Amritsar Special Holi Tour 2020

Get the true essence of celebrating the festival in a traditional Punjabi style by visiting a nearby local Amritsar village close to the India-Pakistan border. Besides celebrating the festival of colors this will be an inspiring as well as educating tour. This village tour also offers a fascinating opportunity to know the authentic ways of living in rural Punjab and experience the warmth of the local people besides enjoying the authentic flavors of the land. As an amalgamation of the Amritsar Village Tour and Amritsar Wagah Border Tour, we will also witness the much talked about Flag-lowering ceremony at this Attari-Wagah Border and feel the zeal and valor of India's First Line of Defence which is, in reality, a homogeneous blend of history, entertainment, culture, and sightseeing.

What to expect

The motive behind curating this tour is to make our guests familiar with the Festival of Colors, the way it is celebrated in Punjab especially in Amritsar and also to give them an experience of a lifetime. So to start our tour in a group, we will meet at the common assembly point at City On Pedals Backpackers Hostel in Rani Ka Bagh from 10 min before the start time. We will start our tour once all the guests have joined. After some basic introductions and instructions from our tour leader, we would be taken to the rural side of the city through a cab or a bus.

We will head towards the ancient monument called Pul Kanjari which is just around 100 m from the Indo-Pak border. We will visit a small ancient structure called the Baradari which was burnt down during the India-Pakistan war of 1971. We will also pass through near the last Indian Army post before the India-Pakistan border. We will also get to visit a small war memorial that was built after the 1971 war.

Moving ahead to our friendly village home we will enjoy the traditional drink - tea with some snacks to boost us up before we visit some of the other houses in the neighborhood. During our casual stroll, we will get to perform various village activities such as cooking on a Chulha - a traditional clay oven, learn more about the age-old gobar gas plant, spend some time observing the families’ livestock and milk their cows. We may also enjoy a drive on a tractor on the nearby farm.

Since the motive behind this tour is to make you all familiar with the Holi of Punjab, so this would be the actual place where we will celebrate Holi, the festival of colors with the local villagers. We will then head back to our friendly family house and have our traditional homemade traditional Punjabi lunch. To indulge ourselves more in the colors of the land, we will carry out few activities of dressing ourselves in the traditional Punjabi attires like Phulkari and the turban tying activities. To take back the memories of the lifetime, we would take some beautiful pictures with the host family. After sharing this memorable time, we will bid farewell to our new friends and would move towards Wagah Border for the ceremony.

At this open Indo-Pak border, we will witness the Flag-lowering ceremony commonly called Retreat Ceremony, in which, Border Security Force of India and Pakistan Rangers, march together, to lower their respective flags as an evening ritual on the tune of music and commands shared by the leaders. We will see an amalgamation of celebrations attached with patriotism - a competitive ceremony in which thousands of people gather on both sides and cheer up for their respective motherland. After witnessing the parade, we will head back to the starting point and end the day of celebrations, fun and a lot of colors.