So we woke up on the train at about 730. Well that’s when the alarm went off. I woke up at 4 something, 5…6… 7… yah it wasn’t that great of sleep. Well our train rolled in around 8 or 9 I don’t remember. We grabbed our luggage and started to hop of the train. Groggily we walked with the herd of people and some guy yells TIM! What the…???!! TIMMM Who the ….?!?!? Ohhh its our guide Samik!
Pause. So these last 3 weeks we have been dying to hike. To trek. To climb mountains and rocks and be awesome. Well snap, the Himalayas are like right there… hmmmmm. Lets do it. Yah well so is Nepal and they have unrest and no government and we read in the papers about kidnappings and killings… yah okkkk. So Everest isn’t gonna happen this year. So I joined forums and researched hardcore where we could trek from bihar in a few days. Nowhere. Nadah. I actually had a few people tell me bihar is a lot worse than Nepal. Well that’s news… Mary Ellen’s cousin has a friend who knows a guy that trek’s outta Calcutta (aka Kolkata, both spellings are used in the city, no joke). So we’ve been emailing him and we are stopping through Kolkata for few hours maybe we can do something. Then we get this idea if we leave bihar a few days early, we might be able to do a little trekking. So we email this guy back and forth and send him our pass port info and he sets this trip up. And well… here we are… ill explain the trip as we go… but yah he works for a trekking company and its kinda his job so it wasn’t like just a random dude. Well it was, but, hey, he knew what he was doing. We just weren’t sure when he was gonna kill us and cut us up. We had ideas tho…
So he finds us. We shake hands and get into a cab. This is too public of a place to be sliced and diced so we figured we were safe, at least for now. So traffic is a pain in the butt, but were in an old school yellow cab, the kind in the movies from the 50s and its beat up, dented, paint from other cars on its bumpers and side panels. Which is explained by how they drive, which is more civilized than Patna, but they are aggressive. Many bumper to bumper, metal to metal sandwiches. So that’s what these cars are made to do. Cool!
So we get to his apartment, well the apartment theat he shares with his mother, father, uncle, and his wife. There are 2 bedrooms and a tv sorta room, which I think might be another bed room, a small kitchen, a small dining area and a small sitting area. Our school has bigger apartment for students. He has lived there since 1988. Crazy. This is common very common and part of the culture, imagine that. So bags dropped off we grab our cameras and get some lunch. WAIT sorry. I forget when we still had our luggage like 2 hrs ago he asks u hungry for breakfast. Yah sorta. Its about 10 am. He asks, kfc or mcdonalds. Umm I guess mcdonalds. I donno if I can stomach either right now tho… so we get to mcdonalds, a post by itself really, and we eat spicy chicken sandwich and fries and a coke. Wow. This is really good. Ok back to the story. So we get lunch sit down Indian place we get way too much food. Have a beer each and get to know each other, cuz we really don’t know much about the guy. Turns out he has a very small repertoire to talk about: photography (im cool with this tho), trekking in general, his hike to 4 peaks (a really cool hike where u can see 4 of the 5 highest peaks in the world and movies. That’s all. But its cool.
So we go to this really random place but super cool. Background, we are in a very Hindu region and eveyr year there is a huge festival where they throw these statues into the river. They are made of mud and straw and are very biodegradable, but it’s a big deal. They a crafted in Kolkata and shipped around the world. Cool. So we check it out, really interesting. Got some got pictures, learned something too, about photography and the religion.
Then we took a ride on a tug boat. That’s all the event deserves. Cool pictures too tho haha
Then we got our luggage, so our small book bags, with 2 pants, 2 shirts 1 extra pair of socks tooth brush and few medicines, just in case. To the mountains we go. We stop at a sketch shop and get sandwiches. Chicken internet and chicken sausage in a bun… this is gona be interesting. Glad we tried sketch food before we came (we had only minimal damage from the food btw) we say goodbye to his wife, a very quiet but nice lady and board the bus. Not the most comfortable, kinda like a greyhound, but the seats reclined as far as the person behind u would let you go. So this is the position I am in for the rest of the night and half of tmrw. This is my first night bus, 13 hour ride. They put a movie in Hindi on. Worst acting and editing ever. Ive made better. This was bad. Really bad. Bus is moving. Im sleeping. Let the adventure begin!
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