India, Day 6: "Wait, where's my rug?"

We all got up bright and early this morning to get a head start on our drive back to Dehli, plenty of shopping still to do you know.  It was a bit chaotic checking out of the hotel at 6:00am, turns out the big Portuguese group had the same idea that we did and there were two mountains of luggage waiting to be loaded onto buses.  I saw my rug bag sitting right on top of my suitcase and then made sure the whole pile made it on the bus.  And were were off!

And ran straight into a monster traffic jam right less than 15 minutes outside of Jaipur.  We sat there for quite a while, enough time for the driver's assistant to run out and report back that the traffic jam was "only one kilometer or so" long, nothing to worry about.

Let's see if you can see something not-quite-right with these pictures.

This is a divided highway.  But because this is India, when there is traffic, people just hop over the median and drive along the other side of the road.  Basically its four lanes of traffic with people driving right at each other.

This entire trip, people have stared at our bus like it was decorated like the Scooby Doo Mystery Machine or something.  They would almost immediately swarm as soon as it stopped, and I always wondered how they know we are tourists.  There are lots of other white buses on the road, why do they only stare at ours?  Then at our rest stop I finally noticed the front of the bus:

Ah, now it makes more sense.

At one of our pit stops Vikram collected our spare food and snacks to give to a family that was living along the road side.  Again, beautiful women who look way to young to have families.

Another unplanned stop along the way was to take pictures of these ladies walking along the highway.  We thought they might be upset with us taking pictures of them without asking, but if you look closely, they are laughing at us.

We made to the hotel, where I did not take pictures of my four hour nap.

When I was getting ready for dinner, I realized that I was missing something.  My rug bag.  Somewhere else in the room?  Nope.  In the lobby?  Nope.  Still on the bus?  Uh-uh.  "Um, so Vikram?  My rug didn't make it to my room."  But it had to be close, I saw it go on the bus.  He assured me it was somewhere, and would check.  And oh, by the way, did I ask Wendy?  She has the same bag as me.  Wait, what?  Turns out Wendy has the exact same suitcase and rug bag as I did, and it was probably her bag I saw getting loaded on the bus, not mine.  Crap.

Assuring me that he would start making phone calls to track it down right away, the other ladies talked me into hitting the local disco with them.  Other than getting the usual slightly-unsettling-but-usually-harmless stares from the Indian men, we had a great time.

Bar of choice that night?  The Last Chance Saloon.  Nothing like a pseudo-cowboy bar in northern India.  No, no country music, it was all techno, but still a lot of fun.

Back at the hotel, I remembered about my rug again and was up all night trying to figure out how to tell David I had just spent hundreds of dollars and would now have nothing to show for it.  Double crap.