My Summary – Part I
Back in the UK. Thank VISHNU for that! Especially baring in mind our domestic flight from Goa to Mumbai (before connecting to London) nearly crashed as the pilot decided to land solely on his rear right wheel having to then fly back up and around for another landing. Kingfisher did get busted for employing over 80 drunk pilots and it seems they let some stay on the payroll.
Have seen millions of these
This place is beautiful!!! Crisp cool air that bites that skin and soothes the throat upon breathing deeply. The looming clouds saving us from the blistering sun. The roads that are made of tarmac and the transport that is on time. The quiet streets not filled with beeping horns, crappy rickshaws and more pollution than Chernobyl. Best of all … no ridiculous mustaches in sight!!!
Britain I will never leave your shores again my darling, darling world.
I need a holiday but it is good to be back.
Dhalsim - Street Fighter II Turbo - Token Indian
Thus ends two weeks of illness, disease, serious lung damage (pollution), ear damage (the hideous sound of our 7bhp whining little beast), eye damage (nasty mustaches) and general damage to our whole bodies. We are battered and bruised feeling like we have gone three rounds with Dhalsim.
The trip started off really badly. We were stuck in Goa due to torrential downpours and tropical storms, the worst in over 100 years for the popular region. Our first move was to jump straight onto a thirteen hour train journey to Mumbai so that we could get to Ahmedabad, however, we soon learned that the train tracks were flooded and no trains were in operation. We went to the coach station. All of the highways exiting the state were closed due to flooding and previous coaches were stuck on highway islands awaiting rescue as the waters flooded the aisle.
It was not looking good. We had a rickshaw to pick up from Ahmedabad and we could not afford to wait in Goa for three days for this to clear which would leave us so far behind on our forecasts. Our only option was to get back on a plane and get our asses to Ahmedabad.
The plane managed to fly through the storm and we landed in the northern state of Gujarat and were in our first official port of call, Ahmedabad. Another problem …
The storm had actually followed us. We were in Ahmedabad for about two hours, walking the streets when all of a sudden a blanket of rain just threw itself over the city. Literally within seconds the rain was beating down on us and after two minutes we were already wading through water. We got undercover in a nearby apartment block and we waited it out.
A few hours passed and we decided that we needed to find a place to relax. We got a rickshaw to a temple on the edge of the city (one location that we knew would be safe, what with it being religious and all) and pitched up a few hundred metres from it in the rough. When we were inside, all cost in our sleeping bags we heard the rain beating down again on the canvas. We thought “meh, the tent will be fine,” but we were wrong. As the floor beneath us became a muddy plateau we could heard the guy ropes come loose and ping on the tent. Then the corner caved in and the tent bent out of shape … the loose ground was causing the taught tent to pull up the pegs!!!
Still testing our luck we waited in the tent until we started noticing small spongy indents in the floor of the tent where a lot of weight was being applied. The ground that we were on was forming some kind of quagmire like quicksand. We opened the door (strategically of course it faced down the slight incline we had pitched on) and we were positioned on what looked like a small river! Gushing streaks of mudded water were passing our tent and our weight was causing us to sink. We jumped out of the tent, barefoot, boxer shorts and rucksacks (to the amusement of the locals) and tied it to a branch above and to the side. Each step we took we had to pull our feet out of the ground as the weird mud was just engulfing us. As we got out and our weight lifted from the tent it literally swam away from us on the makeshift river in what can best be described as if a human walked on a trap in the forest and it strung him upside down in a tree. It was eerily reminiscient of a mud slide and goes to show the power that these weird tropical storms can create. Bloody India.
What a damn mess. We were stood on the side of the road, watching our tent flap about, in bits, wearing boxers and rucksacks. Some locals did come and help us eventually and together we got the tent down once the rain had calmed and the floor had stopped moving. Such an embarassing situation to be in and we were not happy at the time but it has been the funniest moment now that we look back on it. We looked like three drowned rats.
