Trip Stats:
Progress: 20.52 km
Time: 54:20
Avg. Speed: 22.6 km/hr


A teacher on the playground of the school next to the hotel surrounded by a whirl-wind of children.



The camera self-timer catches me as I run in the room with the drowned notebook.


The perfect hit - on a 20ft x 10ft porch, the rain leaks through the roof right on top of the notebook.


Still giggling about how fate plays with me.

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2003-05-22 - Shimla -> Naldehra (Day 37)

Up early, I go through the morning routine and head out to the bank which hopefully will be off strike today. I have a lovely breakfast on the mall and then manage to change money without event and back to the hotel which means that I get out of Shimla and on the road toward Manali where hopefully I'll find a nice place to just stop and hang out for a couple of weeks.

While I get out of town I don't get too far before I start getting warnings of an ugly storm coming. I drive on with light drops coming every so often for about 40 minutes and get 10 km from Shimla when it starts getting ugly and the rain starts coming fast. Fortunately I find in front of me a Himachal Tourism hotel which so far have been the nicest places I've stayed in terms of quality of the hotel, design and food. Great! I pull in and struggle to get the new straps off the bike. They are made with cheap metal hooks which prove to be very hard to take off and I run inside the restaurant as the rain really starts coming down and sit back with the Economist and some tea and watch the rain. The place is known as "The Britisher's Old Golf Course" which brings a funny picture of the Indian's taking over the place after kicking the Brit's out.

As the power is out I go out on the porch of the cottage and start working on today's journal as I watch the rain and enjoy a set of tea. Carianne (a former colleague) has pointed out that there aren't many pictures of me on the site as I'm primarily behind the camera, so in her honor I go get the tripod to get a picture of me working on the journal with the rain pouring down in the background and a steaming cup of tea beside me. I get the tripod set up, put the camera on self timer and as I'm looking through the lens to get the shot straight, I see a torrent of rain come through the ceiling directly onto the laptop keyboard. Now you have to put this is perspective, the porch is shared by two cottages so its about 20 feet long and 10 feet wide, and I'm in a dry spot right in the middle with my little table, tea set and the notebook. I can find no explanation other then fate that would open up a leak just at the moment when I'm over at the camera, dead above the laptop which just released a torrent with enough water that the water splashing off the keyboard soaks the entire laptop screen.

I see this through the lens and yell out the appropriate, "Oh ****!", and run over and turn the notebook upside down pouring a very respectable amount of water off the keyboard and screen. My journal page just stares back at me upside down on the screen, I assume wondering what the heck is going on. I kill the power switch and run inside with the notebook - all of this happening in the 9 seconds it took for the self timer to run down and catch the photo of me running into the cottage with the drowned notebook to get my towel.

I dry it off as best I can and just start giggling as it was just too much that in that big an area, just at the moment I was away, the one leak in the roof would open up directly above the computer. This poor computer has been put through so much - getting banged around on the road, having the motorcycle fall over on it at least 10 times now, going underwater when the bike went down in the washed out road, and now its drowned again in the roof leak with the world's greatest timing. Since so much of what I want to get done on this trip involves the computer - its the repository for the digital photographs, the library of books and courses that I want to read, the holder of all the audio books I want to listen to etc, I've already decided that if the notebook goes, it will mean the end of the trip. That being the case, I don't know what fate is telling me here with the million to one leak or the fact that the Thinkpad is managing to survive through it, the bike crashes, the fall overs and the washed out road! Certainly seems the computer at least is making a heck of a fighting effort to go on with the walkabout.

I have a picture of the following TV commercial in my head: I'm landing at the Delhi airport with the laptop bag swung over my shoulder - (cut) - I start out of Delhi on the motorcycle with all the packs and equipment on - (cut) - I'm driving over the gravel and dirt road with the huge bumps where the bridge is being built into Rampur (bumps up and down, banging all over the place) - (cut) - I'm riding across the washout on the way to Recong Peo and the bike goes down in the water - (cut) - the side cases are shoved roughly behind rocks when the bike conks out at Nako Lake - (cut) - I get up in Nako and the sun is rising on the Himalayas behind me, I open the side case and pull out the IBM bag, open it and pull out the notebook - I look at the camera and say, "Thank IBM, I brought a ThinkPad!" as I start to work on my photographs.

If nothing else I have to give this computer credit - three years old and it is still running like a race car but taking a beating like a tank. You better believe my next notebook is going to be an IBM!

The power stays out so I take the chance to do my laundry - its amazing how black the water is after washing my clothes. I'm not kidding - absolutely black. Even the rinse water - on the second rinsing! That done its back to eating dinner and doing this journal by candle light... oh did I mention the ThinkPad's battery has made it through every power outage, a daily occurrence since I got here, managing to get through till the power came on every single time!

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