My skin is very sweet, like marmalade on a bun or Fruit Rollups. I was born this way and although it makes me popular with women who have a sweet tooth, I attract bugs like a living 5'11", three dimensional fly paper without the stickiness, allowing bugs to swoop in for multiple bites. Cuts and scrapes are quick to infect and slow to heal in the high altitudes so the swollen red bug bites I've been scratching are starting to look cystic. Otherwise today is looking promising, we plan to go to something called Gun Hill and see what trouble we can get into. 11/9/2008 @ 10:00am, after about 13 hours sleep in the high mountain air.
At 6989 feet, higher than any peak east of the Rockies, Gun Hill is the tallest land mass in the area that can be reached by normal pasty tourists. There is a cable car, or "rope ride" that yanks people from the shopping mall below up to the top. The cable car was built in the 1970s and like so many other things in India it looks like it hasn't been serviced since. Miniature models of Gun Hill made of spent grease adorn the ground where the pulley and the cable meet. The engine putts, bangs, and shutters like it's missing a spark plug. Everybody inside the cable car held their loved one t
ightly as it swayed on its tether a thousand feet above the ground, the cable car of love, it was tragically cute.Gun Hill is named as such because in the Colonial days there was a cannon up there that used to blow off a shot at noon so people could adjust their watches. The cannon has since been melted to make cheap little bells and miniature Vishnus to sell to tourist or something and what exists in its place is what I call the Tallest Tourist Trap on Earth. Lining the plateau was a host of cheap carnival amusements like the one where you throw a dart at an under-inflated balloon and it bounces back and hits your eye (I had a bad experience once at the Iowa Stare Fair). In the middle a bunch of che
ap crap shanties were set up to sell little bells and Vishnu dolls. I bought a bell to give to my aunt which broke the second I put it in my suitcase. It was smelted on site and had air bubbles in the metal, probably a hazard of high altitude metal work. I found a guide who had trained telescopes on certain points on interest such as the Doon Valley road that brought us to Mussoorie. Even at my great height I could make out the terror in the faces of passengers on the busses and the deranged excit
ement of the driver. Another telescope was pointed at a mountain called Srikantha. At 21,000 feet it is the biggest thing I've ever seen. Even from Gun Hill, over three hundred miles away it stood out like the downtown Chicago skyscrapers viewed from O'hare. The curvature of the Earth, which blocks anything at eye-level over 5 miles away, could only cover the the bottom half of Srikantha. If I ever come back to India I plan on spending the whole time in the Himilayas.Meanwhile, my deathly ill friend Luther rented a scooter and rode it, sniffling and delirious, for a week into the heart of the Himilayas. He got so hig
h that plants ceased to grow and his scooter hadn't enough air to run properly. He says he doesn't really remember getting back to the scooter rental but his pictures of desolate mountain roads and up-close shots of the very peaks I saw through the Gun Hill telescopes made me resolve to come back to the mountains some day.A rotating restaurant that has broken down is just an oddly shaped regular restaurant. Tori and I ate lunch in the regular dinning hall of the Himilaya's only stationary rotary eatery and I cried CRIED over how spicy the food was. My chicken tikka ma
sala left chemical burns on my fingers and when I took a drink of my Haywards 5000 Heavy Beer I could hear the phiiiish of steam blowing out of my ears. The waiters were having a grand time watching their poison cook me from the inside. The cooking staff came out at one point to watch me sit, panting, tongue hanging out, gasping for water. Tori got some good pictures.For most of our travels in Mussoorie we used bikeshaws powered by feeble old men who were barely up to the task of hauling 300 pounds of combined American meat up cliffs. We tipped well but the final bikeshaw made off especially well. He only had to take us down hill from our hotel to the bus station, but midway he stopped for a white cab who said he'd take us straight to the main bus/train terminal in Darha Dun. We payed the bikeshaw guy for his trouble and he got an extra throwback from the cabbie, garnering him about 300 rupees, or a fu
ll day's pay for about 15 minutes of downhill work.The Cabbie drove through the night and the next day we appeared at a bus station that would take Tori and I back to Bangalore where we would spend our final night together until she returned to the states in late December. But before that we had to wait 3 hours, Three Freaking Hours at a one lane bridge. The problem with these one-lane situations in a country without driving rules is that people don't take turns. Everybody on the road charges the bridge from both directions and honks in a gridlock face-off while motorcycles and scooters fill every available foot of room. If a major congestant, like a bus, decides to back down and let somebody through, a thousand motorcycles zoom in to take its spot. The only way these situations get resolved is all the motorcycles wiggle though and pass, then all the small cars, then the trucks, and fi
nally the busses and semis, but this can take hours and the resulting traffic jam can go on for a dozen miles in either direction. From this I've learned that when a travel agent says it will take this long to get somewhere, it is truely an estimate in the broadest sense of the word, nothing is guaranteed in the world of Indian Travel.
Tori bid me a tear filled goodbye at 4AM when I got into the Kia Sorrento shuttle car and headed for the airport. We traveled on the new National 6-lane Expressway at 120kmph (75mph) setting an Indian ground speed record. This may not sound like much, considering American drivers hit 70+ every time they get on the interstate, but in India -where trains are capped at 55mph but rarely get up that high and most city traffic never gets past 30mph, and even the highway has speed bumps and pedestrian crossings- 75 is dangerously quick.
In my next post -the last of my India series- I'll go over my adventures in Bangalore airport and my overall impressions of India.
