Suspicious Minds

Last night I went to dinner at someone's house and ended up staying there till 2am drinking whiskey, smoking cigarettes (pork AND cigarettes- what is Shillong doing to me?!) and singing and dancing to Elvis.  I would like to say I met Shillong's biggest Elvis fan, but, knowing this place, I'm probably wrong.  The amount of influence music has on this town is amazing.


But I haven't spent this whole time in Shillong itself.  With nothing else planned I decided to join GAPP and his friend Arpit for a side trip to Agartala, Tripura.  Our 16 hr overnight bus ride turned into a 21 hr bus ride due to heavy rains and landslides.  Agartala turned out to be kind of a bust.  It was hot and humid, we couldn't find a cheap place to stay and the things we had planned to see turned out to be a bit lame.  That night, while GAPP and I were on a fruitless search for ice cream (what kind of a place doesn't have any ice cream?!), we both decided it was best to just cut our losses and return to Shillong the following day.  Arpit was up for the plan so we booked our tickets on the 16 hr bus leaving the next day at noon.

There was one more thing GAPP really wanted to do in Agartala; see the Bangladesh border.  Since we had a bit of time that morning before our bus, we took a shared jeep out to the man made lake that borders Bangladesh.  On the way, our jeep picked up lots of passengers, at one point carrying 24 people (not counting the driver!), which we loved.  The border was funny and we chatted up the soldiers and took photos of ourselves next to the barbed wire.  GAPP had never seen a land border with another country so he was quite excited about it.  The soldiers, upon hearing that I was unmarried, commented to the boys (in Hindi of course) that my dad must be well off because he had enough money to send me traveling all over the place.  Ha!

We were having such fun we didn't realize how late it was getting and that we had to get back to town to catch our bus, FAST!  We found our jeep guy and got on the road.  Of course we had to stop a million times to pick up a million more passengers, and this time we were not as amused since we couldn't help thinking we were going to be stuck here in Agartala for another wasted day.  But, after an anxiety filled hour, we made it to the bus station at around 12:15pm and luckily the bus was running late.  This time, the 16 hr ride was extended by a 3 hr delay since our bus broke down some 4 hrs into the journey.  We sat on the side of the road and had endless pointless conversations.  But we did manage to find some ice cream.

We finally got back on the road after dark.  The roads between the two places are extremely curvy and the bus was driving as if it were a small sports car or something.  It was pitch black outside apart from the neon colored lights of the passing carrier trucks (all trucks in India are decked out with lots of colored lights and paintings!) and it felt just like I was on Space Mountain at Disney World- never knowing which way the bus was going to swerve or whether or not we were going to hit something.  Everyone on the bus was sleeping (except for the cockroaches) and, accompanied by my Arcade Fire soundtrack, I just couldn't help thinking, "what the f*#@ am I doing here?!"

Needless to say, I'm glad to be back safe in Shillong, even if it's pouring rain.  Tomorrow I'm headed out to Mawlynnong, which is supposedly the cleanest village in all of Asia!