The Last Hippie Standing

Well shit, it has hardly been a day since I last wrote in the blog but I felt that the last 24 hours were very deserving of a new post! Its about 815 in the evening here, and I just finished eating some very delicious dinner at the roof-top restaurant across from my guest house. I had me some grand ol' vegetable biryani (sp?) Some rice, sauce and veggies I think, whatever it is it was amazing. Anyway I just arrived in Minali this morning at about 630 am and it was one very shitty, but very interesting bus ride.

We departed from Chandigahr last night at about 8 pm because our 7 o'clock bus was running late of course. The bus we were told would be Deluxe with Air conditioning was neither of the two, the seats reclined a little and there were fans on the ceiling however I think that the fans were honestly for decoration purposes only because not a single one worked. We got stuck in the very front seats behind the driver cab and being in those seats means that my knees are constantly hitting against the hard metal of the cab, for ten hours. It was pretty much hell on wheels, I didn't think that a bus ride could be worse than the last one, but this one was far worse.

The way that these drivers operate their machines is one of the most freightening things that I have ever seen. Since we were headed to Minali the entire trip was switchbacks up and down mountains. A normal person would obey these speed limits and probably not pass many cars, complete opposite in India, just like everything else! Our driver was barrling as fast as he could around these hairpin turns, on bumpy unkempt roads, and if there was another bus, truck, car or motorcycle in front of us he would turn on the brights and hold the horn while passing the poor person in front. Regardless if there were cars comming at us or not the driver would swerve to the other lane and continue his attempts to pass these cars. This was basically a ten hour roller coaster with no lapbelts, and I hope I never have to do that again. Even though I will have to when I return to Delhi to fly out, dammit.

Sadly, the way that this drive drove his car was not the most interesting part of the journey at all. Other than meeting a bunch of crazy Indian kids our age who were stoned out of their minds, other than the extreme lack of sleep and food, but our driver was slowly getting trash-hammered wasted while he took us up and down these mountains. Saul was the first to spot it, but behind his seat in a nifty little pouch were two good sized bottles of "bagpipe whisky." Yet again, this also isn't the most ridiculous part, as everyone else is dozing off after about 5-6 hours of the drive, my insomnia kept me up of course. I sat there listening to my ipod and watched the traffic as he swerved effortlessly through it without a second thought, never breaking a sweat or his temper. Than another bus is barrling towards us, and they have their high beams on for several moments, apparently this was the breaking point for our driver. He starts freaking out and flailing his arms, as the bus approaches I see him grab for what I thought was a bottle of water, and he chucks it at the window of the other bus as it passes. I start freaking out, laughing and wondering what the hell just happened.

We continue to drive along for about 30 minutes, and then all of the sudden there is a road block in front of our bus of about four big ass trucks. We try to move around it and all of the trucks move closer and begin to blare their horns at us. I thought we had just hit one but that was not the case at all. The bus pulls over and all of the sudden there are about four angry Indian truckers yelling at our driver. After this there is about a fourty minute arguement in hindi that neither I nor Saul can understand, we are just waiting for this to escalate to blows. After the fourty minutes passes, our driver hands one of the truckers a big wad of rupees, and we continue on. So apparently when the bus driver threw what turned out to be his whisky bottle at the bus, one of the windows shattered and the arguement was over the two thousand rupees that the bus driver owed for the broken window. So I guess after the incident the other bus driver radioed in the name of our bus and they created a road block so we could go no further. These crafty ass Indians.

Anyway, we made it to Minali in one piece, and I watched the sunrise over the himalayn mountains. It was quite the beautiful site. We checked into a guest house called the sonam gues house in vashist which is a couple kilometers away from minali. The owner is this burnt out indian guy that keeps talking to us about all these wacked out documentaries. I think we are going to go to the "theatre" and watch one of them a little later. The room feels like its a damn tree house, the ceilings are super low, everything is hardwood and the bed isn't that comfortable. I really like it though, it has such character and the people that are staying in it are pretty rad, especially the owner. Plus I'm only paying about 2 bucks a night to stay here, and we have a Bakery next door and a really good restuarant across the street that has some spectacular views of the mountains. I can't wait to show these pictures off! Tomorrow we are going to go hiking and then we are going white water rafting the next day, and maybe mountain biking. I will keep you all informed!


Peace,

J a k e