Agra, Turkey: A “wild west” town of dismal clapboard hovels.
Four Pakistani men, my traveling companions on the bus, threaten to rearrange the driver’s face with their wicked-looking walking sticks if he does not take us to the border as promised, but he refuses to go on.
After much futile cursing and threatening, everybody gets out and disappears into the darkness. This is a replay of my midnight Amazon jungle bus adventure in Peru, but this time it’s freezing cold.
The Pakistanis will probably camp out and survive somehow but I must find shelter. A shadowy person appears and offers to guide me to a hotel. The “hotel” is one big room filled with smoking men. Upstairs is another big room filled with cots and these “beds” are not cheap. When I tell the man in charge I will look for another hotel, he offers to punch me in the nose for wasting his time. Criminey! What a superb night for violence!
I escape without a fight and wander around for a while in the snow. Here’s another “hotel” and they have a vacant bed! Saved!!
At dawn I am out again looking for transportation to the border. Here’s a carryall going my way.
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