Just a short note on busses

Remember when I told you that I am "Indianized" up to the point of remaining cool and calm in an Indian-driven vehicle? You can erase that now.

I have finally found an Indian driver who does get irritated by other drivers, and let me tell you – a bus on the road from Macleod Ganj down to Dharamsala is definitely NOT the place to find one!!!

According to my desire to "do the Indian thing", I took one of the regular busses yesterday, down the hillside back to my hotel. The bus driver very sweetly invited me to sit next to him, but it was too much trouble stepping over everybody's bags and packs and pushing my way through the jam-packed bus, so I stayed standing where I was. (Now that I think of it - if the bus DOES fall down the mountain-side - which is better - to be standing in the middle of it, or to be crushed in-between babies and shopping bags on one of the seats?)

Remember how I told you that the roads in India were apparently manufactured some-time around the turn of the century (and I'm not talking about 2000), and have received no maintenance since then? This is especially true, evidently, of the mountain roads. So you have a road full of potholes, mounds and dips, that was narrow to begin with, and bits of the mountainside falling off have made it even narrower. And you have a rickety old bus, that would make a rattling racket even if it were on a glass-smooth finished road.

And you have a driver who is either intensely irritated at the jeep that is trying to pass him, or else he is in a really big hurry to get down the mountain (and evidently doesn't really care too much if we take the really short route - straight down). Or else he is taking those hair-pins turns on the fly just to see how the foreign woman (which would be me) will react. Or maybe he is having fun with the school-girls who are sitting crowded at the back, and screaming at each turn. I swear, a couple of times I thought the bus would tip over on the turns, the wheels just barely keeping contact with the ground. The fact that most of my hair is still brown, and not turned completely white - is in itself a small miracle.

Well, that's all I wanted to say. I just had to get it off my chest. Needless to say, next time I go down that mountain, it will either be by foot, or else I will get somebody to knock me unconscious before the bus starts moving. You see, it's not plunging to my death that disturbs me - it's just the terror and the pain of broken bones that I prefer to avoid.

And on that cheery thought, I will end this one. Despite the carnival rides, I really am having a lot of fun. Lots of love from the snow-covered mountains at the beginning of the Himalayas (not that I'm actually in the snow, mind you, but I can look at them all day if I want to).