Bangalore – Hassan.

In true Rotarian style I would like to start by thanking my honored guest ‘Dog’ for managing the blog whilst I attended to my private and rather urgent needs; I have also offered to sing for him but strangely he declined….

Leaving Bangalore we had a police escort which with hindsight was a jolly good idea; as it turned out driving through Bangalore can only be described as the most crazy video game you could ever play, normal rules no longer apply. It is perfectly acceptable to overtake on the inside through a bus stop, hit other vehicles and cut them up wildly causing them to brake with a screech of abused rubber. We were instructed to follow each other strictly numeric order and drive on the left – in reality we very quickly learned that there were new objectives; get to the front of all the tuktuks using whatever means necessary.

During that frantic morning we managed to score countless wing mirrors and several indicators from fellow competitors as well a succeeding in reshaping our rear fenders which we used to force other vehicles into each other or the verge.

Once out of the city we had the open road and a daunting ride of 200 kilometers to Hassan via a temple checkpoint. The journey itself was quite a disappointment after the absolutely crazy sweat inducing mayhem in Bangalore.

Once at the temple we had to fight our way through an assortment of vendors offering a variety of useless items of tat before hiding our shoes in bags (to deny some local entrepreneur additional profit) and climbing 700 steps to see a status of a chap in the altogether (never let it be said I wouldn’t put the effort in to see someone naked). Once we had had our fill of this individuals lack of clothing we headed down and were surprised to be interviewed by a local film crew – it looks like this little rally is becoming big news as more and more people recognize who we are and wobble their heads at us.

Another tuk tuk appears as we are about to leave and a mad cap version of the asian games seems to have kicked off; the ‘tourist tat’ 100 yards has seen a white face and all the vendors are now sprinting in flip flops to offer faded postcards of indiscrete gods and bronze representations of many handed elephants to the unsuspecting competitors.

Darkness is falling as we start to leave, but hold on, no ones headlights appear to work – we are still a good 50 kilometers from our final destination and are all getting nervous about the already perilous roads in the dark. We find a local electrician and for about 60 pence he fits a new headlights and sorts out the electrics on our beast.

The journey kicks off and we slowly start to make our way to Hassan, we slowly start to catch up with other teams and decide that the more the better – as a result we are plagued by constant breakdowns and finally make it to the hotel at 11pm…..

A bit about hotels.

Indian culture is more than hot food and saris; India has a unique take on the service industry. For example, if you order food don’t expect it to arrive within 30 minutes, don’t expect it to be warm, don’t expect the meat to resemble any creature you recognize, don’t expect to receive all the dishes you ordered and never expect them to arrive in the right order – and after all that it you will probably need to visit the little boys room before the last morsel has passed your lips.

The hotel room you will receive will never fail to live up to its description; if it advertises it has a shower it may have a drippy tap located high on the wall from which spits cold water. If it is advertised as having air-conditioning it may well have an air conditioning unit but it will more then likely either not work or just smell so bad you think you have a direct link to the local sewer.

Most hotels also offer a lottery service lightly disguised as a laundry – it works a little like swap shop – you send in your pungent socks and receive in return a bra or some other useless and inappropriate item – and never at the time they had promised.

…..The hotel was amazing, beautiful cobbled courtyard, inviting air conditioned glazed bar, a collection of eager door opening members of staff and all our bags carefully thrown in a pile.

We dragged ourselves through the door and promptly set ourselves down at a table and ordered beers and food as none of us had managed to eat all day; 40 minutes later and after several reminders the food arrived – apart from mine…

With a slowly boiling disposition I found a guilty looking waiter and dragged him over – with my mood slowly reaching critical point after such a long day I politely showed the waiter each of the dishes on the table and made a point of asking him where mine was – shortly afterwards it appeared with a rather suspect cream sauce…..

Finally feeling satisfied and very very sleepy we find our bags and attempt to get our room key - horror of horrors this appears to be the hotel of the organizers and a select group of competitors; we are advised that our hotel is round the corner and we should collect our bags and walk….after a brief and loud conversation with one of the girls who acts in a customer relations role we are offered a car to our hotel.

The driver signals we have reached our hotel and opens the door so that we may collect our many possessions and climb up the steps into the hotel. The world has changed; cobbled courtyards have been replaced with open sewers, the air conditioned glazed bar is now an insect filled reception and the door staff are now homeless individuals snoring under cardboard.

We are so very tired we no longer care, our eyelids are drooping and we resign ourselves to this hovel. We attempt to check in ‘sorry sir – you are not on the list’; we snatch the clipboard from his hand and examine it ourselves, he is correct.
‘thank you so much for making our lives so easy’, ‘I love the way you have made this hotel business such a breeze’, ‘this hotel is lovely’ and ‘I have always wanted to sleep in a flee infected hovel’ are some of the things we neglected to say to Aravind the head organizer and general asshole who was responsible for this shambles. He quickly shirks all responsibility and even lies to avoid our rant trying to palm us off onto his staff – if we had been in the same room as him at that time – tired or not - he would have ended up with fewer teeth to lie through.

Another hour passes and we finally collapse onto a board roughly disguised as a bed for what will be a delightful if itchy 4 hours sleep.