When Life Gives You Lemons.... Make a homemade gatorade and recover some of the electrolytes that India has robbed you of.

Inevitabilities depend on where you travel, how you travel and with whom you travel. Indian inevitabilities, traveling on a shoe string, as a female, with other females, look a little something like this. You’re going to get sick, very sick, your going to get your ass and boobs grabbed, frequently, very frequently, and if you’re lucky enough, you may find yourself amidst a very angry group of men demanding money in order to remove the blockade they have created to keep your car from passing through their village. That last story will have to wait until I’m back on American soil, but suffice to say, my first adventure into the Himalayas was a beautiful disaster, tainted by Indian inevitabilities. 

We (Prometa my fabulous translator, Frenchy Clair and Canadian Celia) left Ramgarh village at 4 in the morning via Vicrum (the overgrown fisherprice vehicles most commonly used to transport people in this country). Naturally the bus to Sankri was supposed to depart at 5 am and arrive 7 hours later. It left at 7  am and arrived 13 hours later. The woman behind me sat vomiting out the window for the first five hours and the man next to Celia decided she might like to wake from her bus nap to both of his hands massaging her breasts. She promptly slapped him repeatedly until he moved and then berated him about how to properly treat women. English might not have been his first language but the message was unmistakeable. I was stunned at how kind the man next to me was and felt guilty at how harshly my fellow female travelers were being treated by the men next to them. Mine offered me bananas, and saved my seat when I got out for the bathroom, and even gave me a cool rag to put on my neck to fight the heat. Thank you universe. 

Sankri itself was from another world. The only think I can compare it to is some kind of Indian middle Earth. It was a village built around terrace farming where the small stone homes were built for small Himalayan Indians, an intricate cobblestone network connecting one family to the next, where low hanging beams were unforgiving to anyone above 5 feet tall.  Every morning the women left with baskets on their head to collect apricots and grain, and the men left with machetes to cut bamboo from the nearby forest. We ate every meal on the floor of the kitchen, usually in the dark as there was no electricity, and helped in the fields, digging divots for the coming rice planting, all the while reveling in a temperature that was breathable and a mountain range that was more breathtaking than anything India has shown me thus far. 

I began my research and simultaneous my end in mountain paradise. Having run out of water, three hours away from the nearest clean water source, there was little choice other than to accept the water from the apple farm. Fail. One amoeba later, I was shipped directly back to the sauna where I got drugged up to the max in Dehradun’s hospital. Many antibiotics later I still can’t eat, but have successfully learned how to make a homemade gatorade with lemons and sugar and salt to replace my lost electrolytes. There’s no moral to this blog other to say that India kicked my ass this week, I have a new found appreciation for saltines and gatorade (neither of which exist in India) and a new life lesson, beware the apple man, his crooken smile is matched by a crooked water purifier which rests beneath the basement next to his cows.