around the world in 180 days

We began yesterday in Srinagar at 6 am and, after breakfast, were off to catch our bus to Jammu, a town that Lonely Planet only mentions to tell you not to go there. We paid an old man 10 rupees (about a quarter) to throw our bags on top of the bus and then stood around, waiting to leave. 10 minutes after our departure time, a man came over, said some gibberish (ok, it was probably Hindi) and pointed to a different bus. We gathered, by the other passengers unloading the first bus and loading the second, that our bus had changed.

Apparently, there hadn’t been enough tickets sold for our bus and so it had been combined with the mail bus. We rode with sacks of Indian Post for 10 hours through the dusty Himalayan foothills. A sign a the front of the bus said “no smoking,” but an old man who had clearly had too many cigarettes already defied it, tentatively at first, sneaking puffs behind a cupped hand, and then without bothering to disguise his actions once he realized that nobody cared enough to say anything to him.

On the ride to Jammu, we went through the longest tunnel I’ve ever seen. We must’ve been driving in there for 5 minutes or more. It was bored straight through the middle of a mountain. “That’s the British for you,” Anna said when we got to the other side.

LP was right about Jammu. It really isn’t fair to judge a town by its bus stand, but Jammu was a craphole. The bus stand smelled like urine, feces and bus exhaust, and the part of town we rode through on the way in made central hillside look like Edina or something, it was so rundown. There were buildings still in use that were in the process of collapsing. We did not want to spend a night there.

So we didn’t. We booked ourselves on a night bus to Dharamsala and left about 2 hours after we arrived. The bus dropped the two of us, along with five other backpackers, off at a lonely intersection at 3 in the morning. The only people there (besides a bunch of weary travelers) were three or four Indians who were trying to gouge us for a taxi ride to McLeod Ganj, our destination for the night.

The seven of us, three Brits, two Irish and us Americans, stood on the corner, talking, comparing Srinagar experiences (we’d all been ripped off there, so Anna and I felt less bad for being taken in) and hoping every vehicle that approached would be able to take us to a bed somewhere.

After a half an hour, the oddest of vehicles arrived: a bus. We’d been joking about taking one of the busses that LP says run between our drop point and the next town “frequently,” but we didn’t think they ran at 3:30 am. The bus took us to Dharamsala, where we were a short taxi ride from McLeod Ganj. The taxi stand at the bus stand was manned and we were soon zooming up twisting streets that once again made Duluth look like Edina, they were so in need of repair.

Lucky for us, our taxi didn’t break down until we were almost to the top of the hill. Unlucky for us, it did break down. It took us another 45 minutes to find a hotel that had someone awake manning the desk, and really, they came to us. Anna and I laid down to sleep as the sun was just beginning to climb over the mountains, around 5 am, at the International Buddhist Hostel. God bless those Buddhists.

McLeod Ganj is full of Buddhists. Buddhist monks walk the street in traditional Tibetan monk garb, and most of the shopkeepers are Tibetan. McLeod Ganj is the home of the exiled Dalai Lama and is more Tibetan than Indian. It’s like being in a different country, one where prices are mainly fixed at stores, and where shopkeepers don’t chase you down the block for glancing at your reflection in their window. After the relentless salesmen of Srinagar, it’s a welcome change.

McLeod Ganj, mostly because of its Tibetan flavor, is also a huge tourist and hippie mecca. It’s funny, but hippies wear the same costume all over the world. It like there are huge hippie fashion conventions somewhere and they all do themselves up in the latest trends: dreadlocks, patched pants and coats, worn t-shirts and colorful skirts. Ah, yes. Hippies are also the same the world over

We’ve got one more day here with the truth seekers and mystics before we board a bus for another 10-hour ride to either Manali or Shimla, depending on how much we decide we want to be on a bus. They’re both the same distance from here and each other, and if we go to Manali, we still have to go to Shimla anyway, so we might skip Manali and save ourselves 10 hours on the bus. After that, we’re on to Nepal, then Thailand, then Europe and then back home. Three months and counting . . .

Tags: Travel

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 21st, 2007 at 9:37 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.