A dash up the autoroute to leave Merlin for his holidays at Dave & Rachaels in Laragne(... yes dogs need holidays too!) and then a quick flight from Marseille to a surprisingly sunny UK started the India trip seamlessly. I met with Ed and Marky in Heathrow and we all managed to check-in our gliders without any of the usual excess baggage stresses - Thanks, Virgin Atlantic for operating sensible baggage rules.
We arrived to the heat and smog of Delhi midmorning hoping that the arranged taxi would be waiting for us at arrivals. I wasn't totally confident since all email communication on this theme had abruptly stopped about 3 days previously. However a quick foray into the arrivals hall while they guys were changing crispy EU currency into less than sanitary Rupee notes had me bent double with laughter... our taxi driver was there with his sign carefully written out in big capital letters so as not to be confused with any other Disney characters passing through Delhi that day... MIKY MOUSE PARAGLIDE.
The theme of the trip was set....
There then followed a 13 hour taxi journey at breakneck speeds only just avoiding impending demise from all manner of holy cows, road rollers, headon collisions at level crossings and the ubiquitous TATA trucks blowing horns incessantly. We arrived both shaken and stirred at our monastary guesthouse in Bir well after any self-respecting monk was to be found up and about. After ringing the '15 all-time favourite ditty's' doorbell at least 20 times I discovered the dining room window was open so we made our entrance not through the front door, but through a side window..hmmm, breaking into a monastary, I'm not sure how that will affect my karma.
The monks seemed quite unfazed to find 3 comatose bodies in their hallway at 6:30 the following morning. They packed us off to matresses in their quarters so that we stopped making the place look untidy and asked bemusedly why we hadn't tried ringing the bell...
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