Budget: 3500R/$70; Spent: 3744R/$75
Today was a momentous day. Today, Patty made a grown man
cry. But I’ll get to that in due time.
We woke up to a nice breakfast at Dew Drops, consisting of
toast, fruit salad, coffee, and omelettes. Hilariously (to me, not to Patty),
the server only asked me if I wanted an omelette so they actually didn’t bring
any eggs for Patty at all. We all know that you’re playing with fire if you
mess with Patty’s food. Needless to say, she was unhappy. When the server
returned to the eating area, Patty marched up to him and told him she would
like an omelette even though she wasn’t asked whether she would like one. For
Patty, this was just another example of Indian men completely ignoring her. And
I have to agree, it’s getting pretty ridiculous.
We wanted to check out of Dew Drops as soon as possible so
that we could find another hotel and have some time left to explore Munnar and
book a tour for the following day. We packed our things, asked the hotel
workers to call us an auto-rickshaw, and then called a bunch of hotels
recommended in Lonely Planet, with no success. Some hotels were full and others
didn’t answer their phone.
The ride into Munnar was long and bumpy. Again, the traffic
was seriously backed up. Several times we were just stopped behind a huge
lineup of cars for so long that the driver turned off the engine. When we got closer
to town, Patty ran into a couple hotels to see if they had rooms available
while we were waiting in traffic. No luck, except for one hotel called
Bellmount, which had one room available tonight. Not exactly ideal, but we kept
it in the back of our mind just in case.
Turns out that this weekend is one of the busiest times of
the year in Munnar. Not only is it a weekend (bad enough), but there is also a
Hindu festival going on. Many Indian people were taking four days off to come
to Munnar. Bad luck for us! It was clear we were going to have a hard time
finding somewhere to stay.
The driver we had spoken to last night had recommended a
travel agency and given us its phone number. We asked the auto-rickshaw driver
to call with his cell phone so that he could take us there. Once we finally
arrived in town, we got there after only getting lost once. The man at the
travel agency was quite friendly and helpful and didn’t expect anything in
return for finding us a hotel, although we did hint that we would take one of
his tours. The room he reserved for us is at Archana Hotel.
Once again, neither Patty nor I had the energy to be very
friendly with anyone. Hopefully we didn’t come off as absolute jerks. A couple
people had asked whether we were really tired or hungry, clearly indicating our
moods were apparent. We’re not sure what’s causing us all this stress, perhaps
we’re not sleeping enough.
From the travel agency we walked down the street into a more
expensive hotel in Munnar called EastEnd to have lunch. Although it was slow in
coming, the lunch was pretty good. A little on the expensive side, but worth
the cost. We were a little shocked to see some people on either side of us
eating their rice with their hands. Hopefully we didn’t offend them by staring,
but typically we’ve seen Indian’s using bread to mop up their food, not their
hands. This was particularly disturbing for us because of our newfound phobia
of bacteria and obsessiveness with cleaning our hands and not touching anything
we eat. Perhaps we are the freaks after all.
We decided after lunch to go to an internet café to search
online for other hotel options. The travel agent really hadn’t sold the Archana
Hotel to us very well, so we thought it wouldn’t hurt to find another option.
It was a short walk and after 45 minutes of internet searching and phone
calling, we found nothing for today, but another hotel for tomorrow, if we
wanted. We called them up and reserved a room for tomorrow night because we had
found excellent reviews for this hotel online. For today, though, we were
thankful that we had been able to reserve a room at Archana Hotel. We jumped in
an auto-rickshaw and about 10 minutes later we pulled up to the hotel.
Almost immediately we knew that something was wrong. They
had my name… “Jack” (we had heard the travel agent mispronounce my name on the
phone)… but three employees were talking with each other behind the counter,
and not in English. They told us to sit down and a minute or two later informed
us that they’d given our room away to someone else because they didn’t think we
were going to show.
Well, I can tell you that my blood soared to 100 degrees
faster than it ever has in my entire life. We both had a feeling this was a
possibility and we have been so irritable lately that it felt almost natural to
get mad. Immediately I raised my voice and told the guy this was unacceptable.
He tried to explain to us that we had taken too long to reach the hotel and we
tried to explain to him that no one had given us a time limit on our
reservation.
