My Indo-Irish Holiday

We had three days off in a row, the programme team here in Sangam. Three whole days. So three of the volunteers and myself decided to get out of Pune and chill out in the mountains with some of our Indian friends. We set off for the mountains, happy and excited, with snacks aplenty for our one and a half hour (Indian time, in reality four hour) journey. We started out in one car driven by Sid, and the three girls moved into another car (Raouls) on the other side of the city. They took the snacks with them, grrrr, and on we went zooming through the Indian countryside in the alternately sunny and showery weather. The higher we drove the rainier it became until we were driving through the clouds. We arrived at our rented house, at the end of a track that had been decimated by the rains of the previous few days. You think there are bad Irish roads, you should have seen this one. Anyway the house was beautiful, a huge balcony looking out into the clouds, normally you could see a valley, with a big living room and three big bedrooms downstairs. Lots of sofas for napping, a guy to go out and do the shopping, and cook the meals, it was heaven. It was cold wet and windy, but it was Irish summer holiday weather. I was loving it! The balcony had a tin roof, and the rain on it sounded just like playing pool in the garage at christmas with the family in Ireland, except it wasn’t bitterly cold! We were getting hungry, so the guys and two of us girls went out to collect some take out dinner, burgers and pizzas and the like. We also got in booze which was nice as we don’t drink very often in Sangam. We drove through really thick fog to get to the food place along the crazy mountain path and the nicer but scary forest road. We arrived back t the house in one shaken piece and had a nicely chilled evening with the food, booze and chatting. We got up the next day and had our breakfast cooked for us and we went off to see some sights. This was difficult as the fog and rain made seeing anything past the front of the car tricky. We had a wander in the market, bought handbags, went to viewing points and got wet. It was fun, Raoul and Sid thought we were a bit mad for enjoying ourselves when the weather was so miserable, but they had fun laughing at us. We went back to the house and I took a nap, the first of many, while the others saw lots of monkeys in the trees around the house. The fog cleared now and again so we could see snatches of the view. I woke up for a while and discovered dinner was to be in an hour or so so I thought perfect, just enough time for a nap! They woke me for dinner, which was Indian, but the cooks had misunderstood my no spice needs and made the whole meal very bland for everyone. Poor guys had to make do. After dinner we watched a movie, the wedding singer and then a Bollywood movie. The cool mountain air was perfect for napping so I took advantage again and slept through the second movie. We slept in the next day, and headed home at lunchtime. We stopped back in Pune and ate Ferrero Roche cake and drank coffee, a perfect way to end our trip!

Water Water Everywhere

The rains have come! Finally, its raining cats and dogs. Five weeks late! Five weeks! Five! Ah so, you might say, a few more weeks of sunny dry weather, how bad, you might think, it’s a bonus. You would be totally wrong there.
Here in Pune we have a few reservoirs in the hills around the city. These reservoirs fill up during monsoon, it doesn't rain in the rest of the year so all of our water supply for the year has to fall during monsoon. So when monsoon comes five weeks late and its a light monsoon, which this one is, there is not enough water for the year. The city already practices ‘load shedding’. A delightful term they use when at the busiest times of the day, they just cut the supply. (They do this with electricity too, which is mainly hydropower, very green, but crap when the rains don’t come.)
So the water is on for half an hour in the morning now. We have a water tower that fills up whenever there is enough supply, but its nearly empty, we had to get a tanker in last week to top it up and we emptied it the week before when we had forty guests. now we have another forty people on site and it looks like we will be washing hair in buckets of rainwater again.
You will never hear me complaining about a rainy day again.
My hair smells funny.