Beginning to Return...

January 29th

On the road again. I was happy to be going back to Delhi – one step closer to home, it seems. There wasn’t hot water in the morning. Hukam and Lata bathed in the Ganges at 6:30 that morning. I was glad not to go; it must have been freezing!
We drove back through the sugar cane fields and rows and rows of sugar-cane laden carts. We stopped for lunch at the same resort as we had on the way in – Mool Chand. It had Chilly Chicken – I’ve been averaging having meat about once a week since the new year… had more patchouli candy mouth-freshener.

It was lucky we headed back to Delhi a day early, because the car needed repairs along the way, and the traffic was really bad. Luckily, at the mechanic shop, they had the big eye decals I’ve seen on lots of the trucks that I had no idea where to buy – so I got those!

We arrived in Delhi, and went to an Emporium for tablas – Hukam kept telling Mike to wait to get them here, so he did, and he got two smallish ones – the larger one that he wanted was too big to carry with us, and it cost more than the drum itself to ship back to the States…

We then went back to the Hotel Apra and said goodbye to Lata. I noticed that they had hung the new paintings that they were carrying in on the day after we arrived back from Agra. In the lobby they had a cool orange tree picture, with the two trees making women’s faces at the middle.

Then Mike and I went out to buy a bag. We finally found a BIG duffel bag – it’s REALLY big – and also found where they sell Kingfisher, so we got some beer for the night. We took those things back to the room, and then went out in search of a Cyber café to print out the photos for Hukam and Lata’s honeymoon trip with us.

We found a few shops on the way, and a Kali (!) shrine – just down the street from the hotel! Then we found a ‘Photostat’ shop, and I spent about a half an hour there transferring pictures to their computer for printing – the guy wanted me to leave my memory card there and my list of numbers (I was not going to leave my card anywhere!). After transferring close to 100 photos to print, the computer really slowed down, and we had to transfer the rest to a second computer. Then the old guy said it would be 4 o clock instead of 1 o clock tomorrow to pick them up, since there were so many. They charged 6 rupees each print, and they also had a photo album with roses on the front – so we also got that to put the pix in.

We went back to our room - I had a shower (with semi-warm water, but not cold, anyway) and we watched some movies and drank a bit of beer, and ordered room service for dinner.