Amritsar

04-12-2009
Head first in India
The next few days turned into five as we sat around the hotel garden eating and drinking trying to come up with a workable plan for the next phase of the trip.
We had a hard time choosing from the food menu as pretty much every type of cuisine was available unlike Pakistan where it’s pretty impossible to get anything other than Karahi (Pakistani style curry) which was always very good, if not oily, but after a month it was nice to have a change. The drinks menu was never a problem!
Being able to go out shopping was a strange feeling; there isn’t much that isn’t available, not the best quality mind you, but cheap. Broken mobile phone chargers were replaced, new sim cards purchased and laundry outsourced to the service round the corner, total bill for all, about five pounds sterling.
The hotel had wifi (not free but I’ll come to that in a minute) so the task of getting everything on the move again was pretty straightforward, just time consuming, not that it caused us too much heartache, sitting in a quiet, leafy hotel courtyard drinking cold beer and surfing the net for transfer options to the places we intended to visit was never going to be that much of a problem. Different plans were hatched ranging from 1) Caf getting on various trains, planes and automobiles in order to get to Agra to see the Taj Mahal then on to Mumbai, where her motorcycle would also be dispatched, with me chasing overland hard behind, then spending the remaining time in Mumbai while waiting for her to knit, to 2) shipping motorcycle, and her, direct to Goa for a month in the sun. In the end Goa got the vote, partly due to any other option being so complicated that it would be more hassle than it was worth and also because Ollie & Jenny (www.jollyfollies.com) were already there so Caf would have some playmates. Ollie and me had been in touch on the HU forum before we left the UK, so I sort of felt we knew one-another and it was a relief for me to know that Caf wouldn’t be by herself for two weeks as I caught up. Ollie and Jenny are traveling to Australia in their modified Landrover, taking a leisurely three years to complete the trip; well they were taking that amount of time until they found out that Jenny’s Delhi Belly was in fact Morning Sickness! Their plans have now somewhat changed from touring to chilling and Caf was going to hot foot it down to them to do that exact same thing asap.

Our hotel had taken on a different vibe from the first day as two German guys had since turned up on Royal Enfield Bullets, planning to spend six weeks travelling all over India and then Mark and Jo arrived in their massive 4X4 truck from London. Mark had spent many months building what looked, at first glance, like an old Electricity Board wagon with a enormous fiberglass Portaloo strapped to it’s back but on closer inspection was a mobile 5* hotel, fully kitted out with custom fittings ranging from a stainless steel shower cubicle to integrated kitchen appliances. There was no doubting, his philosophy of making it look a right old shed from the outside to conceal the top quality on the inside, had worked perfectly down to the last nut and bolt. Mark, Jo, Trev, Caf and me idly passed time away with tales of days gone by and expectations of what lay ahead. It was great being able to chat away with others that had similar experiences to ours and understood what we were talking about.
Now getting back to the hotel wifi; usually at some point within an hour of us plonking our backsides on the chairs in the garden and opening our collective laptops, one of the hotel staff would come over, demand 200Rs for the day’s use of their facility and would not move until it was paid in cash. Quite why it couldn’t just be put on the bill misses me totally and this now brings me on to a subject that I’m sure you will be hearing a lot more about and that’s, “money, money, money,” my friend.