The road to Damdama

The road to Damdama Lake is paved with good intentions. No, wait, that is a different road. Hahaha. It just seems the same. Hahaha. Perhaps you would find that funnier if you lived in India. Anyway, the road is narrow, windy, potholed, and scenic. By that I mean it goes thru many little villages and settlements with lots of stuff to look at. The kids complain they are bored in the car, but Randy and I just don't get it - there is ALWAYS something to look at. Usually something crazy or bizarre. When we first turned off the main road (Sohna Road, that goes right by the apartments) we saw this "settlement" for lack of a better word. It has a brick wall around it, and it is a tent village. So many people live like this. It is so primitive. More on that on another blog.

Anyway, off the main road we went. The weird thing is that there are not so many differences between in-town and out-of-town here - there are animals, tractors, goatherds, all the country stuff right in the city. What you notice is less people when you get a bit farther out. The terrain got a bit rugged, and we started to see camels. Lots of camels. And cow manure. Lots of

cow manure. Now, I should give some instruction here, and before anybody freaks out, remember that the pioneers crossing the plains of America did this too, altho in a modified way, and 150 years ago, but still, they did it! Many many people here cook over fires, fires fueled by cow patties. So far, so good. The difference is, the people here don't just pick up the buffalo chips as they lay. The manure is picked up and hauled to a place (we affectionately call it a poo patty factory) where it is mixed with (I believe) more straw, then shaped by hand into uniform patties and set out to dry. I assume that someone somewhere is selling these, altho not in places that I shop. I am not intimately acquainted with this process, but we can see the hand prints in the patties. When they are dry, they are stacked into a hut shape, then more manure is spread on the outside (to protect them from weather, I presume) and it is decorated with designs.

Wild, eh? This area we were driving thru was poo patty factory heaven - everywhere we looked. Famous quote of the day - Alex says "wow, this place is filled with camels and cow poo".

I appreciate the dichotomy of this photo- nice elegant house, cow pies drying in the foreground.

This photo I took because it shows the laundry, out on a barbed wire fence. This is very commom but seems like a bad plan - how do you get them off without ripping them to shreds??

Randy and I both often comment how interesting it is to just drive around out in the country. It reminds us, again, that we are not in Kansas anymore, Toto!