Why We Travel, part 2

The toy train is comin' to town!
Originally uploaded by Amberly & David.

We travel to tell harrowing stories about transit that we find hard to believe ourselves. Like the night bus from Pushkar to Agra, with sleeping berths so grotty, the headrest was slick with hair grease. Bouncing and swerving so badly, we spent a fair amount of time airborne, backs pounded as if by an overzealous nanny burping a newborn.

Or multi-leg journeys that stretch hours and days beyond their intended length. Like our recent cross-country journey from the Andaman Islands to Rishikesh, just in time for Passover. It started with an easy-enough afternoon ferry ride to Port Blair, where we stayed overnight in order to catch our morning flight. A 7:45am pick-up kicked off the second leg of the journey, onto a plane to Calcutta and, after time out for an authentic Bengali lunch feast, to the train station for an 18-hour overnight ride to New Delhi. The original plan was to arrive in the late morning on Monday, and take a bus to Rishikesh straight away.

I suppose it was a good thing that the Naxalites decided to bomb the track at Gaya, because it forced our train to take a detour that added nearly four hours to our ride. The delay forced us to stay a night in Delhi, heads still swaying with the rythym of the train as we walked the streets. The good night's sleep wasn't quite enough to brace us for the next day, which we thought might be the easy part.

After negotiating the mammoth Delhi bus terminal and searching in vain for a comfy bus directly to Rishikesh, we ended up on a private "deluxe" bus to Haridwar, the closest serviceable town. The promised five hours streched past the six that the guidebook suggests to over seven, seldom reaching the bus' 30 mph top speed. When we were done winding through Delhi's interminable suburbs, we got stuck behind a caravan of tractor-pulled sugarcane carts, and so on.

When we reached Haridwar, a taciturn bicycle rickshaw wallah deposited us at the bus stand, where we found out it would be at least another 30 minute wait for the Rs. 15 (~$0.40) bus. It was 6:30pm on our fourth day of transit.

We all have our breaking points - times or days when the world is too much and we can't deal with it anymore. In transit, this usually means forsaking the cheapest solution, which invariably involves a test of patience, for the easiest one, which is inevitably more expensive. Amberly was having one of those days. Not taking these moments personally or out on each other has been the key to our successful travel together. So, knowing better than to put up even the faintest of arguments, I marched behind her over to the taxi stand and gladly forked over the Rs. 460 (~$11) for a smooth and quick ride to our end, at last.

With time, these memories fade into stories fondly told with friends and designed to get a reaction. The lessons are less the "shoulda coulda woulda" kind, and more what we learn about ourselves, our limits, and our coping skills at these times. This is also why we travel.