Too Much Magic Bus

Jaipur to Udaipur
April 19, 2010

Our arrival in Udaipur was not as smooth as that to Jaipur. We had booked a wait listed train ticket, thinking we'd get 2 overnight bunks. When the morning of our departure date came around and the train station could not confirm tickets, we got our money back and weighed our options. I hated the thought of missing Udaipur; it's rumored to be magical and we had left it for our last stop in India for that very reason. We could have detoured to Pushkar for a couple of nights, but Pushkar just didn't hold the same appeal to either of us. After a bit of deliberation and consultation with our driver Ali, we decided to take the plunge and buy overnight bus tickets. I'd done sleeper buses in Vietnam and they were not exactly fun but so long as you did not have to pee, they were tolerable. I was not expecting the overnight buses in India to be any better.

Our “super deluxe first class a/c sleeper cabin” bus ticket, as Ali described it to us, cost almost as much as a train ride (surely the agent doubled the price and added on Ali's commission to us), which was annoying. I hate getting ripped off in India, even if it is only for 5 dollars. We visited two travel agents who would not even deal with bus tickets. But for our man Ali, it was all he had to do but snap his fingers and “poof,” magic bus tickets were ours a mere 4 hours before departure time. We boarded the bus and were directed to our “cabin,” which was in an upper row of bunks above the bottom floor of seats (in which we were not allowed to sit, even though they were printed on our ticket). It was like a coffin for two, about the width of a twin bed. The sleeper floor was lined with a carpet which I quickly disinfected (thank you, Lysol, for making travel size cans) though still feared germs and bedbugs and lice. The ceiling was barely high enough to sit up, and we quickly spread our travel sheets down before motion sickness set in. I popped a couple of dramamine and laid down to sleep, which came quickly.

It was a restless drug-induced sleep, especially since the fan died shortly after we left Jaipur, and with the stop and start of the bus, the honk of the horn, and the general feeling that we might topple over at any given turn. Sometime in the middle of the night, I was startled from a dream when I thought we'd had an accident. Either that or aliens were audibly attaching tractor beam holds to the very window I was sleeping next to. Something large and heavy was banging on the outside of the bus, the wall of which my face was pressed against. We were too high up to be colliding with another car, and there was no lane next to us, so I did not know what was happening. Stacy sat up and reached over me to open the curtain. What we saw was beyond comprehension: a giant piece of the bus's roof was literally hanging over the side and banging hard against the window that lined our compartment. I figured my luck had run out, and the piece of steel was going to crash through the window and impale my leg, or cut it off completely. The roofing was hitting hard against the glass, and for some time. No sooner did it fall off, when a second piece came crashing down, this one harder, faster, and larger. We both were terrified and knew this was dangerous situation. I kept having visions of the movie Alive, where a piece of steel crashes through the plane's window and gets stuck in one of the soccer players' calves (he later dies due to gangrene poisoning). My fate was going to be the same, I'd be going home from India an invalid. I held my breath and waited for impact.

Just as Stacy, who was closer to the aisle and a bit more coherent than me, raced up to tell the driver to pull over, the second piece of roofing fell off and that seemed to be the end of it. Relieved and dumbfounded, I fell back to sleep to bad dreams. I don't think Stacy slept much after that. When we arrived in the morning and tried to tell the driver, he could care less. Did not want to hear a word. As we drove off to our hotel, we saw the damage done to the side of the bus. It looked like a giant cheese grater had been raked across the whole right side of the vehicle, and an entire panel of roofing was missing. We were lucky that the luggage rack didn't come crashing down. I hoped no passengers in cars or pedestrians or cows on the road behind us were injured, and was very thankful that we had our limbs intact. New rule: no more bus travel in India.