Coimbatore Fiasco

The group's first travel day. I tried to warn our group that travel days are exhausting, but nothing can quite prepare anyone for those days. We packed up our overly stuffed bags, hauled them to the city train station, waited 10 minutes for a train, walked from Park station to the Central train station amidst an Indian crowd (more people than a fire chief would feel comfortable in one place), once at the station we take a few minutes to find which platform we are to be one, 15 minutes to go until our train leaves with or without us, we hike over to platform 3, find our train car, and finally drop our stuff by our assigned seats. We sit three to a seat made for the siginificantly skinnier Indian people comparing the sweat stains on our backs—my entire back is soaked in sweat. We spend the next 7 hours chatting as much as possible with those around us.

10:30 pm we arrive to Coimbatore—we then haul our bags across the street and check each hotel to hear “full” from each desk clerk. We quickly negotiate a bad price for a taxi to go to the bus station and look there. Again we hear “full” repeated again and again from each hotel. Now we gather under the awning of a hotel calling the expensive hotels in Coimbatore on the pay phone—surely the Residency couldn't be full tonight as well. No, in their good English I hear over the phone that they too are full.

This is when the situtation turns fiasco. Rain. Lots of rain begins to pour. Well, “Welcome to India friends” I think as I look around me to the other students with their large bags stacked in one corner away from the rain. I call Matthew—not what I had hoped I would have do. His voice is warm and welcoming even though it's 11:30 and I've woken him up. The pay phone cuts out.

I don't know quite how to explain this—but a man on a motorcycle who speaks decent English comes to help. He uses his cell phone to call Matthew back and explain the predicament in Tamil. He hands the phone to me and I hear Matthew laugh over the phone as he hears that it is pouring rain. Matthew says to go ahead and get taxis to come to the village. The girls talk with the hotel clerk inside and coordinates two taxis to come take us to the village.

The man on the bike isn't satisfied that we can make it on our own. Like a typical Indian male, he insists on helping even when it's not needed. He asks to meet the “gents” in the group. I go and get them from inside the hotel lobby. He then lectures the two guys in our group about their responsibility to take care of the girls in the group.

An hour later, the taxis arrive. The overly helpful motorcycle man starts haggling a price for the 9 of us. At this point we don't care. We'll pay the extra $10 as long as it will take us to a dry place to sleep. We load up the one taxi with our things with Ty, Jill, and their sleeping toddler, while the rest of us load into the other. The overly helpful man asks just one thing of Ty, a little alcohol. He is surprised to hear that these 9 Americans don't drink—silly Mormons. Poor man his time would have been better used elsewhere.

We arrive to the village by 1:15. David finds that his bed is on the Veranda with grandpa. The girls realize that they are actually going to be spending 2 months on a cememnt floor, while Ty and Jill think about “baby proofing” their room which is full of motorcycle parts, etc. It takes us another hour and a half to settle down and finally get to sleeping. Ty calls it our baptism by fire. That didn't go quite as I had planned, but what does anyway?