Head for the Hills

There are worse places to have to spend a week or two than Mumbai.

The Flashpackers guide lists the worst places to have to spend a week or two as Delhi, Cleethorps and the inside of an elephants arse (in that order).

Given this, we weren't too bothered about the prospect of hanging around to sort out our travel arrangements and get our camera fixed (its had a hard life), figuring on a day or two to fix the camera and about two weeks to get train tickets.
Amazingly we managed to book the whole of our next leg of travel in one day, in fact it took less than one hour. We did it al in one building, all at the same counter - the first one we had walked up to.
This feat of concentrated organisation didn't go unnoticed though, the helpful official was noticed by a spy from the union of useless workers (India's largest union), beaten to death (unefficiently) and replaced by a broken stapler.

The upshot of this is that we had tickets out of there, we were heading for the hills, the one and only place to be during this season (metres of rain in the south and 50 degree temperatures on the plains).

We passed through Shimla, the old summer capital of India during the British Raj, and headed on to Manali, the summer capital of the Traveler Raj.

This is basically why this blog has been so silent for so long. Manali is a chilled out place, a very very chilled out place. A chillumed out place in fact, and its infectious.

Neither Traci or I smoke weed, hash, charas or any other dope deriditive, but pretty much everyone else in Manali does. And there is a lot of weed in Manali. A LOT of weed. Its not just that you can buy it everywhere (the hotel we were staying in will deliver it to your room and put it on your bill), it IS everywhere. 90% of the plants at the side of the road, in gardens, and covering hillsides are weed plants. If you were to pick it all, and roll it into joints, I'm pretty sure that there would be enough to get all of Australia simultaneously stoned..... For a week or two at least.

So after months on the road were happy to move in to a place. Actually take the stuff out of our backpacks for a change. Well we did this in spades.

We came, we watched the world cup, learnt some new card games and ate lots of deserts (due to all the stoned people, the locals have perfected all manner of tasty chocolatey goodies). Before you know it nearly two weeks have slid past.