It took a prodigious amount of effort to suppress a huge groan this morning when our heinous host invited himself to sit down with us at the breakfast table. He came toting a thick book full of guests' comments. I dove right for it, expecting to read a whole catalogue of complaints. But the comments were all glowing, as if describing another place. I was surprised, too, by the sheer number of guests received in this remote place. "Oh yes," our host explained, "my son travels often to France to promote this place; in fact, he's there now." Apparently his son is a less loathsome human being, as most of the previous guests had effused about the warm welcome received.
And then there were the ecstatic comments about the food! Had these other people ever eaten anywhere else in India? Didn't they see how out of line the prices were? In my head, I composed a poison-pen entry into the heavy volume, but with the nasty nawab watching me intently and no coffee in my bloodstream I deferred and passed the book on to Fred, figuring he'd write something equally bitter. But he wimped out, understandably intimidated by the old man practically breathing down his neck, and wrote some bullshit about how tranquil the place was. When Nadine and Liliane showed up, the book was passed to them with stern instructions to write in English, "because if you write in French or any other language I won't understand it."
Like us, our friends were thus intimidated into writing something blandly pleasant. Bapu (as he insisted we called him; we guessed it means "butthead" in Gujarati) was waiting for us out in the hall when we got up to leave, literally blocking our way. "Two hundred fifty rupees" was all he said, demanding payment for the five bottles of (extortionally-priced) water we had consumed. Fred dug into our wallet, pulled out the exact sum and plunked the wad of bills into the odious man's outstretched palm. We both felt anxious to leave the evil place and were soon on our bikes.
Stupidly, we followed Bapu's advice on our route to Bhavnagar. The plan was to stop on the way at Velavadar National Park, famous for its huge blackbuck population. As instructed, we turned off the main highway onto a truly awful road, more potholes than asphalt. Everyone we have talked to the last few days has assured us that Gujarat has the best roads in India; obviously none of them have ever been on this one. After twelve taint-torturing kilometers we had joined another highway heading south with a wonderfully smooth surface. Of course it didn't last. Right after our first *dhaba* stop of the day we had to traverse a long stretch of road in the process of being improved.
It was so abysmal that I fell off my bike at one point, cutting up my knee pretty badly. It was slow going the remainder of the way to Bhavnagar, with only brief stints of smooth road. Most of it had been badly affected by one or more heavy monsoons. And the scenery was uniformly dull, just one monotonous scrubby swamp. When we finally reached the turnoff to the national park we took one look at the road and decided to skip it. Why prolong our agony by twenty kilometers just to see some deer? A sign indicated that our goal for the day was still forty-some kilometers off and we wondered if we could even make that.
Indeed, the last stretch of road into Bhavnagar was awful; by the time we finally reached the city limits we felt utterly spent. Luckily, finding decent lodgings was relatively easy and we were soon washed up and ready to explore the town. I liked Bhavnagar immediately. The people were enthusiastic and gregarious, the streets were clean and uncrowded and the whole place felt aglow with prosperity and harmony. We headed to a hilltop temple to get a view of the town and ran into Nadine and Lilliane for the fifth time on the way to the top. Incredibly, this temple was also a meeting/cruising place for Bhavnagarian homos.
Many of them flirted with in a circumspect manner but were too shy to initiate any conversation --understandable, since as outsiders we were pretty much the center of attention. So we sat there and watched an amazing sunset while checking out the funny little scene. Once the sky began to grow dark we jumped into an autorickshaw --the cleanest and fanciest we've ever seen in India--- to scope out the town's elegant palace/hotel, where our French friends were staying (*mais bien-sur*). We thought there might be a bar where we could have a drink, but duhhhh, this is Gujarat, drier than a vegan cookie; so after a quick perusal of the deserted premises (far far grander than the barn-palace at Utelia) we headed back to our place for a fantastic dinner.
The restaurant was packed with well-to-do Indian families, testimony to Bhavnagar's prosperity. Afterwards I went out in search of water, crossing a pitch-dark park to do so. Apparently my novel complexion was discernible in the gloom; several people approached me and insisted they buy me a drink or a snack. While it's sometimes flattering to be so automatically popular, more often I find myself wishing I were able to blend in more, nostalgic for the relative anonymity of places like Finland --a place almost unfathomably far from here.