I was able to knock out all the main attractions in Amritsar yesterday. I had originally planned to take a bus today to Dharamshala today in the afternoon, but it seems like that bus doesn't exist anymore, so I bought a ticket for an 8pm bus, and planned to just spend the day hanging out in Amritsar and catching up on some blogs from Australia.

I started out by going back to Brother's Dhaba in the morning for some breakfast. I had a mango lassi and an Amritsari kulcha thali, which was very good and very filling. The Kulcha was served with a pad of butter to spread around before eating, creating a nice warm rich piece of bread to dip into the chickpeas or the curd.

I then walked across the street to the Town Hall, home of the Partition Museum, where there was also a Starbucks, hoping to use the wifi to do some work. I was waiting in line behind a group of younger kids who were taking painfully long to order, and the cashier eventually just had me skip them, which was very funny. I sat down and tried to sign in to the wifi: it appeared like it would accept a foreign phone number, but I was not able to receive the OTP that supposedly got sent to my phone number to login. Luckily, it somehow just let me log in after a while, possibly due to some bug on their login page, so I was able to connect to the internet.

I spent a few hours in Starbucks before I headed out to get some dinner. I went to Bharawan Da Dhaba across the street, where I had eaten at my first night in Amritsar. I ordered dal makhani, a popular North Indian dish with whole black lentils cooked with spices and butter. It was really good, but the kulcha was the highlight of the meal.

I headed back to the hotel to check out and try to find transportation to the bus. I was not really sure where the bus would be departing from: I had tried to scout out the bus stop yesterday on Google Maps but wasn't able to find it. While I was waiting for the hotel staff to find a driver, they explained that they had accidentally marked on Booking.com that I had not checked in to the hotel, which would mean that I would not be able to leave a review, and they really aggressively wanted me to call Booking.com in Delhi to get them to reinstate the reservation on the app so I could leave a review, but this was their mistake and I had no interest in making a phone call. Maybe they could tell I was annoyed because they offered me some chai and told me to sit down.

Eventually an auto rickshaw driver came to take me to Hall Gate, a large roundabout right outside of the old city. Along the way we almost got into a car accident with a cow, because neither my driver nor the cow wanted to yield the right of way. We got to Hall Gate and I walked around aimlessly for a few minutes before finally deciding to ask someone who worked for one of the many travel agencies there if he knew where my bus was. Luckily he did, and he sent me to walk under an overpass, where I saw the bus waiting. I checked in (they were waiting for me), and hopped on board. It was a "semi-sleeper" bus, which I guess means that the seats recline a lot, but they don't lie fully flat.

The bus filled up about half way, before we headed to another bus stop about ten minutes away to fill up the rest of the bus. We then drove for about two hours before we pulled along the side of the highway to stop at a restaurant. Most of the passengers got out, but I stayed on board (partially out of laziness and partially because the guy sitting next to me also decided to stay on and I didn't want to wake him). We then crossed into Himachal Pradesh (a different state), and the driver told us the road would get really bumpy and windy and so we may get sick. I found this lulled me to sleep, and next thing I knew I was being woken up by an employee that my stop was coming up.

It was around 12:30am when we got to a gas station in Dharamshala that served as the bus stop. I was one of the few passengers to get off, and luckily there was a taxi driver waiting there who could take me up the mountain about 3km to Mcleodganj, a hill station where I had booked a hotel for the next two nights. I didn't have to pay the full fare because I shared the taxi with two girls from the same bus, who were going to a different village further up the mountain. We drove to Mcleodganj but had a hard time finding the hotel, because Google Maps wasn't really accurate about the road layout or about the Hotel's location, and there was no sign for the hotel. Eventually he just told me to get out and said your hotel is somewhere here, and drove away. Luckily I had the hotel's phone number so I could send a message on Whatsapp, and an employee named Rohit came out to greet me and show me to my room. He told me not to pay now, but he wanted to keep my passport for the night to pre-fill all the paperwork, which I went along with. We were so high in the mountains that it was freezing cold, but luckily there were warm blankets in the bed and I fell right asleep.