It's Raining

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There used to be a highway here. Our neighbor, Suhas, measured that it rained about 4 inches in 2 hours.

Indian Journalism Has Sunk To A New Low

On the front page of the Times of India newspaper this morning was a headline that read, "7/11 Victims Want Govt To Lend Them A Hand." Below the headline was a photograph of a survivor of last year's July 11th train bombing in Mumbai. The survivor was an older man with an amputated arm just below the elbow, holding a prosthetic hand.

I think the concepts of political correctness or personal sensitivity are not in use in this instance. This is a very sober topic, but how can I take this poor man seriously with such a clever headline? Where was the editor on this one?

Local Bus Fiasco

Tonight we went to a friend's house across town for dinner. It was about midnight when we left our friend and headed for the local bus station. We took a local bus home as always when we are coming from this part of the city. A little more than half way into the trip, Hannah turns to me and says, "look what's coming out of the bus!" I turned, a little alarmed, and noticed some white smoke bellowing out of the rear, right side of the bus (of course the exact spot under which we were sitting).

Immediately upon noticing the smoke absolute pandemonium broke out amongst the passengers on board. The entire rear of the bus was filling up with the white smoke and everyone began standing up and scurrying for the exits. The bus was probably doing about 60 MPH at this point and came screeching to a halt. Everybody began trampling for the doors and jumping off the bus — it was chaos.

We made it safely off the bus after much franticness, pushing and shoving. I even saw one fellow running stiffly, with fingers in his ears anticipating a great explosion. In reality, the act of de-boarding the bus was — I am sure — much more dangerous than the actual smoke, or whatever was causing it; but even we got caught up in the fear and frenzy of it all.

We took a rickshaw the rest of the way home.

Khuri

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We are back in India after our little vacation to the US. A post about our reactions on coming back will be posted soon. But before writing about that we wanted to get back to posting photos from our trip to Rajasthan Hannah and I took back in February.

Our last post from the trip left off with photos from Jaisalmer. From Jaisalmer, we took a jeep to Khuri, a small village in the desert about 2 hours outside Jaisalmer. It was extremely beautiful and quiet. We had our jeep drop us at Mama's Guesthouse; "Mama" turned out to be a real pushy, big, loud, tobacco-chewing man who turned us off immediately. We decided to stay despite our obnoxious host and left our bags in a room/hut. We went for a walk and later ran into a tourist who was staying at another guesthouse which she highly recommended. We looked at the facility and knew we had to back out of our current lodging situation. Hannah and I walked directly back to our room/hut and grabbed our bags without any confrontation with "Mama".

Our new guesthouse host was probably the most warm and friendly guy we've met in India. He was very soft spoken and kind. This was quite opposite from our experience at the earlier guesthouse. We had lunch with our host and his family and later in the day Hannah and I went on a camel safari which took us to the desert sand dunes only about a mile from the village. We opted for the sunset safari which was only a few hours and it was plenty. About a half an hour into the ride I was ready for a break from the camel, these animals aren't the most comfortable to ride. I must say the entire experience and the unbelievable skies made the discomfort of the camel well worth it. The landscape was so vast and the sunset was incredible.

Even though we took a jeep to the village we took a local bus back to Jaisalmer. This bus ride will go down as one of our many interesting travel stories in India. Hannah got a seat up front and was immediately handed a stranger's baby to sit on her lap, while i stood, smashed in the back for the entire 2 hour trip. The bus left no local commuter behind, they even piled on top of the roof. Experiences of a lifetime… definitely.