Out of the mountains, for now

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Pictures are going to have to wait for another time, since I don't have my camera's memory card or the time to wait for pictures to upload over dialup.

I'm in Dehra Dun now, after taking a jeep from Uttarkashi this morning. The course had a few surprises but was more or less how I vaguely expected. All in all it was well worth the time and effort and a few of the other attendees are with me in Dehra Dun, and after a sumptuous meal that ran to an outrageous $8 (I'll save my bitching about the food during the course for another day) we're doing our best to find out if it's possible to see the movie 300 here. I'm afraid it'll be dubbed in Hindi, though that won't stop me if it's showing here.

Though I can't upload any pictures, I'm going to give an update up till the time I arrived at NIM. On the train from Jodhpur to Delhi I happened to run in to a Canadian-Swiss couple who I'd met at a small town outside Jodhpur a few days earlier, so once we got to Delhi we had lunch before parting ways. I spent most of the afternoon searching in vain for a specific book about Ladakh and pricing flights to Leh. In the late afternoon I went to a friend's house in what was for me an entirely new part of Delhi, far from any of the places I'd been so far. I knew it was a long way to the train station from her place, and I still had to go by my the hotel I'd stayed in a few weeks earlier since I'd left a suitcase there, so I allotted what I thought was a generous hour and forty-five minutes to take an autorickshaw to the hotel, pick up the suitcase, and then get to the train station. Everything went fine at first, we made it to the hotel without delay, I got my suitcase, and we set out for the train station. Then, at 10PM, we hit a massive traffic jam about a half mile from the station. For the next 20 minutes we actually made negative progress as the driver tried to skirt the pileup only to get stuck further away.

Since we were soon completely blocked in and not moving an inch, and my train was scheduled to leave in 15 minutes, I decided to try to make it on foot. With my moderately-sized backpack and suitcase I took off as fast as I could, crawling across rickshaws and hand-pulled carts, shoving cows out of the way, and generally making slow progress in spite of great effort. I eventually made it past the worst of the jam and at the top of a gradual hill that led down to the station, jumped in a cycle rickshaw that essentially just coasted all the way there (easiest 10 rupees he ever made). I dashed to the track from which my train was scheduled to leave, and in spite of being 5 minutes after the departure time, it was still there. It left two or three minutes after I got on board, and I collapsed on my bunk, soaked in sweat but greatly relieved to have made it.

We reached Haridwar the next morning just as the pre-dawn light began to glow. I got a bus to Rishikesh and then changed to a different one bound for Uttarkashi. The mountains basically start immediately once you leave Rishikesh, and I enjoyed the scenery for the first few hours. Then I noticed that the conductor was having some sort of dispute with one of the passengers. I pieced together that the passenger had boarded and was now refusing to pay the fare to wherever he was going, and the conductor was trying to extract it via extremely angry-sounding Hindi. After perhaps three or four minutes, ofthe conductor trying and failing to physically remove the guy, he got off the bus, tore up a sapling, and came back aboard and resumed the argument, holding the stick above his head. People seated around the uncompliant passenger began to move/lean away, and sure enough there were soon two quick whacks, which caused the pleading to quickly change to yelping and wailing. Before the beating proceeded any further a passenger stood up and offered to pay the guy's fare (I think it was around 75 cents), which prompted another argument with the conductor about how it was a bad thing to do because it was teaching the miscreant that he could get a free ride (this was explained to me later by another passenger named Tenzing). In any case it fortunately meant that we could resume what turned out to be about an 8 hour bus ride, which wasn't that bad except that I hadn't bathed in 60 some hours and had spent the last two nights on trains.

And now, hopefully, I'm off to see 300. Failing that, I'll do my damndest to outdrink a Punjabi.

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