Transportation #10

As I mentioned, the train to Hampi was canceled due to massive bridge failure. The posh sleeper bus, it turns out, only travels in the high season, which this is not. There was nothing for it. I had to take the state bus -- a ten hour ride. The very helpful guy in the bus station saved me a window seat in the front row of what he claimed was a semi-luxury bus. Since this looked like nothing so much as the prison buses I have seen in movies (I am not exaggerating -- it was all metal, with school bus like seats, two on one side, three on the other, with a metal link fence separating us from the driver) I am hard pressed to imagine what a non-luxury bus could possibly be like. Nonetheless, my seat was the best in the bus, the man crammed into the seat next to me was clean, and I was able to watch our slow travel -- the rainy season plays havoc with dirt roads, and we were traveling through deeply-rutted red mud -- with a measure of amusement.

We pulled into our final stop of Hospet, some 6 km from Hampi, at the inhospitable hour of 11 PM. The door to the bus is in the very back so, lugging my increasingly-heavy black bag, I was the last person off. There was just one man standing there in the parking lot, a few feet from the door when I got out.

"Do you want a rickshaw to Hampi?" he asked.

All was well in the world. "Yes," I said. "Yes, I do." I handed him my bag. He drove me 15 minutes to town, and then took me to three hotels until I found one that had a room for me.

Rickshaws are clearly my very favorite form of transportation in the whole world.