building rather than using it in a 'western' way. We then visited the Shivla building which is the parliament building. This is probably the most famous of the three and we were both immediately impressed by the huge concrete facade and famous canopy. Inside we were given a tour with no extra forms or armed guards required and our guide told us about the building and the local politics. Though some renovations had been done the building maintained its original character internally which was really cool to see. The highlight of this place was a massive conical discussion hall from which all government decisions were made - the room had all original Corb benches and the curved walls were draped in Cubist tapestries. The last building that we visited was the High Court. We weren't even given a guide for this one and were just told to wander around. Unfortunately a lot of areas were restricted so we only had access to the public areas, plus there had again been a lot of refurbishment work. This was still a great experience to walk around but again it was a little frustrating because of the disregard for the original building.
Part of the Corb vision for the three buildings was to have large open greenery between them. We found that this didn't really work as there were huge fences between them for security reasons and that the green space was in fact an open wasteland of rubble which was a bit of a shame.
At this point we were fairly cooked from the heat of walking around all day so we had a quick look at the Corb designed Open Hand monument and the High Court museum before heading back towards the hostel. On the way we passed the Chand rock gardens so we thought we would have a quick look in as we were passing. This is a labyrinth garden full of strange sculptures made from bits of rubbish and is fairly large so our quick look ended up being an hour walking through the maze as once you are in you can't get back out again! We were also getting a lot of stares and had to pose for some Photo's for the locals that had never seen white skin before.
By now we were both ready for a tuk tuk back to the hostel to get ready for another big curry for dinner! Having seen enough of the city and the heat we boarded a train destined for northern India and the Himalayan mountain range.