India...Nima picked us up in the "heist" bus at 7:30, I was up at 5:00, to take the now very familiar drive past Pashipatinath and over the forlorn, sad river to the ring road and the airport. I wrestled our 18 bags through managing a baggage fee of about $130. Tim did not fare as well, getting hit with a huge fee for the bag they would not let him take on the plane. I should have been more aware of his situation, but I had all of my attention on getting our 11 through. We waited at the airport for about 3 hours then flew to Delhi.
New Delhi Airport
An angel rather portly with white hair sat next to me in Tribhuvan airport and said..."go to La Dahk". I made friends with some nice Indian Trekkers at the bus stop on their way to Manali to go trekking they waved merrily to me as their bus drove away, buses came, people left, and we sat at the side of the road, sadly wondering if we had been forgotten.
In Delhi, we all gave Tim a big hug and sent him off to the USA. We breezed through the visa area, but I lost the 18 baggage tags. We found the bags and Nicole turned on her Jedi magic..."these are not the droids you are looking for"...and we walked past the heavily armed guardians of baggage without a glance. A handsome young Indian man held up a sign with my name on it..the bus! Everyone said ..this great! What a good job of arranging things, etc. the signal that some disaster was going to happen.
We loaded the taxis and took a relaxing drive past many foreign embassies to a rather ordinary bus stop. Praveen and Michael reassured us that the bus that would take us to the bus stop would arrive in 15 minutes...Om would be driving. OM. Sure, no problem we can handle it from here, I said. It is about 104 degrees with an even warmer breeze, we are surrounded by a mountain of bags. After two hours I called Om, Om where is the bus? Just two minutes away, stuck in traffic. An hour later, I call him again, and now Om himself is standing next to me juggling calls on three cell phones, a skinny guy, with a flannel kind of shirt, I guess he handles transportation in the part of the universe.
He disappears, I call Praveen, 'just wondering about that bus' then after 3 or 4 hours of waiting, a bus shows up, there is flurry of activity as we load our bags onto a big bus, driving through six lanes of every king of traffic, mopeds, vendors, rickshaws, cars, trucks, buses, pedestrians, cows, it seems to be rush hour in New Delhi.
We loaded the taxis and took a relaxing drive past many foreign embassies to a rather ordinary bus stop. Praveen and Michael reassured us that the bus that would take us to the bus stop would arrive in 15 minutes...Om would be driving. OM. Sure, no problem we can handle it from here, I said. It is about 104 degrees with an even warmer breeze, we are surrounded by a mountain of bags. After two hours I called Om, Om where is the bus? Just two minutes away, stuck in traffic. An hour later, I call him again, and now Om himself is standing next to me juggling calls on three cell phones, a skinny guy, with a flannel kind of shirt, I guess he handles transportation in the part of the universe.
He disappears, I call Praveen, 'just wondering about that bus' then after 3 or 4 hours of waiting, a bus shows up, there is flurry of activity as we load our bags onto a big bus, driving through six lanes of every king of traffic, mopeds, vendors, rickshaws, cars, trucks, buses, pedestrians, cows, it seems to be rush hour in New Delhi.
By now it is dark, the bus drops us off at the same place, the Tibetan part of town, same as it ever was, a scene from Mad Max, clouds of dust, horns honking, motorcycles speeding by, people hanging out of improvised vehicles, indistinct shadowy figures appearing and disappearing in the headlights. Without fanfare, we are dropped off with all the bags on the side of the Delhi Mad Max desert, in the middle of the dirt, on the edge of bedlam, and told the bus will be here in two minutes...this could mean anything, from two hours to two days. But, amazingly, after half an hour an old decrepit Volvo bus turns up and someone says, that is the one to Dharamshala, like he is our guide or something. Really? and our bus?
At the airport ten porters magically appeared to push a baggage cart for twenty feet, then demand a tip, as if they had actually been helpful. Here, in the dark, in the dust storm, in the 103 degree heat, inside the black hold beneath the bus, a young man loads all of the bags into the compartment, and will accept no tip.
At the airport ten porters magically appeared to push a baggage cart for twenty feet, then demand a tip, as if they had actually been helpful. Here, in the dark, in the dust storm, in the 103 degree heat, inside the black hold beneath the bus, a young man loads all of the bags into the compartment, and will accept no tip.
We wait in the bus for an hour or two while street vendors try to sell water, soda, chips, hot, charred corn, head pillows, candy, masala soda, they just jump on board and plead with us to buy someting. Small children are also plying the aisles of the bus. I want to buy all of their stuff and send then home to bed, they are probably too young to have homework.
So the decrepit squeaky, rattly old bus begins its journey after some mysterious repair work is done in the middle of the aisle deep down in the hold. The bus drives all night stopping occasionally at surreal rest stops, swaying back and forth over the curving roads on the way to the mountain of the great Dalai Llama temple. Curving mountain road over scary cliffs.
I am sitting next to a lovely Tibetan family, a mother and her two daughters, from Kathmandu, on their way to McLeod Ganj, they live near the great Boudha in the Tibetan community, which I need to visit. I want to know their whole story, how did they get from Tibet to Kathmandu? Where is the dad? Why are they traveling to Dharmshala?
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