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New Delhi, India
28° 36' N 77° 11' E
Oct 29, 2006 14:58
Distance 181km

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Text written in: English

just didn't expct it so soon - the bus ride from hell. or really, the night of bus rides from hell. our plan was to leave agra for naini tal - a lake-side town just inside the himalayas. we'd already bought our train ticket so thought all was in order.

until we had a local guy call the rail station for us to confirm our seats. after the classic "m-hmm, m-hmmm" on his part (you know, the one that no good comes of), he gets off the phone to say no need to confirm our seats cause our train with the 10:00 departure doesn't leave tonight, it LEFT 2 hours ago. doh!

so....what are our options now?? 'no prob' he says, 'get yourselves to delhi (NOOOOO not delhi again, we're thinking...), go to the interstate bus terminal, get on a luxury bus. that'll take you straight there'. 'I do this all the time' he adds...

make a long story a little shorter, we head to the agra train station, manage to get a partial refund for our missed train but asshole train counter guy won't sell us reserved seats to delhi. so peds battles his way in the local's cattle-call line. 30 mins later he emerges with our cattle-call tix (basically for a car full of wood benches oversold and jammed with peeps). we try our luck at upgrading (basically grab a nicer seat in a nicer car and hope no one boots you). we do get booted once, but not the second time. hurrah! so far so good...

now we're back in delhi, at the same 'clean' train station as before. (are we really back in the grubby hood?!). we hire a rickshaw to the interstate bus terminal. after a 5 minute attempt to jump start the rickshaw and a drive that last forEVER (never mind our stops are barely 1 inch apart on the lonely planet map), we get to a bus station full of all crappy, SO non-luxury buses....uh-oh.....

we find the 'office', point to naini tal on the map to the guys behind the counter. they shake ther heads (bad sign in any country). but one guys comes out, shepherds us towards one of the crappy buses. tells us "10 rupees, you'll go to xxxx" (a station name we both immediately forgot - like idiots, we didn't write it down). no choice, we hop on.

so this first bus leg starts with a 30 min traffic jam JUST leaving the station. we'd jump off and say screw it, but we're really not sure where we are and have no better option than to get a hotel in delhi. whatever is happening to us still isn't THAT bad yet.... 

we finally hit the road, its just that we not exactly sure where we are. finally we see landmarks to put us on our map, it's just that, based on the direction we're going, pretty soon we'll actually be OFF the map (horrors!) with even less of a clue where we are .

so...do we jump ship? see any taxis? no. does it look safe? ummm...SO hard to tell when there's garbage and rubble EVERYWHERE. do we ride the whole route and end up back where we started? ugh!.... for the record, the bus itself never felt unsafe (tho if I wasn't with peds there no WAY I'd be in this situation. so for that reason I was kind of digging it all). so we decide to wait and see... and in a pinch-me-I'm-dreaming moment, we finally, actually pull into another interstate bus teminal.

never mind its full of the same rickety buses as the last one, but we ask around, again get shepherded, again to a crap bus. now this one is litterally leaving the station, supposedly to 'near' where we want to go. and it takes 6 hours and did I mention the bus is crap? and it's now midnight. we do the mututal stare-down - can you handle this? do you want to stay? or go? who will suffer the most wrath of which decision? 

thankfully we mututally agree to go for it. hop on. settle in. meet gopal - a local from mumbai - who speaks english and can confirm everything we were told. yes, it's the right bus, going where we need to, etc, etc.... he was yet another angel in this night of so much going wrong but so many people giving us the right advice to make it right.

6 sleepless hours later, peds is convinced we should be dead - the speed-propelled driver (as in drugs, no the rate we were traveling) played chicken with passing trucks and would get around them by sometimes driving on the opposite shoulder. lucky for me, I was tucked behind a seat with a shirt over my head. not sleeping, but at least not watching either....

6am, true to the advice, we roll into hardiwar. more awesome people help us - instead of riping us off - and get us on the bus headed to nainital, that also happens to leave in 5 mins (see - more good luck!). we nab seats, try to stay awake cause the scenery is spectacular (we climb 2000m in 30k) and finally arrive around 9am to briliant sun and spectacular lake/mountain views.

took 12 hours, 5 bus changes and no sleep but we made it. and pretty much did it all the local way. sucked BIG time but was also pretty cool :)