it was 4am and we were stranded in the middle of the western ghats.

but perhaps i should back up and start from the beginning.

it was december 2007. i had been back in bangalore for a month, having recently completed my certification to teach english as a foreign language. i was working for peace child india, the ngo i had previously volunteered for, and getting settled into living there with no end date in sight.

shonali was in manipal getting her degree, and nithya, sneha, and i wanted to visit her and see the places she was talking about for ourselves. we convinced our friend gugi, pretty freshly arrived from austria, to join us, and we booked our tickets.

being pretty broke we had to book the cheapest bus to get there, and none of us really knew what it would entail. and from there it was one adventure after another.

the first adventure came when we got to the bus stand and discovered that the seats we had booked didn’t match the numbering system on the actual bus. it took a lot of cajoling, but we managed to commandeer a three-seater bench for nithya, sneha, and myself, and we positioned gugi across the aisle from us.

the second adventure came when we learned our bus was essentially a local bus, meaning it would stop at every. single. town. along our journey. and you didn’t need a pre-booked ticket, so people kept piling in and spent half the night standing in the aisle and yelling back and forth to one another.

the third and biggest adventure came around 3.30am when our bus came to a sudden stop. we were in the western ghats, with no idea what was happening. we figured out that something was wrong with the bus and it wouldn’t be moving again but that there would be another bus coming in “half an hour”.

“half an hour” in india is always a suggestion, and it was closer to an hour before that bus showed up, already overflowing with people but somehow with room for most of our fellow passengers to shove on. the four of us took one look at that bus and decided we’d take our chances waiting for daylight, as did a few others.

so then came the waiting. we took turns napping, huddling close for body warmth because we only had light sweaters and the mountains are chilly at night. finally, at the first sight of light on the horizon, the 9ish of us who were remaining gathered our stuff and took off on foot.

a note here to remind you this was 2007. we all had the most basic of cell phones, none of which had service in the middle of the mountains, and in all honesty at least two of us probably didn’t have enough credit to make outgoing calls anyway. we had no idea where we were or how far the closest town was so we were winging it and hoping for the best, chasing the sunlight in an attempt to warm up. i’m also pretty sure were were all in flip flops, because what 20-something wears appropriate footwear?

after about 45 minutes of walking a bus finally showed up that was heading to mangalore, and we gratefully got on board. we made it to mangalore, found a bus going to udupi, finally had enough phone signal to let shonali know we would be extremely delayed [at this point we should have already reached manipal], and grabbed snacks. from udupi we switched to a local bus going to manipal, reaching a mere 5ish hours after we were supposed to.

it was a fun weekend and i returned to manipal many times over the next 2.5 years [i’ll share some of those stories another day], but none quite matched this adventure.

xx