On the road again...

Friday - We woke up early and headed to the lobby to meet up with the group. We stashed our bags on a huge stockpile of bags. We headed to the train station in mini cars that only held three people along with all of our baggage. We waited for 30 minutes for our train to arrive. We were split up into groups of 5/6. I sat with Ali, Mike, Lisette and Adam. Shari was a couple of cars down. I talked nearly the whole time with them. I'm really excited everyone seems really cool. After a four hour train ride we got of at Chandigarh and boarded the cars which are to be our second home for the next few weeks (since we have to travel between all the different clinic sites). We drove for another 5 hours with a brief stop in the mountains for a cold soda break then onto Bilaspur which is located in the lower Himalayas. We had a great dinner and then relaxed in our room before bed.

Saturday - Happy Fourth of July!! After breakfast we piled back into the cars (Shari and I both took some Dramamine - the roads are insanely narrow and curvacious). The scenery was far greener today than the previous day. We saw monkeys and of course numerous cows in the road. The driving here really keeps you on the edge of your seat :-D We had a lunch picnic in a pine forest. It was lovely. We're really enjoying getting to know people on the trip. We finally arrived at our destination of Manali (6,600 ft elevation) at around 3:30. We were given two hours of free time so after dropping off our luggage in our room (both times we have lucked out and had the room with the most flights of stairs between it and the lobby -calves of steel, baby), we went to some of the local shops and stocked up on tp, detergent and shampoo.

We then went into this scarf shop and I spent entirely too much (story of this trip). The shopkeepers were really nice and gave us some delicious chai. They even invited us to come visit their families (don't worry moms we refused; you have trained us well). We then had an hour meeting followed by a delicious, spicy Indian meal (I'm going to have to do a lot of hikes to fend off all these calories I'm consuming). Then to celebrate Independence Day we set off fireworks and firecrackers in the hotel verandah. I think the foreigners were more entertaining for the locals than the light show (we kept squealing and running away in fear of the stray firework).

Tomorrow we head for the Ruhntang Pass (13,200 ft). We'll be driving to our first clinic site which we will open up Monday morning. We have 8-9 clinic days. We have to travel to get to each site. We'll have 7 stations (Ob/gyn, peds, triage, two internal, dental, pharmacy) manned by physicians and a dentist. We get to rotate through each. We probably won't have internet for the next two weeks so this is Shari and Rachel over and out till then.