Bár a történet folytatásával az elmúlt egy évben teljesen elmaradtam, azért egy szokásos falinaptárat mégis sikerült megszerkesztenem - így év vége felé.

Használja egészséggel minden kedves olvasóm!

Eddigi fotóim felhasználásával készítettem egy asztali naptárat olvasóim számára, melyet innen le is tölthetnek, majd ki is nyomtathatnak:

http://julay.diinoweb.com/files/Naptar_2009.pdf

Angol verzióban az A4-es falinaptár pedig így néz ki:
http://julay.diinoweb.com/files/Calendar_2009.pdf

Boldog Karácsonyt és Boldog Új Évet !

Tegnapi igéretemhez híven bemutatok egy angol nyelvű leírást a híres szállodáról.

HOTEL SAVOY
India's largest mountain holiday resort hotel

“But where is Mussoorie " the visitor to India might ask It, isn't easy to locate on the map. Most Indians will have heard of it, but the new arrival may be forgiven his or her ignorance just as the visitor to Britain may be forgiven for asking, “Where's Blackpool ?”

Mussoorie is in the mountains (about 7000 ft up in the Himalayas) and far from the sea, but in many ways it shares the characteristics of an English seaside resort - packed with people in the summer months, still and silent with a white Christmas in the winter, while the monsoon mist will remind you of the Scottish highlands-except that it's warmer.

The British have always needed their summer holiday resorts, and Mussoorie, like other hill-stations in India, was almost entirely an invention of the British, it is in fact, just a little over 170 years old.

Back in the nineteenth century, when air-conditioning and refrigeration were very much in the future, British empire builders sweated it out in the plains during the long hot summers. Sahibs cursed, memsahibs fretted, and children faded away or were sent home to England. Inevitably their eyes turned to the hills, where, after the Gurkha War of 1815, extensive hill tracts fell into British hands. Captain Kennedy started the first settlement in Simla, Captain Young pioneered Mussoorie. Both were Irishmen, they naturally introduced potato cultivation in the hills-with great success. But people came too, and in large numbers. Simla was to become the summer capital of British India, Mussoorie was to become its pleasure capital.

Captain Young built a shooting - box on Camels Back in 1823 and a large residence in Landour in 1826 Within ten years there were over a hundred houses in the hill-station. By the turn of the century. Mussoorie was a small town, rivalling Simla and Darjeeling in popularity. To it flocked Maharajas landowners and civil and military officers on leave. Before long the need for a really large luxury hotel was felt, and Mr Lincoln stepped in to fill the gap. He acquired the estate of a former school - "Mr Maddock's Mussoorie School."-but naturally new buildings had to be erected for the hotel which was named after the Savoy in London.

When we realize that the first motor-car did not reach Mussoorie until 190, we can only marvel at the ingenuity and perseverance with which people and goods reached the hill-station. In those early days men came up the bridled path from Rajpur on horseback, while women and children were carried up in "jhampanies”. a crude sort of palanquin adapted to hill travel. Some brave spirits walked the seven miles from Rajpur to Mussoorie. The present motor-road (about 14 miles to Rajpur) is really the old Cart Road built by Mackinnon to serve breweries and other enterprises. (where the British soldier went beer naturally followed and the first brewery had been started in 1830). Everything heavy including materials for building the Savoy came uphill by bullock-cart "Mr. Buckle's Bullock-cart train" was a sort of cargo-express creaking along the winding road between Dehra and Mussoorie. Massive Victorian or Edwardian furniture, grand pianos, billiard-tables barrels of cider and crates of champagne all the appurtenances of a hotel that was to: become as well-known as the Raffles in Singapore or the Imperial in Tokyo came up in these lumbering bullock-carts.

The hotel was opened to the public in the summer of 1902 and, as one resident put it." The Savoy Hotel has sprung, phoenix-like from the ashes of the Mussoorie School. The estate was (and still is) the largest, acreage-wise. of any hill station hotel in India.

All was ready in time for a royal visit in March 1906. Her Royal Highness the Princess of Wales ( later Queen Mary ) arrived in Mussoorie. She attended a garden party in the spacious grounds of the Savoy and possibly influenced by the sight of the two great deodars in front of the hotel (even then over a hundred years old)planted a tree outside Christ Church about a hundred yards away. The plaque can still be seen almost embedded in the trunk of the tree. The Savoy deodars still stand, more enormous each year-they must be almost 300 years old; the oldest trees in Mussoorie, older than the hill-station itself protected in the old estate when else where other fine trees have fallen to the axe. Among the souvenirs the princess took home with her were some of Mussoorie's famous walking sticks purchased in the Landour Bazaar. We are told that at least one of them was given to King Edward VII who possessed a large collection of walking sticks.

Hardly had the royal visitor departed, when Mussoorie was rocked by an earthquake, the most severe recorded in the region. The Savoy was badly damaged along with many other building in the hill-station. The hotel had to close for over a year. But in 1907 it reopened and two years later it was ablaze with light-for it was in1909 that electricity came to Mussoorie. Before that, the vast ballroom and dining room had been hung with chandeliers, the rooms lit with candles, and the kitchens with spirit-lamps.

It was after World War I, in the "gay twenties" that the Savoy entered its halcyon and most popular days. The Savoy Orchestra played every night, while the Ball-room was full with couples doing fox-trot, then the latest dancing craze. But you could waltz or tango or 'begin the beguine,' according to your inclinations. Wealthy India princes and their retinues occupied wings of the hotel and threw lavish parties and fancy-dress balls.

The famous traveller Lowell Thomas, visiting Mussoorie in 1926, wrote: "There is a hotel in Mussoorie ( the Savoy ) where they ring a bell just before dawn so that the pious may say their prayers and the impious get back to their own beds."

