Awoken at 4 by the hotel staff, down to the bus at 4.20 or so. But we didn’t, of course, leave on the dot at 4.30, despite what the conductor said last night. It seemed to me it was only the Westerners who had been so naïve as to believe him; the locals had obviously accepted it from the first as a statement of pure fiction. One unexpected benefit this morning was that Val + I were able to change seats to move forward to 2 near the front. The conductor offered them first to our 2 French neighbours, but they dithered, so I offered ourselves if they didn’t want them. I think the conductor was wanting to squeeze on a few local – very local, ie Ladakhi people, + it was possible to squeeze on more into the bench seat along the back. We were much happier with our new seats – more space, better view, + best of all much less bumpy. It is now Val’s turn to have a bad stomach, + yesterday she was really suffering with the more violent jolts.
Bad stomach or no, we could both have done with a bite to eat, for breakfast or for lunch, but when we did finally have a meal break, neither of us could fancy the rice + watery dhal that was all there was on offer. There was another stop, this one unscheduled, when the bus stopped to let off a couple of travellers at a monastery, + the Wanker got off too, + ran down the hill to get a better picture. We had to wait for him to come back, but the only one who really minded was the conductor, for it gave the rest of us the chance to get some fresh air, + take a few pictures of our own.
We arrived at about 5, + of course there were the usual people waiting to drag you off to their guest-house. It’s just as well – on the one or two occasions when there hasn’t been anybody, we’ve felt lost. There is no way of telling, however, just by looking at the representative in front of you, or even listening to his blurb, what the place is like, so more or less at random we selected one of the guys + went with him, “just for looking”. When we got there, however, the cheap room he’d offered us we didn’t like, + the rooms upstairs, which we did like, were too expensive. So we started to walk away, only to be called back – our price for an upstairs room had been accepted. It really was quite a good room, clean + airy, with a simply magnificent view: the higgledy-piggledy mass of the streets of the old town, with the ruins of the old palace towering over them, looking, not regal, but like a factory of England’s industrial north, but set flush against the hillside, + behind that the hills + mountains. It was marvellous.
We ate a rather hurried + not very special meal at Dreamland, the town’s travellers’ restaurant, before rushing back to catch the result of England’s opening World Cup qualifying game – they won 5-0. Sat in our room for the rest of the cold evening. The funniest thing was the power supply, which kept flicking on, off, on, off, almost at will, so that we were constantly lighting + blowing out candles.
At times, it is our fellow travellers that are the most infuriating, with selfish, entitled behaviour. But we have at last arrived at a most magnificent place, right up in the mountains.
