It was just too easy...

Very soon after Jessica's latest post, a series of mishaps coupled with being in the wrong (or sometimes right) place at the wrong time led to the first time in a very long while that our traveling could be classified as 'difficult.' As the events I am about to retell are actually not so harrowing, I suppose this is more of a testament to what good travelers we have become and how often that fact intersects with great fortune and wonderful people/opportunities.
While on our way to the train station in Delhi we were remarking what a pleasant time we had - filled with rest, cooking, and clean laundry. This was made even more pleasant by the fact that Delhi seems to be the last place any backpacker wants to be when in India, with its notorious scams, pooping in the streets, and extreme heat. Indeed, we had had it too easy. Our rickshaw wallah dropped us off at the wrong train station which forced us to get into yet another rickshaw with a man whose business practices Jessica disapproved of so much that her only words for him were, 'no, I do not want to go with you, we don't like you!' Alas, sometimes you are desperate and need to catch the last train out of town and he did get us to the train station on time, so good on him. As a preface to this scene there isn't much to say to quell the nerves of the mothers, but I will say two things: 1) the train system is insane in India, but not in the way that my brother's friend Brian thinks ('I hear people just disappear on those trains and are never heard of again...'), instead we have found the train system to be rather orderly and secure. This does not, however, outweigh the fact that there are over 1 billion souls in this nation and everyone is on a family summer holiday. The trains are also full so missing a train is an undesirable situation as it is not guaranteed that you will be on the next train to your destination. In other words, missing our train was not an option.
2) I promised myself a long time ago that I would never run with a backpack on. Any of my friends from college can attest to my disapproval of our fellow students who had their priorities so maligned as to run to a class not to miss the first 5 minutes and to sacrifice their pride, the cleaniness of their clothes, and the increased risk of stress related diseases.
So there we are, it is 1022 PM, the train is scheduled for 1020, and for the first time, a train is pulling out of the station on time - perhaps since independence in 1947. We ran, oh did we run (or perhaps waddle) with our backpacks, some mangos, and a bar of chocolate after the moving train. Jessica and I have been accused of being eerily similar people -- one difference is the cause of the ensuing scene. Jessica is a more cautious person than I am, therefore, she ended up in the drunk tank and I didn't.
As the train pulled away I took a few long strides, stuck out my arms, and clung to the handrails while imploring the men standing at the door to pull me in. My last sight of Jess was her standing on the platform, arms at her side, palms raised in a gesture of utter disbelief and panic/weighing her options. That was Monday night, I haven't seen her since...

Just kidding! But it did get pretty bleak there for a moment. I found myself in a general seating car and thus had to make my way up to our slightly nicer sleeper car that was of course on the other end of the train. General seating carts, especially on overnight trains, speaking generally (ha) is filled with people who are pretty hard up for cash - this means that they do not see white solo women that often in the flesh or have no qualms about acting as though they haven't. Have we mentioned the staring in India? It is unabashed which, to me, is better than trying to hide it, but it means that we feel like we are in the zoo. Slowly I made my way through the train and finally reach our car when Jessica bursts into the door babbling and hurling herself on me. After a moment, she coherently recounts her travails of the last hour. As the few cars behind the one I leaped onto were filled with people, she had no choice but to jump onto the last one. As the adrenaline of jumping onto a train gaining speed is not enough for a girl who has 1 and a half functioning legs, she is met by a man with a gun, a gun pointed at her, the fare dodger. Jess had found herself in the police car that is used to 1) keep fare dodgers like herself off the trains 2) lock up the drunks and other unruly folks wreaking havoc on the train. Quite clearly our Jessica represents one if not both of these characteristics, so it is only understandable that the officer(after lighting up a dooby) locked her up in the drunk cell before letting her explain her story. I am told he considered letting her go to her seat not after seeing her ticket, but only after she surrendered half of our candy bar to him. After our stories were told and our blessings counted, we fell asleep to wake up in Haridwar, yet another holy city on the Ganges. The city, to our sleepy eyes, was filled with pushy Indian grandma-pilgrim types and a lot of poo so we decided to return to our friend, public transportation, and take the hour long bus to Rishikesh where Jess once again used her line about not liking a person as a reason for not getting into his rickshaw, fair enough. After said unlikable rickshaw wallah dropped us off at the wrong point, we had to walk through yet more crowds of pushy grandmas on pilgrimage before reaching our much anticipated destination.
As many practitioners of yoga know, Rishikesh is the self-proclaimed yoga capital of the world so we were anxious to reach a place we were hoping to spend quite a bit of time. Turns out the world's center of yoga has an off season. Frankly our patience was a bit low as this was the second city in a row that was underwhelming. Once again, this is a testament to the breadth of incredible places we have been over the past 8 months. In an effort to be pro-active, we started to research other cities that offered many yoga opportunities this time of year and settled on going to Dharamsala earlier than expected, but would first stop in Chandigarh for a few days. Chandigarh had been described to us as the Canberra of India. To make that allusion clear, Canberra is the capital of Australia - a wealthy, well-planned city that is also totally devoid of culture or anything else of interest. With this image in mind, we decided to still give Chandigarh a chance as it was not only on our way, but had various 'points of interest' most notably the government sector which was designed by Le Corbusier - one of the gods of modern architecture that I had studied in depth at university.
Something was off in Chandigarh from the start. It is a new city that was designed in such an ultra-modern way as to set the tone for a 'new India' - after having just received independence, there was a desire to show that it could keep up with the first world, but that just isn't India. Chandigarh had everything that frustrates us about India while lacking all of that which makes India such a singular, great place. Frustrations included the black hole where cheap accomodation should be, the cryptic, elusive way in which we had to get a bus out of the place while being told that it was impossible, everybody's inability to tell us where Le Corbusier's buildings were, and the bureaucracy(and military barricades) that finally made it impossible for us to see the buildings. The upside of Chandigarh being a bit of a ghost town is that we were able to scramble onto the top of a roof parking lot to catch a glimpse of some of the buildings before being politely shooed away by some military personnel. Let's just say that the most pleasant time spent in Chandigarh was the hours spent waiting for the bus we were told wouldn't come. Alas, the bus did come and we arrived early this morning in Dharamsala, a town in the foothills of the Himalayas that is home to the Dalai Lama in exile along with many Tibetan refugees. The scenery is beautiful, the feeling calm, and the weather pleasant as opposed to the oppressive heat that has characterized our first few weeks here. Along with all of these positive attributes, yoga opportunities abound and we are in the midst of figuring out if we want to participate in a month long yoga teacher training program taught high up in the mountains by a man in flowing white clothing. Things are certainly looking up for us and we are heartened by the prospect of lots of yoga, trekking, and the absence of long-distance transportation for the foreseeable future.

And since you were wondering, yes, the headline of all the newspapers here, both English and Hindi, read 'The King of Pop is Dead.'
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