It is said that the halls and corridors of the historic Savoy Hotel are haunted by the ghost of Lady Garnet Orme, who was found dead in mysterious circumstances many years ago. Apparently strychnine had been placed in her medicine bottle, but how it got there, on one could tell. Agatha Christie used the circumstance of the crime in her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920). The case was quite a sensation in its time, as it involved crystal-gazing and table-rapping seances, the victim having been a practitioner of the occult.

A famous mind reader claimed to have found the murderer but nothing could be proved. And Rudyard Kipling wrote to his friend Conan Doyle, urging him to use the case as a new adventure for Sherlock Holmes; but Holmes never did make the trip to India. The case remained unsolved. In fact, it came to a dead-end when Lady Garnet Orme's doctor was also found dead ( of strychnine poisoning ) a few months later. But not at the Savoy I

Everyone came to the Savoy including great Indians such as Motilal Nehru, then a successful barrister, and his son Jawaharlal, just back from Cambridge. When Jawaharlal came to Mussoorie in 1920 he had not yet entered politics; but as the result of an incident in Mussoorie he was soon to find himself in the thick of the freedom struggle.

In May 1920, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru's mother and wife were not keeping well and he brought them (and his infant daughter Indira) up 11o the salubrious climate of Mussoorie. They stayed at the Savoy. Also staying there was a delegation from Afghanistan; they were in India for political talks with the British Government. Pandit Nehru did not know about the Afghans until after his arrival; but the Government; fearing that he might try to contact them and influence them in some way, asked him to sign an undertaking that he would not get in touch with any of the delegates. This he refused to do. He was not really interested in meeting the Afghans; but he insisted that no one had the right to prevent him from doing so.

Ordered 'by the authorities to leave Mussoorie within 24 hours, he kept his wife and mother at the Savoy, gave instructions for them to continue their medical treatment, and returned to Allahabad. Having no other engagements just then, he decided to visit a few hundred farmers who were camping on the banks of the Yamuna under the leadership of Baba Ramchandra. They appealed to him to help free them from the toils of greedy landlords who were overtaxing them and making it difficult for them to earn a living. It was his first real contact with the masses, and for the first time he realised where his true sympathies lay-with the poor of India-and from then on his life was to take a new direction.

After India's Independence in 1947. Mussoorie went through a difficult period. The British had gone and the wealthy princes and land-owners were also finding times difficult. Hotels and boarding-houses began to close down. Then in the early sixties the prosperous Indian middle-classes became hill-station conscious and again crowds thronged the Mall on summer evenings. Now in the '90's the foreign tourist is discovering the delights of the lower Himalayas. The Savoy makes a good headquarters for those who simply wish to get away from the “heat and dust" of the plains. The Savoy's trees, lawns and extensive grounds provide the right atmosphere of tranquillity.

Anand K. Jauhar, whose father Rai Sahib Kirparam acquired the hotel from Mr G. D. Lincoln in 1946, is keen to preserve the "old world" atmosphere of the Savoy and its links with the Raj. To walk along its halls and corridors is like walking into the past.

Mussoorie still has many reminders of the past. The old Library, just below the Savoy, is well over a hundred years old; on its shelves are many rare books of travel and subjects related to India. In Mussoorie's days of wine and roses, the Library Bazaar was at the centre of the social whirl. Every evening a regimental band. occupied the band-stand and entertained strollers and those who sipped tea (or stronger beverages) in the adjacent Criterion and Savoy restaurants. The first-floor of the Library was, in fact, the Savoy Restaurant for many years. "A boon and a blessing to man" as one resident put it.

Other 'historic' sites in Mussoorie are the ruins of the old breweries-the Crown Brewery near Skinner's estate in Barlowganj; and the Mackinnon Brewery on the road to Hathi-paon, past the Municipal Gardens.

Old cemeteries-one on the Camel's Back Road and one up at Landour have many interesting graves going back to Mussoorie's early years. Here lie the hill station's first pioneers and settlers as well as generals and common soldiers, memsahibs and their infants, schoolmasters, reverend gentlemen and brewers. Here lies John Lang the first Australian-born novelist, who died in Mussoorie in 1864.

Here lies Frederick Wilson, who married a beautiful girl from Hursil and was the first man to float timber down the Ganga. Here lies Alfred Hindmarsh, "one of the six hundred;" a survivor of the Charge of the Light Brigade during the Crimean War. And many others.:....

Famous names. If that is what you want, the Savoy register is full of famous names. The Nehrus, Motilal and Jawaharlal and Mrs. Indira Gandhi. His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Hails Selassie, the Emperor of Ethiopia. His Majesty the King of Nepal. His Majesty the Crown Prince of Laos, Pearl S. Buck, the Nobel Prize-winning author. All these and many others have stayed at the hotel at some time or other.

Mr Jauhar closes his register with a flourish-a flourish that is typical of the man-and takes me out to his giant deodars, to share the splendid view of the snow-clad peaks of the Himalayas; from the Bandarpoonch massif in the west, then Srikantha and the Gangotri group, to the Chaukhamba massif (7138 m) in the east.

Stand beneath these deodars and listen to the wind. These trees have witnessed the entire history of Mussoorie, they are much older than the hill-station--they were here when the Mansuri ridge had just a few shepherds, huts, when sheep and cattle grazed on the Mansur shrub which was so plentiful and gave the place its name.

Although Anand Jauhar is keen to preserve the past, he is also looking to the future. After all, people want more than history and atmosphere; they want a little fun while they are on holiday. And Mussoorie has a tradition of fun and frolic. That tradition hopefully will continue.

With something of the old spirit and something of the new, the Savoy carries on......

Ruskln Bond, 1986