Macshite
Trip Start
Sep 01, 2010
1
16
86
Trip End
Ongoing
Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India
Sunday, October 24, 2010
...so to continue where I left off...
...I left Diu in not quite as much comfort as I would have liked due to a combination of the Portuguese legacy of the siesta and my inability to buy a bus ticket in good time. All of the sleeper berths were gone and the only seat left was the one right behind the driver. From this enviable vantage point I got to witness all of the very near misses we were having with frightening regularity. Moreover, a little while into the journey, the assistant (a child) removed the cushions from the seat next to our driver, then removed some wood paneling thus exposing the engine. Whilst gunning it down down what India calls a road at around 40kph the assistant proceeded to beat the engine with a spanner. Unfortunately I don't believe this strategy to have had an effect, for a couple of hours later we stopped to pick up a short man with a long beard and a reassuring look about the eye (a mechanic it turned out). Another half an hour or so went by, then we stopped at something like a scrapheap, cannibalized some parts from another bus, then the mechanic went to work. During this interlude I decided to enquire as to what was wrong with the bus "bus is broken?" I asked a complete stranger, "is ok, is only the brakes" came a confident reply. 'Thank got for that' I mumbled uner my breath 'I thought it was something serious'...
I'd already decided I wasn't getting any sleep anyway so sat up the rest of the night listening to music. At some horrendous hour and feeling a little dizzy from lack of sleep, I arrived at the city of Ahmedabad....
...stopped here for only a day, partly to break up the journey to Mumbai, but also to catch up with the photographers I'd met in Diu. Had a little sleep in the morning, then met up with the guys in the early afternoon. Was tricked into going to Macdonalds for dinner which was as dissapointing as it was disgusting (as you can imagine from a country that doesn't eat cows or pigs). After that they showed me around, we ate some ice cream, and decided to blow up one last water melon (which, due to an incredibly fast fuse on the Nazi Foil, was very nearly the end of one Chris Linaker).
Had a sleep in an incredibly crap hotel, then caught the train to Mumbai in the morning, where my life long gream of becoming a Bollywood movie star was bound to be realised (or given somesort of strange and freakish event, would be destroyed forever)...
