The Beginning and the End

You know that expression that goes something like “it’s not about where you’re going—it’s all about the journey?” Or how about “The joy is in the journey?” I’ve seen variations of this cliché on a dozen different bumper stickers (usually attached to Volvos), t-shirts, coffee mugs, and Zen-looking motivational posters on office walls.

You know what?

It’s a big fat lie.

Jimmy’s going to handle the highlights of our tour in Rajasthan, and yes there were many. But our trip was book ended by a pair of mishaps of the kind that seem to follow me around this running joke called my life.

First, our departure. It was the morning after Diwali, we’d gone to bed early, gotten plenty of sleep, and had a good breakfast. We even took showers, though we knew we’d be on a crowded bus for the next 13 hours. Our backpacks were loaded up, with plenty of room to stash all the souvenirs we planned to pick up during our trip. We arrived at the bus station a good 45 minutes before the scheduled bus time, found a bench, and avoided eye contact with street people and merchants, just like our guide book tells us to. We did everything right.

But the bus driver didn’t. Our host—Captain Singh, who’d driven us to the station to make sure we caught the right bus—started asking some questions. After talking to about fifty people, he learned that the guy (apparently there’s only one) who drives the 9 am bus to Jaipur had had a rough night of visiting and setting off fireworks and didn’t show up to do his job. That was only a theory, however, as the bus driver never actually bothered to call in. When we asked if someone else would be driving the bus, they just looked at us as if we were nuts, and said something like “but that’s Kumar’s route.”

So we came home, spent the day wishing we hadn’t cleaned out the refrigerator that morning, and waited until 5 pm to take the overnight bus instead. That ride was almost as good as you might imagine. We managed to sleep a bit after a surreal rickshaw ride to our hotel through the streets of Jaipur where wild pigs—the scary looking ones with the punky mohawks on their heads and backs—compete with the cows for the best piles of trash to eat. Street gangs mean something totally different here.

But that misadventure was nothing to the one we faced on the way home. In Udaipur—the setting of Octopussy, the first James Bond movie I ever saw and still can’t believe my mother let me watch when the Dukes of Hazzard was verboten in our home—we caught a night train to Delhi. I’d been feeling a bit queasy that afternoon, but I was excited to be heading home and riding on a train with real sleeping berths, so I shrugged it off.

But right before we took off, I threw up for the first time. I remember that Seinfeld episode about trying to remember the last time you threw up better than I remember the last time I actually threw up. It’s been that long. But my body apparently remembered the motions, and repeated the process several more times throughout 15-hour train ride. Somewhere after midnight, my stomach decided this wasn’t the only good way to empty itself, so my visits to the washroom were only about half an hour apart. Luckily the bathroom was close and very clean . . . at least when we arrived. I did my best to hose it down with the little sprayer deal some Indians and Europeans use in lieu of toilet paper, but I’m pretty sure after my 8th or ninth trip, the rest of the passengers had decided that was my special place.

When we arrived in Delhi, my concerned husband took me to a doctor who did a quick exam, took my temperature (102—take that, germs!) and admitted me to East-West Hospital. There they started IV’s to rehydrate me, gave me shots, smiled at me a lot. Apparently this is the hospital that most tourists visit. The lobby area was covered with photos and thank you letters from travelers who’d stayed there. My favorite was one of this Israeli guy posing next to MY DOCTOR with a handwritten note saying: “Thank you, East-West Hospital, for my best malaria experience yet!” I don’t know exactly how far gone you have to be start ranking your bouts of malaria, but I’m sure I don’t want to find out.

Jimmy and the staff took good care of me (Jimmy even let me have the remote and didn’t complain when I watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer reruns), and after a couple of days I was discharged, a little thinner and paler, with a prescription in hand. In spite of all the tests, they couldn’t figure out exactly what it was that made me sick, but that’s not uncommon. Getting sick in India is part of the package for almost every traveler; the question is only how sick will you get. We were lucky—it actually couldn’t have happened at a better time or in a better place, and it was really mild compared to what some endure.

So maybe the joy isn’t in the journey, but all the best stories definitely are.

Miss you all,
Jen

PS. If I don’t get at least 11 comments, I’m going into ghastly detail about stool samples. You’ve been warned . . .