A Strong Contender for Worst Bus Ride of My Life

We are currently in the very small town of Vashist. Yesterday we came by bus to Manali from McLeod Ganj where Melissa and I parted ways with Andrew. We had spent a week there and I certainly could have stayed longer but Mel only has a week left in India so it was time to see more. Andrew on the other hand was going into an 11 day Vipassana retreat three days later so he stayed behind. I hope that he'll be O.K. by himself. When I first found him in Delhi he was filthy, had shrunk to only six foot, and was barely able to feed himself. He was disoriented and had trouble forming sentences in English. He spoke in some sort of pre-consciousness, hippy speak. Over the weeks though he grew to his normal 7'5" and we began to dialogue about the "outside world". Hopefully he'll be alright.

We all loved the atmosphere of McLeod and the minuscule villages neighboring it. On my last day there I was leaning on the ledge, looking out into valley and knew that I would miss that place for the rest of my life.

But it was time to go and we had decided to go South East. We purchased some tickets for an overnight bus whose route skirts narrow mountain passes for most of the 10 hour ride, caught a taxi down part of the mountain to the bus station where the driver tried to charge me a luggage fee of ten rupees to stick the bags in the cargo bay. I almost fell for it but realized pretty quick that this was just another India scam. No way was that guy gonna get my twenty-five cents after I just paid eleven dollars for a ten hour luxury bus ride.

So shortly after we were off and nail-biting. We had all of these visions of rough, unpaved roads wide enough for a small Geo Metro and a medium sized goat but that would inevitably be forced to accommodate two large bus's and possibly a herd of goats. It was all true and worse. The rain started after an hour or so as we barreled along through the thickness of deep clouds. The Xanax helped me to come to terms with my mortality in a fairly La-de-da fashion.

So the events that follow are as I remember them. I was dozed off when we came to a stop around 3 a.m. in the pouring rain for what I thought would be one of the pee-brakes. it turned into the driver drinking Chaya and mentioning almost in passing, that we would be there for an hour. I had already refused him ten rupees for tossing my bag into a wet bay and just didn't have the nerve to question his work ethic. An hour later the driver stepped up into the cockpit, turned the key, The engine whined, and we all got out again to stare blankly into the black rain.

Now it's three hours later, people are sleeping where they can, it's 6 a.m. and the engine turns over. Fuck Yeah!. We enthusiastically jump back onto the bus, smiles around and another bus employee states that this will be a great place to stay unitl the roads are cleared. What? So the story goes that the roads were washed out, landslides were up and down the mountain pass and we were to wait until the rain subsided and the roads could be cleared. It was turning into a hell. The rain stopped, the sun broke, and the flies gathered. The place we were stuck at had drinks but no food and there was no word on the roads.

O.k., hell. At I don't know what time but certainly hours after we were scheduled to be in Manali, the bus was moving with the pasengers and their flies. It was true about the roads and the wash-out. The going was slow and a bit nerve-wracking since I had slept off the Xanax. It seemed to be taking forever to get there. Mel was CRANKY, and I was hot and sticky. O.K. I was cranky too, but not as a bad as her. Don't let her tell you different. So anyway, it was four in the afternoon when we finally reached the bus staion, ten hours after schedule and twenty after we left McLeod. We went and had a beer.