Manali, Himachal Pradesh

We managed to find a luxury bus out of Delhi, not too fabulous by Western standards, but on the flats we felt sheltered from the excesses of the engine compartment, and for some reason, when you emblazon a "Volvo" symbol on the front and sides of the bus in large enough characters, it is roughly the same as adorning a semitruck with vicious looking red & orange lights arranged in snarling rictuses or blood dripping orgasms. In any case, the effect of such adornments was that other vehicles on the road dived to the side when the distinctive roar of the V-million engine asundered the nightly racket. Perhaps the drivers took special courses in the art of "chicken" and wore special talismans allowing them to bend the metal frame of their chariots in order to squeeze around the 15 ton concrete-bearing lorries while simultaneously avoiding the colorfully painted yak-drawn school bus moving at 5km/hour. All this while driving on roads occasionally reaching 5 meters in width (for two lanes of traffic) but only when counting the massive mud trenches found every few feet.



As I may or may not have mentioned, it was a surprisingly nice voyage and while Norm and I couldn't quite seem to defeat the 4-inch-too-short coffin we'd allowed ourselves to be paired up into in order to fall asleep on a hopefully clean 2-inch pad of foam, I, having the window seat, was able to entertain myself with various predictions regarding the chances of us making it up the mountain drive. I have heard descriptions of the occasionally terrifying busride in exotic locales and I like to think of myself as somewhat of a connieseur of the death-defying acrobatics of four-wheeled vehicles in precipitious locations. In Italy along the Amalfi coast, the bus drivers seemed to believe the early morning first rides were perfect for course records and testing braking systems, but luckily we were traveling south and travelling along the inside lane so I only had to worry about the occasional falling rock turning the tire and flipping us instantly off the lemon-laden cliffs in a beautiful pirouette of "ciao bella's" and "qu-est que c'ests." And even the maddening trips of southern India where busdrivers drank the blood of bulls and devoured the souls of vampires in order to maintain the fortitude to charge into certain death on the wrong side of every road with the grave and solemn duty to both intricate and extricate each and every tourists' lives countless times. No, this was manageable as well, with fear taking a back seat to fascination after fear had been stomped down by repetition. Yet there was something about travelling into the mountain passes of the Himalayas, following coursing glacial rivers whose occasional gleam of light may or may not have been that last poor unsuspecting nun's rosary floating in the water, drifting from the collision her bus made with the rapidly approaching ground. Perhaps it was the sickening switchbacks attempting to dislodge my stomach from the very comfortable position it had been lodged in since my unlikely birth, or the fact that during the night I could look up and see the crystal stars flickering their brilliance upon the road, followed by the realization that the reflection from the road was actually that same beautiful glacial river shining 150 meters below, further eclipsed by the knowledge that the only thing keeping you from getting a close up of that reflection was a meter tall wall and the four Indian-maintained strips of rubber connected to the wildly whirring engine of the banshee driver we'd contracted.



Following is a briefer description of this scene; "Dude look at those stars! Holy shit, is that the river? Down there! Where's the edge of the road? What do you mean you can't see it? No don't lean over you idiot, you might tip the bus! If you can't see it, shit, well, you can't see it. Hell no I'm not switching spots with you!"



After hours of this the mind goes numb, the