Another half hour passed, we covered 10 km (honestly, I’m not lying, the buses here drive so slowly) and finally we were there. We got off the bus with great difficulty (by that time, the already packed bus had been filled with an entire crowd of people, so there was no room to move).
The highway, a bazaar, and a whole crowd of beggars. Along the road there were kiosks with signs saying something about travel — that meant we were on the right track. We asked some men where to find “Baba travels” (that was the name of the company we were traveling with), they pointed in the right direction, and we went there. Beggars latched onto us, even grabbing our hands a couple of times, but I didn’t show that I was scared :)
We walked and walked and then saw our yellow bus with “Baba travels” written on it. We asked the Indians sitting nearby where it was going, they looked at our ticket and confirmed that the bus was ours.
There were 2 hours left until departure. We were hungry. Right next to our bus there was a local café, where four rather pleasant-looking Indians were eating something. Of course, there was no menu in the café; some names were painted on the wall in Hindi. We asked the owner of the restaurant what we could eat there. He said chapati and some dish… We didn’t understand anything, but we ordered — there was nowhere else to go, and we still wouldn’t find anything better here anyway. The owner, by the way, an Indian and a very handsome man, started frying something in a pan. And his son started baking chapati in the oven. About 10 minutes later our lunch was ready. The chapatis were wonderful (we understood that right away, but later I started comparing them in other places and so far we haven’t found better ones), and with the chapati they brought us some gravy — hard to describe what it was with, but it was even tasty. I was very surprised that it was tasty.
The toilet in the café was in the backyard; next to it, black buffaloes sat in the mud. They are so cute, stretching their heads forward in a very funny way. And because of that, they don’t seem scary at all.
After lunch we decided to walk around a bit, buy water, and top up our SIM card so we could buy more mobile internet. It’s so convenient for messaging Mom :) You can write a lot in Viber — this isn’t an SMS with 70 characters.
There was little time left until departure, and the nice chapati baker from the café offered us to sit and wait for the bus in his place.
Our bus had reclining seats — there are many like that in India. Inside, these buses are a bit like trains. There are single berths and double ones — one big soft bed for two. The bed closes with doors, as if you were sitting in a big cage — in principle, not so bad. Of course, the mattresses were terribly dirty; somehow we didn’t think that they don’t provide bedding here. So as not to sleep on those dirty mattresses, at least not with our faces, we put a towel under our heads. We slept in our clothes, covered with my shawl. In the evening it was even a bit hot, but by early morning the shawl came in very handy.
Like everything in India, the bus moved slowly and often stopped for no apparent reason. In the middle of the night we stood for a long, long time by the roadside. But the air was so pleasant, fresh, with the smell of grass.
