Another weekend another adventure

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Since my last blog the previous volunteers has left and the new group arrived. At Malainta we have two new guys - Scottish Chris in Day-care and English gentleman Patrick down at the school. In fact, as is the way of the world , I mentioned to Patrick he reminded me of Freddie, who it turned out he’d met in Paris and spent some time with. We’ve had a good time introducing them to India, taking them on walks which resulted in a ‘dip’ in the river and a ‘function’ which turned out to be the guy’s mother-in-law’s funeral...
Over the weekend a group of us went to McLeod Ganj. I managed to persuade a fair number of people to take the bus with me instead of a taxi, but sadly for team India all but one took the taxi on the way home. On Saturday night we went out for a meal then headed towards the one and only club excite , which thankfully was closing so after spending a while at a small bar headed back to our respective hotels. A lot of us were in ‘the pink hotel’, a cheap but good complex. Patrick has been converted to my cheap standards and we managed to get a good room for 150 rupees, cinched for him by the fact we got an old man chair. Further improved the room, whose only downfall was the large and threatening portrait of an Indian over the bed, by taking some candles someone had left on one of the balconies.
We all had breakfast at a hippy hangout roof café then whilst the rest went shopping and actually managed to have a brief encounter with the Dalai Lama, Patrick and I headed out for Tatawani to visit a temple with hot springs and a river. The bus journey was rather epic, especially as I fell asleep on the first bus we took. Patrick managed to mangle every place name we had to ask for, and although I woke up just in time the conductor insisted we weren’t supposed to get off, taking us several kilometres down the road to the wrong place. When we got back onto his bus again he looked faintly surprised but accepted that we wouldn’t pay him for the fare to get back to where we’d been trying to get off. Another bus journey later, this time higher up in to the mountains, we pulled over on a roadside in the middle of nowhere and were told that this was Tatawani. Wandering down from the roadside towards the river, local people from the handful of houses dotted around nearby pointed us in the direction of the river and later a group of farmers on a tractor directed us towards the crossing point, a neat line of stepping stones. It was really beautiful, the sun setting in the valley. We weren’t entirely sure that we were being pointed in the right direction, but headed towards a distant temple spire. When we reached the temple it appeared the hot springs were quite small, two pools of hot water, one of which was filled with soapy suds as two men washed there. A man appeared and told us he was responsible for the temple and lived near-by. Stating ‘Mera home is your home’, he invited us to eat with his family and stay at their house. Although tempting, we had to turn down the offer because otherwise there would have been no-one at school the following day, and Louis the American Idex representative from Jaipur was visiting the house aswell. The return bus journey from Tatawani was a bit hit and miss, it being in the middle of nowhere, so we decided not to cut it too fine. The valley there was stunning, up on the list with the Bandla where we live and the Golden Temple. We went in the river briefly before storming along a short cut up the cliff-side to the main road. The bus arrived all of a sudden whilst I was taking a photograph, and screeched to a halt for us. There was a classic moment where the two cultures merged - Patrick standing in one doorway shouting ‘Anna’, and the conductor in the other calling ‘Ana, lardki’, the Hindi for come, girl! Their calls of ‘an(n)a simultaneous. The ride back down was an eventful one, the locals of the incredibly rural and secluded area completely off the tourist track taking great interest in our presence. It was also one of the more dangerous bus companies, speeding down the hairpin bends and taking on the uneven road so violently we were flung about across the back seat. By the end of the day it was a bit disenheartening to think of the long bus journey back, but we managed all our connections ok. A slightly iffy wait on a dark roadside in a place called Mala where we started to head to the shop in the 15minute wait then had to sprint back when it briefly pulled over from the main road. Overall, it was a really interesting day - a long journey for such a tiny place but a real experience to go somewhere that wasn’t even in the guide book - I actually found out about the hot springs there when I attempted to make the bus journey to a ruined temple but gave up when I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get back home in the same day so started reading road signs and asking where else I could visit.

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