Monday Morning: Ahmedabad

Okay... so the sheer amount of blogging that I haven't done and need to catch up on is completely overwhelming and has been keeping me from wanting to do any of it, which is exactly why I need to suck it up and just start chipping away again at my Eid break in India (other life updates still to come).

After a nice 2.5 days in Mumbai, we needed to make our way to Udaipur via Ahmedabad. We thought that since we'd just spent some time getting used to India with a friend and native of the country, we were ready to face the challenge of transportation on our own. Boy were we wrong.

We got on the train from Mumbai, taking a 1st class 3-tiered sleeper car that was far from luxurious. After having seen the incredible amounts of poverty in Mumbai, I was content with my bed that was way too small (complete with only 1 creepy-crawly visitor in the night). I managed to survive, and so did everyone else. It wasn't until we got to Ahmedabad that we had the REAL experience. It was 5am when we arrived and unfortunately had missed the non-existent wake-up call we asked one of the ticket people to give us. So not only were we bleary-eyed and a little out of sorts, it was pitch-black outside. We were met right away by a group of taxi/tuk-tuk drivers who were trying to get us in their vehicles. The group followed us all the way to the street outside the train station. We figured telling them that we didn't need a taxi but rather a bus was the best way to make them go away, quite to the contrary. We then had several offers to take us to the "bus station" (which didn't exist). We later learned that it was several kilometers away from the train station, but we had no way of knowing where to go. They kept pointing in the direction from which all the busses were coming, and so we had no choice but to take their word and cram into their rickshaws. By the time they turned down a dark road I was thinking we were headed straight for a mugging, kidnapping, raping... I don't know what. There just happened to be a "stall" that this guy's buddy was selling bus tickets from. We paid an overpriced 180rupees for a bus ticket, and they finally took us to the actual bus. There were in fact many busses on this street, as well as many bus companies which might have been cheaper but we were just happy to have tickets and a seat. We got on the bus, and that's when the real fun started.

Within the first 5 minutes, Greg found a rat crawling at his leg. We all staked out our seats, and we all decided bathrooms were in order. So, Megan and Hillary set out to find the toilets while we watched their stuff. Moments later the bus starts pulling away. I was absolutely paralyzed with fear. We had their stuff, their passports, their money, their identification... everything. We tried to get them to stop, but they kept making circular motions with their arms and not communicating otherwise. We found out that they were just pulling around the block to find more passengers and returned to the street we were on, only parked a little further up than before. Somehow Megan and Hillary didn't freak out and managed to find us again. I don't know that I would have done the same. They continued to do this loop several more times. The bus was scheduled to leave at 6am and actually left at 7:45.

The rest of the bus trip was fairly uneventful. It was a non-AC bus, but the air that morning was fairly crisp. We spent most of it napping due to the lack of sleep from the night before. Needless to say, we were relieved once we got to Udaipur. I wasn't convinced that that was actually where we were going until I started seeing the name of the city actually written on the street signs.