Travails and adventures

Yay! Its final. I am going white water rafting to Dandeli next weekend. I have been having short trips every now and then after coming to Bangalore. But I guess, I need this to break away the lethargy that starts to grow over you in this city like an epidemic.

Life in Bombay was a lot different. Things were always on the move irrespective of any time of the day or week or year. Work kept one terribly busy and weekends were busier and usually booked for something or other for the subsequent 3 weekends. Even catching a movie used to be difficult sometimes. Of course one could squeeze time for it too most of the times. Just 6-7 hours of sleep, and one was fresh and ready to take on the fires and late hours at work and subsequent maggie-dinners and K soaps (Deadly combo that!). Here, 8 hours of work is a gruelling exercise trying to figure out whether the participants of the conference call are actually speaking english or Japanese. And other times are spent in trying to assimilate what I have understood and act upon them. And on other days, the same 8 hours are gruelling with no clue about how to appear busy in front of the damn machine. Time after work is immense now. I had never seen how the world outside looked at 6PM on a week day in Bombay. In fact, 11PM was a more familiar time to admire the skyline of the city. Here, I am already done with stage II of sleep by 11PM. 9+ hours of sleep and I am still groggy most of the days. Gah!

Trips were a lot of fun. And adventure from the word go. They were never planned and ended up being the backpack varieties. Even the honeymoon, which came much later, turned out to be just that. Its different that the mother of adventures - the tsunami happened just then. Anyway, things were adventurous in a less literal sense back then. There was no planning, no booking, just a couple of thousands in the pockets. And a weekend trip would be done. On a TGIF-like afternoon, the place would be decided amongst a couple of mail exchanges with friends and evening, we'd be at Dadar station to board the bus to Khandala or train to Nerul/Matheran, a ferry to Alibaug and so on. One such trip of ours was decided to be Mahableshwar.

This was more of a 'semi planned' trip. By semi planned, I mean, we had booked our bus tickets in one of these humongous, hep-looking Volvo buses well in advance. What we'd have done after alighting at Panchgani/Mahableshwar was still anybody's guess. But at least it was a start. But fate decided to screw our humble start to an organized life rather royally. We were all ready to board the bus outside Andheri Shoppers Stop at 9PM when one of us got a call from the travels guy that there was some Maharashtra wide bus strike and buses were cancelled until further notice and we could collect the refund for our tickets.

A look of gloom and unimaginable silence prevailed through for several moments in the apartment. Thankfully none of us 6 noisy girls were really in the verge of tears. A boyfriend of one of the gang pacified us with the "hota hai"-"its ok"-type sympathetic noises. He was a late entrant into the whole plan and hence not part of the trip. And so he had booked himself a trip to Kolhapur the next morning. Then suddenly one of us hit with an idea of going to Daman the next morning. Now, our knowledge of Daman was as much that of a school going kid. One of the union territories of India, wich is associated with one more place called Diu and blah. Of course we also knew a couple of things related to inebriation that a 10-11 year old might not know. Hence the gloom and silence was forgotten and the decibel levels in the apartment soared to its maximum and stayed that way until 2AM when the boyfriend, after refusing our invite to Daman, left for his abode and the others decided to call it a day in order to wake early to take the first local to Borivali where outbound trains to Gujarat took off at 5-530AM.

Ok. I guess, this is getting a bit too long and I am past my sleep time. Will continue later....