Today I will share another story about travel to India.

(Thread 2, pictures sourced from the Internet). For the first thread, see this: https://twitter.com/halifaxshadow/status/1314869788359835648

A few years after the first trip I had a change of assignment and began to travel frequently to India.

I had a team and clients there and became close to our business in that country.

At one point I stayed in Mumbai for almost 6 months - living in the ITC central hotel which was lovely.

The staff - and I mean all the staff (hundreds?) - must have been educated on my photo and all knew my name from day one I checked in (always a good sign for a hotel)

Incidentally, the tandoor restaurant there is excellent and should be tried.

Mumbai is very restrictive. If you go out and about you have beggars, you have traffic, it is very crowded.

The CEO of one business I worked with knew I was struggling to adapt so he invited me to his offsite in Mysore.

“Halifax, join us in Mysore. It’s nothing like Mumbai! Clean air, open skies, you’ll love it!”

“Ok sure!”

So he calls his guys in Bangalore and it’s arranged, I will be there visiting his team on a Friday and they will drive me up to Mysore.

The guys I’m going to ride with tell me about the NICE Road which is a toll road / highway you can take to Mysore. They tell me it’s “just like the the autobahn” and that I will be impressed.

Tbh at first it really was fine, and seeing the lorries in India is always a fun experience. Many of the drivers paint them by hand. Something like this.

Then all the sudden the highway just ends. I mean, no exit or anything the road just ends. Everyone including us is driving our vehicles off road and into the woods. The bottom of the car is bouncing on tree roots.

You can’t imagine the din and cacophony of all these cars and trucks creeping through an off-road trail both ways. Completely haphazard. No rhyme or reason. Exhaust smell was oppressive and nauseating.

Apparently due to some litigation over land use or imminent domain or something the highway just can’t be linked up. So for a short while it just *does not exist*

I couldn’t stop laughing. I knew I was making a memory for life.

My back starts to hurt from all the bouncing. But soon enough ... we are back on the “NICE Road” .. it was fun actually.

Then in Mysore we had some welcome drinks and dinner here, which was lovely

After that we relocated back to our resort with individual cabins.

It was really nice and they got me my own cabin.

There was drinks scheduled there too. I went down to the reception hall for that. At first it started slow but once the evening got going ...

... it was like a Bollywood movie. The locals are not embarrassed to sing solo, and to do choreographed dancing too - on the fly. This was a young group, average age in the late twenties tops, but I tell you they were very wholesome people.

Despite drinking quite a bit you could see no untoward physical or social interaction between men and women. Not that you see a ton of that anywhere with work people, but you’d expect a little that late into the night with that much drink in that age range. Not there.

Anyway, Mysore really is nicer than Mumbai. But, you don’t escape it entirely.

There are some people sleeping on the side of the streets. There are still beggars. And open sewers.

Still, clean air and the open skies did me good for a couple of days. Then, back to Mumbai.