Mountain Announcements

As I write I am uploading photographs, trying to settle my stomach. My final hours of tourist India come to an end. I get a bus to Delhi in a couple of hours.

Last night was a beautiful end to the experience. I took a rickshaw to Manali to meet Effie for an enjoyable and surreal Korean meal, surrounded by only Korean people and Korean wine.

After this we went to meet an old friend of Effie's, but as this friend was just sitting in her room knitting and talking to incredibly drugged-out losers, I decided I had better things to do with my last night. We found two friends from our trip to Spiti valley, one of whom plays trumpet and we dragged them to Vashisht.

We joined an emerging party at Sonny's place with a gang of vodka and rum. We drank, sang drunken songs, jammed, talked loud nonsense and had our neighbours utterly despairing. They gave us a half our time limit before midnight. I tried to stop at midnight but our team was too drunk. We soon had them coming in asking "Don't you even care? Don't you even care? People are trying to sleep." It became a kind of refrain, "Don't you even care? Don't you even care?!"

Not wanting to instigate further violence in the world, we remembered that there is infact a public hot spring bath. So we hightailed it there, guitars just about managing to still be in hands. We found a whole bunch of other friends and made a lot of steamy, pants-clad noise. Then we went back and collapsed. Strange but beautiful evening.

So, goodbye the mountains. I'm gonna miss the goodtimes...