This weekend Alpana and I headed to Madikeri, a hill station in the Western Ghats. The scenery was gorgeous and we had a great time, but the best part was meeting fellow travelers and sharing stories about trips to other parts of India and other parts of the world. There are now about five million places on earth that I absolutely must visit as soon as humanly possible. I've never really done any significant traveling before, and now that I've started, I just can't stop. I love wandering around a new place, meeting random people, learning about something completely unexpected, and of course, trying new foods.

The other fun thing about our trip was the crazy adventure we had trying to get home. Over the weekend there was a court ruling about a longstanding river water dispute between Karnataka (where we were) and Tamil Nadu (a bordering state). The ruling gave more water rights to Tamil Nadu, so people in Karnataka were upset and threatening to strike. We had bus tickets for a night ride on a government bus back to Bangalore, but because of the tension in the area over this dispute, the bus drivers weren't sure they could drive all the way back. (Government buses are often targeted when violence breaks out -- a couple weeks ago a few buses were burned in Bangalore during rioting over the Saddam execution.) We were also hearing rumors about a city-wide strike the next day, which might make it tough to get home from the bus stand once we finally reached Bangalore. But Alpana had a plane to catch so we decided to go ahead and try our luck. The bus dropped us off in Mysore (halfway home) at 2:30am and refused to go any farther. Luckily there were some nice guys on the bus who were in a similar position, so we stuck together and ended up all cramming into an SUV-taxi which was taking advantage of the absence of buses to make some extra money. It could have easily been a scary experience, but everything worked out quite well for us. Since there was hardly any traffic on the road, we made it back in record time.

I'm back in Bangalore now and everyone's talking about this river water dispute. Apparently there's a statewide bandh (strike) called for Thursday. During a bandh, everything shuts down and there's no transportation available so most people just stay home until it's called off. It doesn't make any sense to me though. The strike is being called out of anger against Tamil Nadu and the courts, so what good does it do to hurt your own local economy?

Postscript: The Chief Minister of Karnataka asked the strikers to postpone the bandh until Monday so it wouldn't disrupt the city's big aero show. And they agreed. So I guess there's a system to this chaos.