udta Punjab

We spent two nights at the Red Fox Hotel to break up the journey before flying to Kullu, since we'd read that Chandigarh is India's first planned city, and according to India City Walks, is "a benchmark of modernisation, and is a rich, prosperous and green city, rightly called 'the city beautiful'!" 

Of course, everything is a matter of context. We were, in fact, able to (somewhat) walk safely along sidewalks and berms to Sukhna Lake and to Nek Chand's Rock Garden, and everyone surprisingly stopped at the red lights. The lake was more or less a muddy reservoir with pleasant gravel trails alongside, but the rock garden creation was pretty impressive, though complete with hordes of domestic tourists on horrific whirlwind journeys around India in cramped tourist vans. There is still plenty of blight and smell and rubbish, so it's hardly like being beamed into a small cosmopolitan European city, but it is worth a couple of days as a transit stopover.