i have yet to receive my flying car

"Ohhhh, I wore a fifteen-pound beard of bees for that woman, but it just wasn't enough."

Until Shimla, my travels in India were almostly entirely by bus, owing mostly to the hilly nature of the northern regions. Can't build railways on such steep grades. Learning of Shimla's talked-about narrow gauge, I was determined to take it. As a child, I understood trains to be large metal boxes exclusively used by the Alberta Wheat Pool (and other such gangster organizations). I forgot that passenger trains existed for years at a time. So, cut to Shimla, I'm very excited to begin properly traveling around India.

Probably should have done some research on the internet. Probably should have booked my travel in advance. Didn't! It took 4 trains, 1 bus, 1 autorickshaw and almost 24 hours to get from Shimla to Rishikesh. By car it would have taken 6 or 7 hours. Well, I'm an idiot. It's probably a blessing that I'm alone, because my internal monologue turned external would have been an unbearable tirade of complaints. For real - thanks universe!

I get it now. Showing up at the train stations without a ticket has mixed results, ranging from irritation to minor catastrophe. Though it appears all of the folks in Bangalore's computer biz were too busy to make a respectable Indian Railways website, I come out of this past week with respect for the complexities of Indian Railways. A few rules to live by: book ahead, book far ahead, learn the codes and acronyms, and do not lose patience.

Rishikesh was decent enough, but I'm not the ashram type so I wasn't bound to last long.

The past couple of nights have been spent in Mussoorie, another old British hill station. I'm staying at the empty house of Paul Gerberding - brother of Tim, uncle of Spruce and Louis. (All roads lead to Dawson, even here.) He's currently out of town with a pile of 15-year-old students, hiking in the Himalayas. The house is great - if any readers ever come across this particular Gerberding, be sure to hook him up with ice creams and other delights. Paul teaches at an international school just outside Mussoorie and lives next to campus, so the walk to the centre of town takes 45 minutes. Most of the walk is along quiet country roads - not the quiet of midwinter Dawson, but plenty quiet enough. There are very few streetlights and you can see the stars so clearly. All of the smog and haze sits in the valley. Mussoorie and surroundings are built on and around the ridges, and far below is the glowing city of Dehra Dun. (It's quite amazing how twinkling and serene DD appears from above at night, as it has no redeeming characteristics in the regular, ground-level context.) There's nothing built in the elevations in between, just trees. It's hard to get a spatial understanding of this place, as the bends and folds of hillsides obscure relative distances. Around one bend of the road, you'll come upon a half-dozen families living in shanties made of plastic sheeting and scrap metal, barely off the road, cooking over an open fire. Around the next bend is a posh, upper middle class home nestled in the hillside.

Tomorrow night I'll take a sleeper train from DD to Delhi and then transfer to another long-haul affair to New Jalpaiguri. NJP is just a means to an end - Darjeeling. The whole affair will take a day and a half - but this time I'm expecting it! Will travel avec toothbrush, fresh underpants, better outlook etc.

I've imbibed approximately one metric buttload of masala chai since arriving in this fine country, and only a small handful of beers. Not much of a drinking culture. In the spirit of something-or-other [Puritanism? Hinduism?] I expect to get appropriately tea-crazy while in Darjeeling. But if you hear about a line on some stronger stuff, hook a brother up.

Oh, speaking of brothers, Ben and I have indulged an episode of joint whimsy and booked flights to the Andaman Islands for the first half of December. Hooray! We both earned record-breaking awful sunburns while snorkeling in Belize in 2007 (2008?). I'd like to think that we both learned important lessons and emerged from the incident two sunblock-savvy individuals. But alas... mama raised two fools. Wish us luck on our future melanomas!