Leaving the Local Intelligence Unit S.S.P. Office (I forgot to ask what S.S.P. stands for) I feel less sure about my future dealing with the Indian border police than when I entered the office. The day started with sorting, gifting really. A backpack that some store in Bangalore (maybe Adventure Worx, I can’t remember) gave me as a free gift, Herman Hesse’s Siddartha, some oils that I’ve used and treasured for months, a pair of nice sunglasses and extra hand sanitizer. Extra weight and bulk which I’m sure I still have more of.
Anyway, I retrieved my lock from the Sikh temple where I left it, picked up my dirty laundry (dude said ‘power out, no clean’), and ate lots of ice cream and chocolate at the new Cafe Coffee Day here in Nainital. After making plans to meet up for a trek in three months, I left Girish Bhatt, Director of Hilltop Tourist Point and headed to the Local Intelligence Unit. The first official; instructed me to leave for Delhi today to apply for an extension on my visa. That didn’t appeal to me, so I spoke with the lead investigator and he told me that I’d have no problems at the border. Exit papers are not needed. We’ll see…
The following recursively defined series is what I think of when I go through difficult time:
u1 ε R, ui+1 = -½ui
As the number of terms increase, the series approaches zero from the positive and negative sides, just as the most productive learning situations. The fraction can be decreased for slower learners or increased for faster learners, but it must be between 1 and zero. I have a hole in my heel. Part of it was cut out during a pilgrimage in Than. A rock in the desert. This keeps making its presence felt, just as my inability to travel smoothly without challenges. My train ticket from Hospet to Bhuj was canceled automatically since it was waitlisted (which I failed to notice when booking) and I didn’t confirm it.
Luckily, many people accommodated me in the sleeper class by letting me sit with their family or friends, and two guys slept together so that I could have a bed at night. Each time the conductor came, my neighbors would tell me to go hide in the toilet for 15 minutes and they would knock when he had passed. For my ticket from Bareilly to Kathgodam, I booked for the wrong day, bought a general ticket, waited eight hours plus four more hours since the train was late. Again, I was accommodated by kind passengers in sleeper class.
One of the Singhs at the Sikh temple aolng with Girish Bhatt informed me about the 2:30pm bus to Tanakpur from Nainital which would pass through Banbasa, the town nearest to the Nepal-India border on nthe Indian side in Uttarakhand. At 1:50pm I leave the park bench where I’m reading The Savage Detectives by Robert Bolaño and at 2:01 pm I’m told that the bus to Tanakpur left at 2:00 pm.
No problem!
I jump in a bus for Haldwani to catch a bus to Tanakpur. When at Haldwani I’m told eleven times that the Tanakpur bus will come at five. Two Indian guys take responsibility for me and take me on a bus before 5:00, which turns out to be a bus to Bareilly, but we’re getting off at Kichha. A short cut? Once we get to Kichha I find out that the Tanakpur bus left at 5:30 and it’s 5:33.
This is when I decide that the alpha man of my two ‘helpful’ Indian friends has caused me a problem and I tell him so in a loud voice so that about eight other Indian guys come stand around to closely observe the foreigner making a scene. Expectation is the mother of all of my disappointed children. The analogy is the closest I will come to admitting a space for celibacy in my life. I have to stop fucking around with expectation.
After my scene has come to a close, the two guys responsible for me (of couirse the produces another bastard) get on a bus with me and I ask, ‘Is this the bus to Tanakpur?’ and they and everyone else waggle their heads and I don’t know the answer. One of my caretkers gets a ring on his cellphone, says something about a carpenter, grabs his friend, goes out of the bus and the bus drives away with me waggliung my head with headphones on. The last stop is Khatima, where I argue with a jeep driver for a Rs. 50 ride through a river and to a Rs.200 fan room in Banbasa.
It’s nice to sit in someone else’s room and stare at a map saying, what the hell?!
June 23, 2010
Paul S Clevenger's Blog 
July 28, 2010 at 9:27 pm |
paul, you should write a book about your adventures when you are done with your traveling. you are doing this exploration is because you are having a summer off there like we are here?
July 29, 2010 at 7:32 am |
I’d need a really good editor. I am traveling around here until March, then I’ll travel back to the land of my youth and rediscover my family. Making money is on hold as long as I have a positive balance in my checking account.