Tirupathi Fail

On my way to school Monday morning, I saw a smashed rat by the side of the road.  If you were someone who could read omens, you would have known what that meant:

Defeat. 

But I got through Monday, no problem.  Same for Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday.  Friday, I knew would be a challenge, but I felt up for it.  Brad and I had planned an adventure to India’s (and the world’s ) most visited holy site: Tirupathi.

Sounds like ti-roo-pa-tee

Lonely Planet explains that it gets between 40,000 and 100,000 visitors a day.  But we’ve been trying to get out and see India before we leave forever, and we thought, yeah, this will be good, f-ing crazy, but good.  So we bought our tickets and packed our bags.  It took some mental preparation, "It's going to be loud. It's going to be hot.  It's going to be insanely crowded."  But by Friday afternoon we were rearing to go.

The plan was to take the train 3 hours north, stay the night, hike up to the temple Saturday morning, take great pics for all my great blog readers, then head home early Sunday on the 6 am train.

BUT…well, read on. 

We hauled it out of school at the earliest possible moment Friday afternoon.  We knew we were cutting it close with only an hour to get to the Madras Central Train Station, but since the trip usually takes 40 minutes, we figured, all right, we got this. 

Two hours later, we were still 10 kilometers from the train station and the car was just barely inching forward.

Turns out downtown traffic came to a halt yesterday due to visiting politicians, who from what I can tell, shut down roads wherever they go.  How is that any way to win votes?  If I could vote, I would find out who that politician was and vote for everyone but him. 

So, there we were, trip stopped before it had even started, feeling stressed about traffic and asking each other, just what the hell do we do now.

Brad says, “Where do you want to go?”

I say, “The airport.”

Our driver was willing to take the four hour trip, but after two hours of already being in the car, we’d had it. 

It took us almost as long to get home, so three and a half hours later we were there, having accomplished nothing but driving around in a big, slow circle.

As for great pics for my great blog readers, I’ll just give you the view from the backseat.  I’m sorry in so many ways, that that’s all I have to offer.

We're going to try again March 18.  Anyone care to join us?