Cancelled Trains and Broken Buses

Our night train last night from Amritsar to Delhi was cancelled last minute.

Pravin managed to get us on an overnight bus. Lovely.

These buses have seats as well as boxes on top of the seats where either 1 or 2 people sleep on the ground of this box.

My 'sleeping' arrangement was 19/20...part of a double...with Pravin. You sleep opposite...feet in each others face. No hanky panky.

I was not looking forward to this. I had lucked out so far but I had no choice last night. Especially after Pravin went to all that trouble and he also convinced one guy to switch his single seat...that was in the cab with the driver and about 4 other guys just standing around.....to switch with me as I was insisting I did not want to be at the back of an overcrowded bus. I was well prepared to stay in Amritsar on my own and take a morning bus. Poor Pravin.

These two spots were at the very end of the bus. Smack at the end. On the floor. The WORST sleepers on the bus. A bus with no toilet. Yup....they do these overnighters with no facilities. The drivers assistant just wakes everyone up around 2 am and turns all the lights and yells out in Hindi that there is a bathroom break as well as food break.

I know this because I certainly was not sleeping. Especially after one hour of us leaving Amritsar when the guy that switched with me wanted his seat back. A seat that someone else made me give up to take another aisle seat in the middle of the bus. Oh Oh. The guy that was kind enought to switch was a bit upset.

My cuteness got him to give in to me staying where I was......'but if I don't feel well...I will need you to switch with me.' 'Of course' I said. 'This is kind of your seat'.

GOOD THING he fell asleep for the night

I have no idea how anyone can sleep on a very bumpy road.....driver blaring horn every minute....2 stops to fix the tires....1 stop to get gas...and another ONE HOUR stop for the bathroom/food break.

The drivers assistant had to wake up quite a few passengers when our wheel burst at 7:30 am. We waited for over 1 hour to see if the bus would get going. It didn't, so Pravin had to call us taxi's. Luckily we were only about 45 minutes from Delhi. While we waited for the taxi's...the bus got going again.....we hopped on for the very slow ride until we met up with our taxi's.

We got into our hotel this morning at 10 am.

I'm soooooooooooo tired but I have to stay up to make my 1 am flight to Bangkok.

Maybe I'll get some sleep on the airplane.

I hope so.