gadget sunday.

Nice sentimental and partly spiritual entry yesterday - no? I wonder if I told any of you but my greatest ambition at one point of time was to be editor of “Readers digest” I wrote this one when I was in training and thought it would fit on well here. Besides this change of flavor was really required since this was beginning to get too much of a “ nubile nymphets and me” kind of blog and this after all is about how I am walking to thank the lord for my wife and family’s happiness.

Today was spent in covering up the gap between where we were and where we should have been, This was roughly 40kms and though we plan to leave behror tomorrow morning, by the distances covered we reached there only tonight. This town represent exactly 1/3rd of the distance required to be traveled and we have made it in three and a half days. My back seems to ache a lot and in the first session I had Suresh, my driver press my back almost every 20 minutes in the end in order to be able to make it to the 23 km mark I had set for myself for that session. However hard we try we are unable to make it to the start of the morning session before 5-45am or so and after all the stops for water and breakfast it is almost 11-45am by the time we finish and then the heat is terrible. It drains us so totally that the last 4 kms take almost as much energy as the rest of the day. Everybody walked with us today as did last night. Sarry did a magnificent job of organizing the entire back up including a delicious breakfast of sandwiches and cutlets with hot steaming cups of tea , all of which she carted from our hotel. Our friends Prafulla and Sangeeta came in for the day and walked a few kilometers with us. Mangesh’s dad and Prafulla’s mum also came in for the day to bless us.
The entire gang went back in the afternoon today and by evening it was only the five of us. We planned to ensure we walked at least 20 kms in the evening session to take the tally to around 45kms for the day ending the day a bit closer to the target. It did not quite happen like that because just as the five of us were about 5 kms from the hotel we had a man stop by us to specially tell us that this was not the kind of place where women could walk after dark. Our driver also came in to say he had seen loads of suspicious looking characters around the dhaba where we had stopped for tea. Coming from him it was quite scary and we bundled off the ladies to the hotel in the car and walked the rest alone. All this led to us walking almost 5 kms less than budgeted and we are falling behind on a regular basis since on no day are we able to complete the 45 kms budgeted. This also led to a heated discussion on women’s rights over dinner at a nearby resort and made the food quite spicy.

Incidentally my gadgets are faring worse than me on the trip. First my internet connection would not work, then the mobile charger got burnt out. Now the adopter to my laptop gave up too as did the earphones for my mp3 player. I guess they no longer make stuff strong as they did when they made me.

The only gadgets that work well is the massagers. They were the most reluctantly added bit of equipment to our luggage- since no one wanted a mechanical massager. We wanted a to take a real live massage specialist with us to ease out strained muscles. This was shot down by Sarry who insisted that it ought to be a male so that proper pressure could be applied to knotted muscles and my insistence on delicate fingers softly easing out pain. Both were therefore dropped but we took two mechanical massagers – a Japanese one that beats and pummels you like the local pehalwan ad the Chinese one that vibrates against you .All present tried out both today and by a huge margin the Chinese concept was declared the winner.

Tomorrow we shift base to shahpura which is exactly half way to Ajmer and we hope to cover the distance to shahpura in a day and a half and then leave for Jaipur. Due to the gap between where we are staying and where we are supposed to be walking, growing per day all planning is going haywire. Maybe when we are in Jaipur we may have to start from a point some 35 kms before jaipur and then walk into the city we already checked into the day before. What kind of gap is going to be carried over to the last day is not known and might require me to walk maybe 20 hours on the last day to get to the temple. Scary- very very scary !!!