Orien, Pankaj (our driver) and I said goodbye to our new friends at our favorite juice bar in Delhi and left for Varanasi in the early evening after gathering supplies for our three month Hearts of the World Tour through India.

We drank a mixture of pineapple, ginger, sugar cane, mint juice here every morning while staying at the Blue Sapphire hotel in Delhi.

Saying farewell to our new friends

Onward to Varanasi!

We had planned to split the trip up by stopping in Agra, the home of the Taj Mahal. I was in the back of the truck knocking around on our new orange and brown flower-printed polyester mattress, which was sliding on top of a bunch of wood we just bought. One of our next moves is to build out a platform in the back of our truck, however this platform bed wasn’t built yet and so I was there, on a very sloped and slippery mattress cramped amongst all our bags and luggage, trying to sleep. As we approached Agra, we still felt fairly strong and awake and so decided to press on to see how close to Varanasi we could get.

At about 4:30am, after much driving, we attempted to sleep on a roadside near Kampur but were plagued by mosquitos for hours and hours and couldn’t get a wink to save our lives. In the middle of our exhausting tossing, turning, bug-smacking routine, a mysterious hand rapped urgently on our window and startled us half to death. My heart was in my throat as the man spoke to Pankaj in Hindi with an authoritative, menacing tone. Pankaj’s summary, “He said we couldn’t sleep here.” He didn’t seem to be a cop. Maybe he was a car thief?

And so, deeply tired, cranky and itchy, we decided to keep driving. It was Varanasi or bust.

To be continued…