On the road again

After taking more than forty minutes (though at less than $2 I can't really complain), our roomserviced breakfast finally arrived. I wolfed it down, took time to enjoy my first ever cup of chai tea (what would become a daily ritual), and we rushed downstairs and waited for our IDEX guide to show up with a tiny escourt car at 9:20am sharp.



Packing in the car for the ride to the other volunteer hotel was yet another puzzle with a quite cramped solution. On arrival I paid two US dollars to a walking water bottle sales man and recieved my change in rupees. Based on the semi-astonished look of nearby on lookers, I instantly regretted not bringing along more American cash. Another sort of regret began to set in as Rick, Magnus, and I began to realize that, had we chosen to participate in the 'less hardcore' Himachal Pradesh program- we would have not only saved ourselves of the morning's commute and probably also a turtle or two, but also been able to spend the upcoming days in the tourist favorite cities of Jaipur and Agra, and, as a strange sort of happening, thirty one of the thirty four Himachal volunteers were European girls.

Fighting my way through a crowd of beggers, I was one of the last to board our bus. With the two other Kanjar volunteers already settled, I had the pleasure of sitting next to a Himachal-bound British girl. Born in the Caribbean but fortunate enough to develop that sweet British accent growing up in the UK, my seatmate, prettier than my last neighbor on the Greyhound (that skinny Palestinian dude), had wanted to travel before her senior year of Uni (the Brits go to Uni for two years after finishing two years of College) and so spent a pair of weeks drinking and surfing in Australia, a few days in Singapore, and planned to see Himachal in India before finally spending a month in Thailand.



Along the seven hour bus ride from Delhi to Jaipur, I learned that:
-All buses here are equipped with novelty horns. The drivers use them liberally.
-There are tons of little retail shops throughout all the small but dense towns strewn across India. People gather around the streets lined with these shops, sometimes spilling out onto the highway (which is just a road like any other but sometimes sporting a median).
-The girl I ended up sitting next to on the bus was the same girl who I'd had to wait for for so long with the guide at the airport, the night before. I mentally forgave her on account of the British accent and all.
-There are many hill top temples and lone mountains along the way from Delhi to Jaipur. The terrain is savannah-like with less tall grass; the land visibly exhausted after surviving the majority of the intense Indian summer.
-Things were still "reminding me of slumdog." They were reminding my seat neighbor of slumdog as well. Must be a westerner first-time-to-India thing.
-I wouldn't be able to sleep while traveling through India during the day, just too excited about all that was going on around the road and outside the window.






Pictures:
-Blurred bus shot: could be a Greyhoud, could be a college STLF trip, could be a bus full of Europeans spending their summer in India.
-Garbage strewn area of a small town along the highway.
-Temple on a mountain.
-Temple on a hill.
-Highwayside town.
-Restaurant/nice rest area we stopped at that sold bottled Coke and Pepsi and trinkets, and was covered in European cellphone company Vodophone advertisements (a common building material around here).
-Grain bin, photoshop out the big hill behind it and it could be Iowa.