Cold and clear. Part of this town is carved right into the stone of the mountainside. The bus depot is in the middle of a busy marketplace with lots of taxis, horse-drawn wagons and trucks. This is probably a very nice place in the summer, but I only stay for two hours and then continue in a new, luxurious bus heading northeast into a gray afternoon snowstorm.
I get a seat in the very front of the bus across from the driver so I get to watch the heavy globs of wet snow splat on the wide windshield and get piled into sloppy heaps by the wipers. The highway tarmac soon disappears under the snow and the bus seems to be sliding down a tunnel plowed through six-foot drifts into the night.
Dawn: still snowing, everything is white or gray; no forms are visible—only differences in light intensity. I don’t know how the driver manages to tell which is highway and which is snowdrift and I guess he can’t either because we slide off the road into a snow berm.
Everybody gets out to help push. Holy smoke-- my feet and hands are freezing! I’m really not dressed for this kind of thing—no gloves, no boots and only Adam’s thin reversible trench coat. I am thankful when the bus slides back onto the road and we can get back in.
Mid morning, the bus stops at a stone cabin for a tea break.
Inside the room is cold and wet, but since I am the only foreigner on the bus, they kindly offer me one of the few chairs near the big potbellied wood stove.
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