the most epic bus journey of my life....

so this may be a very long posting...and it will put things out of order cos i do want to write about Leh and shrinigar and other previous happenings but this is just so humerous that i have to write about it first....

A couple of days ago we boarded a bus in Leh for a two day ride through the himalayas to manali..little did we know how crazy the trip was going to be! I'll have to dot point it to make it readible...in order this is what happened:

*Firstly....we had to stand in the cold at 4.30 in the morning cos our bus didn't show..typical india
*Later we were delayed another 3 hours just before the worlds second highest motor pass because of a snow storm(in one week we came from 45degree desert heat to a snow storm!! india has it all!) .....after three hours they finally cleared the road and we passed through, slightly in a rush now to get to our destination before dark.
*a few hours later our conductor guy got up to demand that we all pay him 50rupees each to cross the border....the equivalent of about $1.50 its not much for us but for them its a fair bit...but anyway everyone on the bus knew that this was total bollucks as there were many tourists that had passed over the border before and never had to pay...so we all kicked up a storm, refusing to pay...when we did get to the border someone complained to the police and then the conductor got a very stern talking to. it was quite humerous. *i should put in now that this was THE MOST SCARY BUS RIDE I HAVE EVER BEEN ON. i will never again complain about vline because though they must be frustrating i have never feared for my life like i did on this bus! we climbed up through the mountains on unsealed roads in the dark....its was petrifying! Not to mention the fact that our bus was too large to fit around most corners so we constantly found ourselves reversing back around a corner for a second attempt at getting around the hair pin turns...on one occassion we couldn't make it around the corner without all passengers piling out, making the bus light enough to reverse back up the mountain...pretty scary stuff!!!
*arriving only a few hours late at our crappy, overpriced tent accomodation(in the snow!) that we had no choice about staying at, to find out that my bag was SATURATED...and i mean saturated....
*attempting to leave at 7 the next morning only to be delayed an hour because or motor wouldn't start(so THAT was why he didn't stop the engine while we were delayed in the snow for three hours. GREAT).. after numerous attempts to push a 30seater bus along the flat ground to roll start it the driver realised we needed to take some other action. Even i could have told him that it was NEVER going to work. After half hour we hailed down the first truck that came past and they set to work doing something else to try and get us on the road again....We got fed up with standing around watching nothing happening though so we went for a walk to the paddock over the road that had a small spot of sunshine....it was here that we witnessed the billowing smoke coming from our engine as they tried to start it and suddenly....a ball of flame in the drivers cabin area of the bus....thinking something had gone terribly wrong and all our bags were about to go up in smoke we started sprinting back to find that it was infact the conductor guy using a ball of flame to heat the air going into the engine so that it would start. crazy indians...
*4 hours later we somehow ran into the back of a jeep....but in the scheme of things this was NOTHING....a few words were exchanged between drivers but as the car was still road worthy we drove on!
* At this stage we had started a competition with the other tourists as to what could go wrong next....Probably jinxed ourselvs as barely a half hour later we got a punture and had to stop on the side of the mountain to fix it
*after waiting an hour, rejoicing in the fact that they fixed the tyre and climbing back on the bus we were then told that there were infact THREE more bad tyres and it was going to be another THREE hours until we could leave again....We therefore decided to walk the 7 k's to the nearest town to get some food where 4 hours later we were picked up by our bus and on the road again...

Thankfully we arrived that night in one piece in Manali, despite being a good 6 hours late....but such is life really! Though it may not sound as impressive in writing, it was a pretty epic journey..We did make some good friends along the way though. And it was the very first time in over a month that we had run into any other aussies...so it was good to hang out and enjoy the good aussie humour even though it was more often than not whilst waiting for our bus to get fixed!