Adventures at the Arabian Sea

We're traveling fiends. Last week we made a visit to the west coast village of Murudeshwara. It's 282 miles from Bangalore, and takes about 8 hours by bus. "Murudeshwara" is another name for the Hindu god Shiva, and the town is famous for its 123 foot tall statue of him. It's pretty intimidating.

The highlight of the trip was definitely the Arabian Sea. It's monsoon season, so during our swims and walks along the beach, the weather would abruptly shift from warm and sunny to violently windy with torrential rain. Torrential, I'm telling you--it felt like being pelted with icicles. In a moments time, the weather was gorgeous again, though, so we didn't mind too much. The beach was littered with interesting things. Litter, for one, but also fisherman, whale bones, enormous puffer fish, and dead dolphins. It was awesome.

The trip home was quite an adventure in itself. There were a shortage of seats, so our group had to divide between two sleeper coaches. The buses are specially designed to distribute the impact of each and every hole in the road across the two upper cots in the back of the bus (where Joey and I were sleeping). You could have told me the bus was rolling down a hill, and I would have believed you.

Things were worse on the other bus, though. One girl was awakened in the night to the sound of someone... well, he was pooping. She wasn't certain at first, but when the stench of diarrhea began to burn her nostrils, it was pretty well settled. She then saw him wrap his treat up in some newspaper and throw it out the window. When he got down from his cot a while later, he had large brown stains running down the back of his pants.

Simply hilarious.