a techno rainbow.

Stepping onto a town to town bus in India is like stepping into a rainbow (if you'll forgive that sickly sweet image...before you gag, read on). The outside of the bus is painted luridly, with neon flames, flowers, rainbows (funnily enough) and even sometimes a blown up photograph of puppies, kittens or a white baby (?). They always have 'SuperComfort' or 'Deluxe' or 'Grand Bus 2000' painted right across the front windscreen. The bus we caught this morning sported a large photo of the Taj Mahal welcoming us 'to delight'.  Inside fake flowers of all colours festoon the windscreen, sometimes there are little fake pots of little fake flowers on the dashboard. There are pictures of Jesus- brightly coloured, of course- and usually a bit of gold decoration hanging about. It is like stepping into a rainbow that is also a tiny, sweaty, usually dark dance club playing really bad techno music. Very loudly. It sounds awful but it is actually something I quite enjoy, purely because it is so India.

You crowd on while people crowd off, squeezing yourself on to a bus that in any other country would have reached capacity half an hour and 20 people ago. You watch the ticket man struggle down the aisle towards you, past the 30 people blocking his way, the whole thing smelling like sticky sweat because Indians love a bit of polyester and they have not yet caught on to deodorant. The ticket man finally reaches you and you grab on to the roof bars, the bus careening around corners honking its warning to other motorists, and try to fish the equivalent of 20 cents for your ticket out of your pocket without collapsing into the five people surrounding you, with their armpits in your face. You give your money, get your ticket and then the poor ticket man has to make his way back to the other end of the bus, because 3 new people just got on.

The other day when we were on our way home from Kalpetta, clinging on to the roof railings while trying to avoid squished toes, I was watching our bag of shopping that was sitting on the parcel shelf to make sure nothing flew out and hit an old lady in the face as the bus screeched from town to town. I was watching our bag of crackers inch ever closer to freedom, ready to escape its plastic prison at the first chance, and thinking of the only other time in my life when I carried groceries home on public transport. It was in Canada, four and a half years ago, when I lived in Toronto, in my first rented room, on my first overseas exploration. It was a world away from here, in every way possible. Not least because where people on the subway in Toronto gave me dirty looks for clogging up space with my plastic bags full of cheap, shitty noodles, bread and peanut butter (I was 19 and poor...), people on the buses here gladly move out of the way when I am maneuvering my shopping out of harms way and smile tolerantly when I accidentally whack them with said shopping...

I'm about to get sentimental for a minute, so if that's not your thing then go now...make a cup of tea, eat a biscuit. Ok. A lot has happened in the last four (nearly five?) years, since my first tentative, Doc Marten-clad steps into independence in a dodgy neighbourhood in Toronto. And I am happy to say I can look back on everything that I've done, everywhere that I've been and everyone (mostly) that I've met, and smile.  

bed bugs and bus stations.

Bed bugs and bus stations. Not a phrase that conjures quite the same image as the Disney film with which it shares its illiteration, but a very big part of budget travel in India. And it being so, I usually wouldn't complain. I make my own decisions and I deal with the consequences; I'm a big girl after all.

This time, though, the decision to sleep 'budget style' was made for us (and it being so, I feel compelled to whinge about it).

Off to Fort Kochi we were. Down from the cool breeze of the hills to the humid coast, where the air is heavy with the promise of rain. By late afternoon- by our third bus ride in a day of travel- we realised we would probably need to stopover for the night; it didn't matter where, a bed in a room was all we wanted. First town: not possible. We sweated from lodge to lodge in the loud evening streets to find that every single one in the bus station cluster- and there were many- was full. This we found perplexing but decided it didn't matter, there would definitely be space for us in the next town. So on to another bus we heaved. And we arrived at a station and it was eleven pm and we were definitely not getting to Fort Kochi that night. Will went on a hunt. He came back 15 minutes later, elation absent from his face...how could they all be full?!!

They weren't. After several portly managers grunted 'full' from under their moustaches and impatiently waved him on, one man took pity and explained that these lodges couldn't afford the expensive licences required to allow foreigners to stay and, therefore, they were "all full".

Well done Indian bureaucracy, you thwarted us yet again. After a consolitary almost-midnight snack in a brightly lit bus station cafe, we searched for the most comfortable corner to call our own in amongst the all-night snack shops advertising their open-ness with techno music, the rubbish and the encroaching rain, and the Indians waiting for late buses or waiting for nothing, with nowhere to go. Amongst this we lay down on our sheets for a night of unrest. And we un-woke at four am to discover that you don't even need to be in a bed to suffer the wrath of bed bugs.

Grrrrr.

But we slept it off and then we swanned around Fort Kochi, looking at fancy things and pretending we were richer than we are. Until we got hungry. In our battered old clothes, scratching our bites as we sat on a roadside drinking chai and eating deep-fried triangles, were we fooling anyone?