Our days have been longggg. We leave 6amish and usually drive until 5, stopping once or twice for tea breaks. It's back breakingly exhausting. Three of my vertebrae have fused together and two have shattered entirely. The traffic is usually so intense that our conversations mostly consist of mono-syllable words and one sentence sound bites. For instance:
"Don't do it you stupid [insert_animal_name_here]!"
"Jesus christ that hurt!"
"Look out!!!"
The pothole situation has been upgraded from meteor site to minefield. There are more potholes than there is road and some of them are deeper than our wheels. It's not like we are only on back roads either. National highways disappear into rubble every half mile, and sometimes this goes on for hours. The concept of the divided highway has been implemented in places, but everyone drives in every direction anyway, so it's kind of pointless besides giving the cows more room to sleep. Several times a day my suitcase goes flying out of its spot in the back of the rickshaw to which I either (i) get hit in the back of the head if I'm sitting on that side, or (ii) make a frantic lunge to stop it falling into the road. Eventually we got wise and started tying things on, which was fortunate because on one particularly hairy leap into the air (not just us, rickshaw too) my handbag with money and passports was left dragging along the ground attached by a bungee cord until we realized that for once the strange noise wasn't coming from the engine.
The roadside signs are fabulous. "Enjoy STD" has been surpassed in awesomeness by "cum restaurant" and even better "anti-transparent cum stress relief". Okay, okay, I'm juvenile, but what else to do for 2,500 miles? Other notables include "Swastika Hardware", "Gurkha - Blood and Guts!!!", and on the mountain range, a road sign of a car falling over the cliff. Comforting.