Nothing came of our five minute conversation so they called
up the manager. I spoke to him and it was an utter disaster. I have never been
so shameless in public. I was basically yelling at the guy over the phone while
he was telling me that it was all our fault for being late. I even looked up
and saw countless guests just staring at me, and that still didn’t faze me. The
thing about India’s service industry is that it is never their fault if
anything goes wrong. Being a little more rational now, I understand where he is
coming from and, if we are being honest, we were looking for other
accommodations even after reserving a room at this place. But being the crazy
jerks we are, I completely flipped out on the guy. He was really encouraging my
anger by not conceding any responsibility though. Something must be done about
my psychotic-ness.
Finally, the manager told me to pass the phone back to the
receptionist and I gave it to him. It was then I realized that him and Patty
had also been going at it. The receptionist took the phone and went into the
other room and Patty explained that she had yelled at him and had swore at him.
I had heard none of this, but considering how I had been over the phone, I
wasn’t that surprised. The man came back and asked if we’d like to see the
room. It was at this point that Patty apologized to him for swearing at him.
The man just shook his head and said that it was not right, and kept sort of
repeating himself over and over. Patty kept apologizing and then he said it was
his first experience of that kind and then tears began to well up in his eyes.
It was sad to see and Patty almost began to cry. She apologized again and then
he told us to follow another employee to check out the room.
As we were going up, Patty was horrified by what she had
done. I think seeing the receptionist cry was a little too much for her. We
went to check out the room and discussed whether we even wanted to stay in the
hotel given that we had acted like crazy people in front of so many employees
and guests. We decided against staying and went down to reception to inform
them. When we said we didn’t want the room, the receptionist offered it to us
for 2000 rupees, including tax, down from the original price of 3000 rupees. We
couldn’t argue with this price so we accepted and while we were filling out the
paper work, he threw in a free breakfast, too. We weren’t sure why he was being
so generous, but we accepted as graciously as we could considering everything.
After taking our stuff to our room we talked about how crazy
we were becoming. We couldn’t understand what was causing this, but we knew it
had to stop. Patty explained that she had gotten so upset because the
receptionist had pretty much laughed in her face about our predicament, that
is, not having anywhere to sleep tonight, which was partly the hotel’s fault.
After this, she had felt the receptionist had zero sympathy/empathy for the
situation we were in and so she exploded. Typically, though, Patty doesn’t face
confrontation with anger. She usually tries to be the bigger person. Without
condoning anything, which she’d not let me do anyway, I think it was a good
experience for her, and I think she reluctantly agreed. Don’t get me wrong, it
was awful, and she still feels awful (and so do I, for that matter, but I
didn’t make a grown man cry…) but I think she also feels like she stood up for
herself. Perhaps it wasn’t in the way she would do it if she could go back and
do it again, but nothing is ever perfect the first time you try. Once again, we
felt like India was forcing change upon us.
After contemplating our psychotic episodes, we decided to
try to catch the sunset. It was already quite late in the day and we hadn’t
really seen anything of Munnar, so we thought sunset would be nice. We had to
backtrack to the hotel a couple of times because we forgot things, but
eventually set out in the direction we wanted. Unfortunately, our walk proved
futile and we didn’t make it very far to see anything. We asked a rickshaw
driver to take us along the main highway out of Munnar for a couple minutes so
that we could see the valley. By the time we got to a nice spot, the sun had
already fallen below the hills and it was getting dark. We took a couple
pictures and then headed back into town.
We stopped at a restaurant recommended in our book called SN
Restaurant. It is Indian food, though I would hardly call Keralan food Indian,
especially the seafood. The Keralan dishes tend to be far less spicy, and the
spices they do have are different from other Indian dishes. The experience was
enjoyable. We got to watch an Indian family stare at us as we cleaned our hands
with our sanitary wipes. It was hard to tell what they were thinking, but I saw
a smirk or two.
We walked back to our hotel after dinner and started
watching Dead Poets Society, with Robin Williams. I think we’d seen this
before, but it had been a long time and I didn’t remember much. We only made it
about 30 minutes into the movie before we were too exhausted to continue. We
are checking out of our hotel in the morning and we are hoping to get an early
start to the day.
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