(the Rajasthani desert, on our camel safari)
Having returned from Project/Travel week last week, I'm finally getting around to my attempt to paint my experiences up in words for all of you out there.
It's a strange thing. I'm sitting facing the pool playing music loudly to the night, in a restful moment away from the hubbub of school-life here. Yet, I've stationed myself and my packet of juice slapbang inbetween the Social Centre and Gossip, our tuck shop here. It should be bustling, but I guess the mocks and tests coming up have tied the hands of a lot of second years right now.
The week of my birthday, the desert and a 24 hour train journey across three states was busy, so I'm going to (hopefully) bring you the stories day by day (I'm feeling very CNN-ish, and was going to write 'as they happen' but I restrained myself) over the course of the next eight days.
This will prevent potential RSI for me and overwhelming quantities of text for you to read :)
FRIDAY MARCH 5TH
After spending the previous evening on a moonlight picnic in the biodiversity reserve, and having slept on a roof (it felt like camping out in the summertime, if you managed to ignore the mosquitoes) I got up and packed for the week.
(this sounds so simple written down, but I'm sure as most of you know, I'm not the world's best/speediest/most effective packer. In hindsight, I did pretty well though, as I wore almost everything, had space for souveniers and only forgot my pajamas (: )
I was going to travel with Yanna (German/French, grew up in Japan, our organised one), Aradhya (Indian and our only second year in the group), Andres (Spanish and an amazing violin player), Bartek (our Polish sarcasm dose), Osnat (our Israeli CliniClown game-instigator) and Emilio (the patriotic American who pretended to be Indian for the week). We didn't really know each other too well, so the week would at the very least contain some getting-to-know-people-ness, which I always think is fun.
So it got to three and we were all excitedly standing around in the heat of the day with our backpacks and travelling clothes on. We'd booked a bus with a bunch of others who needed to get to Bombay to catch trains, and were waiting for everyone to arrive (we work on Indian/MUWCI time here, which means that things happen anywhere between ten minutes and two days after they were supposed to).
By half past we'd all dribbled in, and the bags were being tied to the roof. Our ringleader (the second year at this point in time) was getting slightly stressed, as our train was due to leave at 20:30 and getting into Bombay would take us four hours at least around this time of day.
The bus driver took his time though, and eventually we (already too hot in the bus, tearfully and cheerfully waving goodbye to other friends) were on our way.
Naturally we had a couple more obstacles to get past before we could get out of the state and into our chosen travel week region. The first was a flat tire, which landed us at some unknown pitstop area, with a ringleader who was getting more agitated as the time wore on. We considered hitch-hiking the remaining two hours into Bombay, but settled for getting our backpacks down in advance to allow us to jump off and race for a train if neccessary.
We got to Bombay by 19:30, but with the evening traffic and sheer scale of the city it was unlikely that we would make our train. We were advised to get off and catch a train from a nearby station, which might still get us there in time.
We grabbed our backpacks and jumped out.
We ran along roads and pavements, hauling each other up and pulling everyone along.
We got to the station and found a line a mile long for tickets.
Luckily we had charm and (I'm sad to say) foreign blood on our side, and we got our tickets.
We continued to run through the station.
We linked hands and jumped on a random carriage.
It turned out to be a women's only carriage, which made for an amusing/slightly uncomfortable twenty minutes for some of our group. The women all watched us, alien as we were with massive bags, braids over our heads like Heidi (that would be me) and franctic looks on our faces. We were told to get off at a station, we did, and it turned out to be the wrong one.
The rush continued.
We ran out of the station.
We shouted for taxis.
We piled into two and kept our fingers crossed we'd end up at the same station.
We did.
It was 21:15.
Thinking that the Indian time scale we'd had such problems with earlier might work to our advantage, we checked the platform.
There was a train there.
Hoping for the best, but suspecting it wasn't ours, we got on.
No comments:
Post a Comment