The SLEEPER (NOT!) Bus- By Tricia

Dear all, With Tricia here I am on a little hiatus. Below is her entry of our eventful life in the last couple of days...

By Tricia:
{ Sorry, everyone, for the delay in telling you about the night bus. I know the anticipation must be building, but probably not as much as my frustration with keyboards, slow access, and lost emails. This is the third time I've written this. }

THE SLEEPER BUS from Mumbai to Goa. 8pm-8am
Imagine a big Greyhound bus, super fancy luxury Volvo AC bus. It's converted to a sleeper by adding bunks where the overhead storage would be. A few seats remain in the front of the bus, these are for people who bought "sitting" tickets instead of "sleeping" tickets. Our sleeping shelf was the second one on the right hand side, over the heads of a few people sitting below. Now, some of the bunks had ladders to help you climb up but not ours, so we used the bar meant to keep you from rolling out to hoist ourselves up... We laughed, in near hysterics, once we saw what we were in for on our 12 hour ride and appreciated the fact that we are as close as we are and that we like each other as much as we do. The bunk was about three feet wide, maybe 3.5, and this was a double sleeper, NOT a single. It's about 6.5 feet long, with a ceiling that slopes down toward the window (thank Shiva for the window, we got to look through the top six inches of it... without that I think the claustrophobic in me would have lost it). There were six inches from the tip of my nose to the ceiling and probably 12-18 inches above Julio's head. Thanks to Bikram yoga, our skeletal systems have improved enough that we could sit, with our spines curled over, for short periods of time. We grew very skilled at using our feet to retrieve items from the bottom of the bunk. But basically, we had to be horizontal for the duration of the trip.

We found all of this to be VERY funny, but it got even better. The bus made several stops in Mumbai and at one of them, along with the new passengers came an extremely strong, very foul odor. India is famous for the smells it offers (not always good). I don't know if stench rises like heat, but this one was truly awful. (If anyone knows the answer, let me know. A prize to the first believable response.) The doors were shut and we were trapped on our shelf with the curtains closed, covering our noses and trying not to breathe, all while laughing like a couple of lunatics. The conductor, in trying to remedy the problem, only made it worse by spraying an aerosol can of air freshener along the length of the bus. We could actually see the mist coming over the top of the curtain, into our bunk. It was possibly worse than the original odor.

Not too long after that, they switched from the radio to the soundtrack of a Bollywood film and when I say soundtrack, I mean the ACTUAL soundtrack, complete dialogue and fight scenes included. I heard the whole movie because it was impossible to sleep, I'll never know how Julio managed with me tossing and turning and the bus lurching in all directions. [Our night bus was not unlike the Knight Bus of the wizarding world:it didn't fly, but there were lots of tight turns, quick stops and starts, causing us to be thrown in all directions and bounced around as the bus went over potholes and bumps in the road...]

The bus stopped every four hours or so for people to use the toilet. I was desperate by the first stop and woke Julio up to tell him we stopped, scaring him with all my excitement. Then I couldn't find the toilet... In wandering around, I came across these really angry, really loud honking geese that greeted people as the went into the rest stop. Finally, I found the place, the most disgusting squat toilet that I was ever so happy to see. (Thanks also to Charlie and Kim for teaching me and Bikram Choudury for including awkward pose in the series; it makes squatting over a hole so much more manageable.)

The truth is, that despite all of what could have made for a terrible night, I was so happy to be in India, to be with Julio, that I lay awake actually smiling at the ceiling, composing this email in my head and looking out the window at the passing lights until we got far enough away from cities and it grew too dark to see anything.

I woke Julio up again at 9:00am when the conductor yelled, "Welcome to Goa! It has been a very slow ride!" We quickly packed up all our stuff to find out that it was just a chai stop and that we were being welcomed to the state of Goa, not the final stop. Julio asked the driver how much longer the trip would be: about two hours. We plugged in the ipod, laughed some more and danced around in our bunk, on our backs. Julio--amazingly--fell asleep again and woke up at the next stop where people started gathering their things and getting off the bus. After getting our packs from under the bus, we were harassed by a barrage of rickshaw drivers, taxi drivers and motorcycle taxi drivers (These last said that both of us and both of our packs would fit on the motorcycle, no problem). We got some sweets and started making phone calls to lodging places in Colva, the beach town we were ultimately going to, six miles away from Margao. At this point, this was my second night without sleep, and Julio had just woken up.

Maybe ten minutes later, we realized that we were not, in fact, in Margao but rather in a town called Mapusa in the northern part of the state. We wanted to be much farther south of where we actually were. Of course, our bus was long gone and we had no choice but to negotiate with some of the taxi and rickshaw drivers, whose prices seemed to make a lot more sense now. We chose an autorickshaw, deciding that we didn't want the local bus experience at that particular point in time. An hour later, we made it to Colva and took the first lodging option we came across. It took them an hour to clean our room, so instead of arriving on the beach at 8:30 or 9:00 as we had hoped, it was more like 2:30 before we walked into town, found some food to eat and walked down the beach.

We decided that the sleeper bus experience was one we were okay with having, but one that would not be repeated. Lo and behold, two nights later we were on another, from Margao to Hampi (the town where we are now). We opted for sitting tickets this time (they're cheaper). I won't get into the details here ( but here's a taste: cockroaches crawling up the walls, this one was NOT a VOLVO AC luxury sleeper)... believe me when I tell you that this was also eventful and unbelievable, mostly because of the crew in charge of the operation. Everything that happens here is somehow either absurd or just beautifully eventful and memorable. Every day seems like a week, but in a truly wonderful way, it's just time passing differently. I'd love to stay here longer.

Love to you all,
Tricia in India

"Into the Woods to Find the Giant..."
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