Day 74:

I remember at the beginning of this trip, back in Samcheock, I was so shy about asking the adjuma pimp running my hotel to give me a five dollar discount.

Funny.

I'm in India now, and the whole tourism industry exists only to extract money from travellers as quickly as possible. I'm steeling myself. I'm not looking forward to what it will be like to be in Varanasi or Delhi. China has a bit of that, Nepal has even more. India, it seems, has a hundred times as much money-related bullshit as Nepal.

It's amazing what I can now, compared to what took a lot of courage back in Samcheok. When the rickshaw guy at the border changed both his price and his currency at the end of our ride I was confident enough to tell him that he would take what I was offering, or he would take nothing at all.

(And in between the last two paragraphs, I was comfortable letting lose a stream of expletives to the guy who sold me a bus ticket for a bus that he now says will not arrive... no refund)

So the latest news? I'm in some nasty border town between Nepal and India. I overpaid for a package to get me from Pokhara to Varanasi, and I'm about halfway there. I waited an hour for that aforementioned bus, with the guys insisting that it would come "in a few more minutes." Eventually they said it wouldn't come because they didn't sell enough tickets, and then told me to go buy a ticket for the local bus. And here I am on a crowded local bus... it rather resembles an American prison bus....

...Thank G-d for my earplugs.