Monday morning Anne and I piled back into the van with 4 of the students and returned to Jibhi. The drive is about 4hours each way, and we had just returned the night before, from a weekend at the clinic. Fortunately, the landscape is beautiful and can keep you entertained for hours.
The ride turned out to be a bit adventurous, as almost every car-ride in India seems to end up being. First we ran into a massive herd of goats. Cars were backed up waiting for the sheep to get out of the road. Men were relieving themselves on the side of the road as we sat and idled for awhile. Finally, our driver Sanju, decided to turn around and take another route. After an extremely interesting 5 point turn, we headed back in the direction we had just come from, before veering onto a slightly less-traveled route.
We wound our way up the mountains on the opposite bank of the Beas River as we drove through the Kullu Valley. As we curved left and right along the windy road filled with pot holes, we saw several men standing on the side of the road making strange arm and hand signals. I had no idea what they were motioning about, but thankfully Sanju did. Apparently they noticed that a cow was teetering on the edge of the cliff above us. They waved Sanju to the other side of the road, into oncoming traffic, just in time for our van to miss being squashed by a cow. Apparently the cow just missed us... and sadly must have died on impact as its neck snapped. Who gets hit by a cow dropping off a cliff into mid-air and landing on the top of your moving vehicle??
I was really quite thankful that I didn't actually see what had happened, but apparently I was the only one lucky enough to have missed the gruesome image.
We continued driving, with Sanju acting as if absolutely nothing out of the ordinary had just happened. We reached Bhuntar and decided to stop to buy Anne some clothes, since she had been recruited to come to Jibhi with me before having had the chance to buy any salwars.
We had a nice time picking out some tunics in a lovely little shop we found and were walking down the street back to the car, when I suddenly found myself in a split in the middle of the road. I felt myself slide to the ground as something extremely slick gave way under my foot, landing with one knee hard on the asphalt. As I looked down, I was sure I was about to find myself in a pile of gooey cow dung, but instead I saw a lot of red. I apparently managed to step directly onto a tomato, which had somehow made its way into the middle of the road. Now what a single tomato was doing in the middle of the road, I cannot tell you, but there it was, now nicely squished under my shoe, resulting in a lovely red streak showing where we had slid together along the pavement. What can I say... I have a unique talent for impailing myself on strange objects!
The rest of the drive was largely uneventful. We wound our way for the next 2 hours, on increasingly narrower and more beaten roads, until finally we reached the clinic at Jibhi. The students were so excited when we arrived and they got to walk across the rushing brooke that runs beside the clinic. The scenery here is amazing. Huge spruce trees, babbling brookes, birds chirping...
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