campout recon no. 01

My mobile phone rang at 09:30 on Thursday while I was in the middle of painting the ceiling of our bathroom at Tipperary. (Yes, renovation is still going on, but more on that in a different entry.) My friend, Parmesh was on the phone telling me to meet him in 10 minutes on the road below our house. Apparently, we had been nominated by the team from church to do a little campsite reconnaissance prior to our planned camping trip for the weekend. I scrambled to wash out my paintbrush and trade out my painting shirt for some cleaner, warmer clothes. (It is the end of September and it seems like we have just skipped right from monsoon to winter). A few minutes later, I met parmesh on the road, jumped on the back of the 100cc motorbike and we were off, motoring east out of mussoorie on the way toward Dhanaulti, about an hour drive through the mountains.
As we drove along, Parmesh would have to continually downshift to make it up the slightest incline and I chuckled at the realization that my added weight on the back of the bike was giving the motor a workout. Somewhere on the road just past a small village, we downshifted again to help the little motorbike climb the slight incline and there was a “snap” and the engine raced but we did not pick up any speed. After a few seconds of trying the gears, we realized something in the transmission had snapped and none of the gears on the bike would engage. I climbed off and Parmesh pulled out the tools to see if we could figure out the problem. After a few minutes of trying a ridiculous screwdriver on stripped screw heads, I realized we weren’t going to make it out to check out the camping sites and my heart sank. Parmesh continued to tinker, banging with a wrench here, stripping more of the screw head off there, and muttering in Garhwali. We were probably an hour walk away from Mussoorie.
After I convinced Parmesh that the bike was officially broken beyond our ability to fix it, we rolled the bike back down the hill to the village we had passed earlier and caught a jeep going back out the mountains toward Dhanaulti. If we couldn’t take the bike, we would just have to get there by jeep instead. Two jeeps and about 2 hours later, we arrived at our intended destination to begin looking around for a campsite for the team.
Unfortunately, trying to accomplish this task on foot was much less effective than with a motorbike, since we had to walk along the road until we found a possible place, then hike up the side of the mountain, only to discover the land was privately owned, or there was not suitable space for four tents and twenty five people to camp for two days. After a few failed attempts, we decided to walk back toward Mussoorie on the road until a bus came by to transport us the rest of the way. Later, on the crowded bus, I wondered what we would tell the team who were eagerly expecting that Parmesh and I had picked out the perfect spot. Why did it have to be so difficult to simply pick out a place to camp? I marveled at the difference between what I expected our reconnaissance trip to be and what it had actually turned out to be. When I jumped on the bike in the morning, I was excited and full of hope for a quick trip out to the jungle to pick out a good site for the team and be back before noon to continue helping with the painting at Tipperary. But by the time I got back to the house at 3:30 in the afternoon, I was tired and sapped of hope for where we were going to camp for the weekend. Thankfully, Edwin took the news well about his broken motorbike; we got it fixed for 20 rupees (about 50 cents) and planned to try again very early Friday morning. We were planning to leave town on Friday afternoon by 2:00 for the weekend campout.