Bad Luck always comes in threes...

We packed up and left the clean and modern Peppermint Hotel in Jaipur and said good bye to all the wonderful staff - Jitendra who showed us magic tricks, Rajid with the piercing green eyes, Chirag who brought us the best vegetable stir fry, Amit the very helpful man at the lobby and Ravinda Singh the proud and jolly manager.

Our driver for the next four days arrived in his Toyota Inova and his name was Parveen as well. Not so chatty but an excellent and smooth driver.

The road to Agra is a very good quality 2 lane highway, not that lane markings or the word ‘highway’ mean anything in India.

The girls and I had just finished reading the story of Shah Jahan, the man who built the Taj Mahal for his wife. What a beautiful and sad story of love and commitment. We were talking about how the marble used to build the Taj Mahal had come from Jaipur and we could see out the car window many carts and trucks carrying huge loads of granite, marble and rocks when I saw Maisy in tears. Surely she wasn’t emotional about the love story! Then, with a pale shade of green across her face she held her stomach, so I reached for the closest receptacle, which happened to be an empty school bag and up came her breakfast. We haven’t had a car vomit in over 4 years since Tom Price so it was action stations to help Maisy, and Parveen pulled over on the side of the highway.


All good, later the same day.

After a quick clean up, Charlotte and I were back in the car and Maisy was just sitting on the edge. Paul and the driver were still on the side of the road when we caught sight of a tractor pulling a large cart of boulders careening across the road heading straight towards us. The two men jumped from the out-of-control vehicle as it hit and flattened a motorbike which deflected the cart away from our car and into the embankment beside the road. My heart was thumping. This was all happening metres in front of us. We were all fine. Paul raced to the overturned cart as the driver of the tractor took off on foot into the fields. The motor bike rider had luckily jumped to safety and people arrived from everywhere. Everyone was safe but it was such a close call for all involved.

Such is the way with our Indian drivers, they did not want us near danger or any commotion, so we were quickly taken from the scene and continued on our way.                             







   (Empty space is for my enormous sigh of relief.)

We drove a short while to get to a tea house and toilet stop. The topic of conversation was all about how lucky we were and that just yesterday Paul and I were talking about how in South East Asia we saw dozens of accidents in the seven weeks we were there but in India where everyone drives so close to each other we had not seen any sign of an accident.

And so, back to the car, Parveen was waiting for us with bad news. The car battery was flat and no-one had any jumper leads. Just as well we all had a yoga session last night and we just laughed at our luck. It only took about an hour with a dozen or so men all giving their expert opinion (one tall, white, used car dealer from Brookvale included).  Eventually after about the 13^th try at jump starting it that it actually kicked over and we were back in action.

Hoorah, and on to Agra, incident free.

LuckyLee