Patience

Chennai (Madras), Tamil Nadu, India

 

So it seems every time I step on a bus in India there's always a novel test of endurance awaiting me.  I thought very little could be as frustrating as the Amritsar ride on the night "luxury" bus, what with the controversy over the coffee table, the intense heat, choking diesel fumes, and the annoying, loud, sweaty sikh kid sitting next to me over whom I battled for the armrest (I pushed him back over the line of control) and who I eventually just had to tell to f-himself when he started trying to shut the window, which actually worked. 

 

Unfortunately the bus from Agra to Dehli on Sunday evening was even worse.  Having been shutout of train tickets and having a monday AM plane flight, I had no alternative, but to book another "deluxe" air-conditioned ride.  This time, my booking did not secure me a seat, but instead a spot on the floor in the back (some german loser who simultaneously got on took the last seat, made no effort to switch with me, and was bitching to me how it was uncomfortable - yes). 

 

Of course, I could have tolerated this had we made the 4-5 hour drive back to Dehli as scheduled at 5 pm.  Instead, the "deluxe" bus was actually the back end of a domestic tour bus, so instead of driving back to Dehli, we made several stops for night-time sightseeing in Mathura (where there are no streetlights or anything, but that's beside the point).  Mathura, in the 1-2 hours I spent there, managed to shoot past Amritsar and Agra as the biggest dump in India that I've seen yet.  Apparently it's significant as a pilgramage center due to the fact that Lord Krishna allegedly lived there during the events of the Bhagavad Gita, so there's loads of vishnaivite sadhus, and of course cows, cows, and more cows, as well as persistent hawkers and beggars.  While I take no position on the various Hindu deities, by the end of my time there, I was ready for Kali, Durga, and the rest of the sivaites to raze the place.

 

So after that unscheduled stop, already being well behind schedule and only being a little over an hour outside dehli, at or around 11 pm our driver made the customary roadside dhaba stop, for "dinner", which I'm pretty sure they usually do in order to get a kickback/commission from the owners as this happens a lot. Then at some point outside Dehli I was hustled off to a neighboring bus headed more towards my part of town, and although I didn't have to sit on the floor, I managed to lose my hat (which I thought I had lost in China but recovered).  Then the driver screamed at us in Hindi and dropped us off two miles away from our destination.  So at 1 AM I got back to the hotel marking the end of what should have been a four and a half hour drive after 9 hours.  India.

 

Chennai is a coastal city recently famous for outsourcing (which I guess here would be Insourcing) and is the first place I've seen in India which seems to be booming rather than decaying.  I'd like to see more of it, but I can't really stray too far from my hotel room due to a microbial souvenir from the north.