28/03/2010

It’s been one month since arriving in India!!

We had to leave the hotel at 8.30 to catch the local bus down the mountain to Abu road for a connecting bus to Jodhpur; we devoured breakfast quickly on the walk to the bus stand only just making the 9.00 bus.

The connecting local bus to Jodhpur was terrible, hot, cramped, over crowded, with no leg room and lasting 6 hours over shitty roads… I didn’t sleep well last night and needed to catch up on it too but these circumstances didn’t make it easy.

Arriving in Jodhpur at around 5pm we needed to hang around for 5 hours for another connecting local bus to Jaisalmer, we went to go grab something to eat finding a nice, but more importantly comfortable restaurant offering 50 rupee thalis where we sat for a good few hours killing time. The owners of the restaurant were getting aggravated that we were there for such a long time and stopped us from playing card games and were constantly looking over at us making it difficult for us to fall asleep at the table. Fortunately their English was not great and when one did try to speak to us and tell us to leave I manipulated the conversation befriending the guy and persuading him to let us stay a little while longer. Generally restaurants in India welcome the fact that foreigners are sitting in their premises as it not only brings in other foreigners into the place but also the locals too because it gives them something to stare at while they eat which is unfortunate and damn annoying for us.

After overstaying our stay in the restaurant we headed back to the bus station to catch our bus, I went to go check out which stand our bus will be arriving at as we could be the first to board only to be told that the #299 bus at 10.30pm will not be running. I asked why this was the case only to be yelled at by the Indian behind the counter shouting “NO BUS”, I continued to ask “why” only to get the same reply progressively shouting louder and louder. I found this confusing as the bus was listed on the timetable but I also found it entertaining and kept on asking “why” only to piss off the official and to see how loud he could scream “NO BUS!!!” Anyways I didn’t get an answer to “why?” but thankfully we called one of the private bus companies and organized a ride to Jaisalmer on a deluxe bus. We paid rs40 to get to the private bus stand where we finally boarded the bus and slept for the 5 hour journey maybe from being exhausted from traveling all day or from the sleeping pill I took, perhaps both.