How does one make it to Mumbai from Kathmandu in time for her flight in four days? Why, she takes every conceivable form of transportation known to man. It's only fitting that our vocabulary unit in class this week is transportation.
Step one: Get the hell out of Kathmandu. We left on a 7:00 pm bus. Now, normally embarking on this sort of adventure would have us giddy with excitement, however, on this particular night, both Sara and I were suffering from the "why-the-hell-did-we-eat-that" syndrome. Sometimes your common sense takes a back seat to "oh, sure I want to try what looks like boiled buffalo on a skin flap...anything for the sake of adventure." Oh man, my stomach is turning as I write this. Poor Sara had it worse than me (and she's the vegetarian). So there we were, two American girls writhing in digestive pain in a bus full of Nepali men sitting directly behind the young dreamer who is happy to practice his English anywhere, at anytime. I mean, more power to him, it's certainly how you learn, but I usually pull back speaking to any stranger when it looks like their dinner could end up on my shoes. As the night went on (it was a 10 hour drive), things got better...especially about 4 hours in when we figured out how to adjust our seats. We made it to Sunauli, the border town with India at around 5 am.
Step two: Get to the border...4 km away. Seems easy enough, right? Well,it was actually...the only thing is the only way to get there was by rickshaw. Don't get me wrong, it was a beautiful night/early morning, but we did not see it coming. But, like I said, it was a nice little ride, although certainly slow going. It was nice and dark so we could see the stars, a nice calm before the shit storm that was about to unfold.
Step three: Cross border, get to train station. Immigration on both sides was a breeze. The officials were helpful and the process was beginning to become routine to us by this time. The official on the Indian side told us to look for a man named "Bablu" for our bus. This we did. We finally found Bablu and his wonderfully charming brother (I guess the sarcasm doesn't come across on the blog). His brother sat us in their "office" while he took our info (though we only gave him our names). He looked at our train ticket and finally says to us "ok, we need 1500 Rupees for Sleeper class conformation key." Ok, certainly, we had been traveling for three weeks and were a little tired/sundried, but we were no fools. No one was going to flim flam us, at least not for that much. We said no thank you, we will just take our chances at the train station. He got a little more testy and said "no problem, I will just cancel your tickets." Ok, it was on now. What ensued was a 20 minute war of words with me shouting "this is fucking bullshit" at the top of my lungs while he continued to threaten to cancel our tickets. We got on the bus and he followed saying "Go back to Nepal." More fighting, on the bus. It was quite the scene. Even typing about it is getting me so angry, I don't thing I had ever been that irate before in my entire life. Things finally calmed down and that dick (excuse me family) finally left. Our bus was about 4 hours but it broke down about 1 our from the train station.
Step four: Get to train station. The riders on the bus split up and each took separate jalopy-style cabs. There were about 13 of us cramped in a space for about 4. It was a bumpy ride, not for the boney-butted. Finally, we got there and with the help of some very friendly young Nepali men, we made it to the train station, where we stayed in the safety of the tourist office until our train arrived.
Step five: Train ride!! Oh, finally the fun part. We had the lowest class, sleeper. We had heard some serious horror stories about the sleeper class in the Indian trains. But, honestly, it wasn't bad at all. We spent two days watching India roll by while finishing our books. I finished "Midnight's Children" by Salman Rushdie, I figured it would be a good read in India (thanks Aarti). It was. The first night on the train I had nodded off only to be stirred awake by two local travelers, a couple. They stared at me for about 15 minutes before saying hello and asking for my address. They wanted to be pen pals. They asked about my religion and when I told them I don't have one they seemed to lose all interest in me. I really enjoyed the train ride. i have some great video from the window, but I doubt I will be able to download it now. I'll try to put it on my computer at work, and see if thats any faster. We got into Bombay two days after departure and made our way to a hotel that charged us way too much, but it had room service and cable, which was all we wanted (aside from maybe a pool). We spent the night watching TV and eating, a good last night. We had no desire to go into Bombay, we were just too tired and the city too dirty. I would like to go back to India, but would probably go north to Delhi or south to Goa.
Step six: Get yourself the fuck to Egypt. Airplane #1: Bombay to Sharjah, UAE. Thankfully we didn't have to spend much time in Sharjah, we just bought some gummy bears (which I had been craving) and fell asleep on the airport floor. i actually slept through the night, which was surprising. They had these great massage chairs in there that really did the trick. We boarded Plane #2 the next morning and 4 hours later, landed in Alexandria.
Step seven: From Alexandria to Cairo. We hoped on the train. Thats it, not much to this step really.
Finally, we were home. Free for one day to relax and take it easy before we had to hurl ourselves back into the chaos that is Sakkara Language School. It's been a week now and things are getting back to normal, everything is becoming routine again.
I know I know, this would all be better with pictures. I need to put them on my work computer to ensure me keeping my sanity during uploading, however. This week, I promise!
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