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Being a celebrity for a day(or the duration of india maybe) . . .
We got up early and got a local bus to lonar, not as simple as hopping on a bus, but we got there in the end. We waited a wee while in the village next to it, where there is the beginning of some 9day worship thing so loadsa stalls selling like headless bodies and different heads, I've got pics, so funny I was holding them up, and laura sat in the chai shelter while I stood chatting to the guy picking up the heads to see which one looked like me. So funny. We got our photo taken with a few people, I normally say no but when they are friendly its funny.
We crammed onto the local bus, people thought it weird that I sat on lauras knee, but it was crazy, the bus was packed and then everyone just pushed and elbowed there way on, it took us the 3rd bus to get on in this fashion as I kept loosing laura. So on the 3rd everyone was pushed aside so we could sit next to the conductor, what a novelty we were, he loved it. It was good fun.
Once in lonar we got a rickshaw to the lake which was beautiful, smelly but gorgeous.
We walked roughly half way round the lake, it was boiling, came across a temple, no surprise, but our day was spoilt a little by a group of guys following us, so I made laura walk in front so I was acting as a barrier between us. Its so frustrating as when we stopped to look at the view they would linger. I mean a lot of the time its curiosity of 'the whites' which is why they do it, they mean no harm and its lack of education on their sides which is why they stare, they don't understand the implications it has on us.
So we headed back to the square where no one understood the name of the village I was saying that was 11km away to get our bus back to aurangubad. Our accents are so strong that they can't understand even if we say it right. But there was a direct one from there but it was meant to come at 6 but in fact it came at 8pm. So I had a chai and laura waited in the chai shelter while I wandered as at the bus station we were getting hounded.
We sat in the station at one point and everyone gathered round, laura was really stressed, a guy was taking a pic on his phone, so I got out lauras camera and took a photo of them all staring then got up to shoo them away, they all ran away scared screaming which me and laura laughed at, like 50 onto 2 what did they think we were going to do! So I could see laura was really unhappy and affected by this, we ended up in the ticket guys office which has barred windows we ended up getting pics taken with all the ticket guys and signing childrens school books through the windows, it so funny, honestly you just don't understand til you've been here.
I ended up finding us some friendly chai guys who wouldn't let anyone in his stall who was going to stare.
On the bus laura got chatting to a local young guy while I hung out the window with my ipod, I was pleased, she was finally getting to chat to a genuine nice local, which I could tell she was enjoying. Getting to see india for the positives after all the harrassing negatives.
We napped a bit on the bouncy bus.xx
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