The traveling pants

Well, another day has passed and my bag is still in the clutches of the Great Indian Bureaucracy...and I'm still wearing the same pants that I left Germany in. After many dozens of phone calls to the Lufthansa office in Delhi and a visit to the airport here in Leh, it's become clear that there was a mix-up somewhere and a poor Mr. Luca of Italy had his bag sent to Leh instead of mine. With the help of about 15 Jet Airways employees at the airport office, we have some confidence that my bag will come on tomorrow's flight. At one point I think three of us were on the phone to different people in Delhi at the same time and all were getting more or less the same answer. Cross your fingers for me.

In more enjoyable news, we spent some time in the afternoon yesterday wandering around town, and hiking up to the Leh Palace above town. It's in various stages of decay and restoration, and navigating the crumbling, unlit corridors by headlamp was a bit of an adventure. Amazing views out over town and the main valley though!

We also moved hotels. The place we had stayed in for the first few days was chosen mostly because they had wifi (an extreme rarity around here I assure you) and it was a decent place, but lacking in both cleanliness and hot water. When connecting to the wifi, we kept noticing another network called spic-n-span, but it was locked. Today when we decided to move to a better hotel, Nichole looked out the window of our room at the really nice looking place across the way and said "we should stay there". So we looked, and it turned out the be the Hotel Spic-n-Span. We're now nicely settled in a clean room, with wifi and 24hrs hot water. (ahhh...the things we take for granted at home)

Geek update: I'm working on a better way to display photos in blogger. In the mean time, please be patient with the lack of captions and wonky photo layout.

View of Leh from Leh palace