Melanie and Gavin's Travels

Thoughts from the road... (previously written)

We are somewhere over Northwest Australia, having left Bangkok earlier tonight. We were ready to leave, it's been about one month of relative daily stillness and that is enough for Gavin and I. So we are excited for new places and old friends in the land down under.

Our bus ride to the airport was uneventful which I found reassuring. In India and Nepal we got used to an element of drama which was usually added to the days' affairs, especially where travel was concerned. Traffic delays and tuktuk drivers pretending they knew where they were going were the usual problems, but others prevailed as well.

I suppose two of the wierdest were the following;

1) In Southern Nepal our local bus was stopped by a road strike, or bandh as they are called there. This occurred because a student was killed in a road accident. Since the bureaucracy is apparently untrustworthy in most Asian countries the people (locals) tend to take certain things into their own hands. In this instance they got a large truck, parked it sideways across the road and used it to block advancing traffic. The result can be miles of cars/buses/trucks stuck along the road. I only figured out what was going on because I'd read about something similar in the paper the week previous, as no one around us really spoke English. We were lucky to only be stuck for a few hours. I read in the paper they can last for days. An added element of strangeness for us Westerners was when car tires were put in front of the truck and lit on fire. A few Europeans were with us and were equally shocked at the blatant pollution, it smelled horrible too. The truck was finally moved when policeman showed up on the scene.

2) Of course the worst incident happened in India, Mumbai to be precise. We had booked an overnight tourist bus from Mumbai (previously and still mostly called Bombay, which I prefer) to Goa. The ticket was rather pricey by Indian standards at 650 Rupees ($17Cdn) but there was A/C and it was a Volvo bus (all the travel agents tell you about them with excitement as they are new and bouncy, with air ride for comfort). Anyways we needed to get to the bus, which we were told was near a specific hospital and quite close to the beautiful VT train station. We got a taxi from outside of our hotel, it was a metered taxi so we didn't have to negotiate a price. The bus would not be at a bus station per se but close to the above reference points and parked along the road with all of the other big buses. The taxi driver said he knew where the hospital was, however his English was limited.
A short time later we saw the train station, then we got on the entrance ramp for the highway which was past the station. At first I thought 'okay maybe it's a short ride to the next exit where the hospital/bus road is' but Gavin caught on right away. He started asking the driver what he was doing and where he was taking us, getting upset as he thought the driver was trying to cheat us when he was really lost. Well he was right. My stomach started to turn in knots (a usual phenomenon in India, I feel so calm now I've left!), Gavin became furious and the driver then pulled over to ask for directions. We were then driven back in the direction we had come from and taken to the right spot, worried by now we might miss our bus to Goa. When we got there we could clearly see the name of the hospital from the road, it was so frustrating and of course we didn't want to pay him the full metered amount. He'd literally driven us twice as far as we'd needed to go, AND we were now running late.
It turned into a road side show with me dragging both of our packs out of the taxi, as i was afraid he would drive off with them. The driver was threatening to get the police so we would pay and Gavin was agreeing as we felt we were in the right here. By this point we needed to find our bus on a long street full of buses that looked the same and we were getting angry. A bus conductor with fluent English came over to try and help us. We explained the situation and he sorted us out to pay a lower amount, the driver was reluctant but seemed to agree. We paid him, found out our bus was actually a street over (seriously, how are people supposed to know these things?!) so we started running for it.
While this new 'might miss the bus' drama took shape, the damned taxi driver started following us in his taxi and demanded we pay him the 30 rupees he felt he deserved, for driving us completely in the wrong direction! In retrospect it's nearly comical; us running down a Mumbai street with backpacks on, looking for one bus in dozens with a specific name on it and this taxi driver nearly stopping traffic chasing us down. But then my adreneline was on high alert, I'd already yelled at him for trying to cheat him so badly I'd started shaking. These travel experiences really get you to explore all of your emotions and reactions I must say... Well we ran across the 6 lanes of crazy Mumbai traffic, lost the taxi and found our bus with the help of a very nice shopkeeper and then in typical Indian style we waited... it left an hour late of course. I spent the first half hour waiting for the driver to find us on the bus and make a scene. This was the bus that I was then very sick on all night, so one might understand why we were so happy to get to Goa!

So many people in India live in slums beside the train tracks. I was reading this book by the Economist Jeffrey Sachs recently called The End of Poverty. He mentions this situation and was shocked by it as well. A lot of these people have organized into groups throughout the cities to fight for their rights and make the slums safer. I found it interesting that a lot of these shacks have tv's in them. No matter where I have travelled in the world I seem to see tv's and Coca Cola, even in extreme poverty. The people living beside these train tracks were a real mix, we saw girls with wild hair and hunger in their eyes as our train whistled by. I saw children dancing and men getting ready for work wearing dress pants no less. Women washing their hair in buckets and babies being changed. I suppose what amazed me is how their lives were really quite normal on a daily basis, how people everywhere live such similar lives at the basic level. We laugh, we cry, we love, we die, we sleep and we eat - and at the end of the day it's mostly only the variation or extremes we do it in that defines us. The size and quality of our house, the amount of food, the availability of water change but as people we are similar. I suppose that is one of the reasons I love travelling so much, it makes me feel so connected to the rest of the world.

posted by melaniewilkes @ 8:51 PM