Another surprise trip… (Oct. 7)

We got up Friday morning expecting a normal half day at work but of course the administration here love throwing us curve balls periodically. As we arrived at the chapel for worship, Dr. Prabhu Das and Robert Franklin met us in the hospital entryway. Now if you remember Dr. Prabhu Das is the “helicopter administrator” and Robert Franklin is the extremely helpful school registrar. They informed us that we would be leaving for Machilipatnam in 10 minutes for yet another fun filled trip to the state police headquarters! Now keep in mind we were running on about 4 hours of sleep after being up until 3 the night before partying it up in the streets of Nuzvid for Dussehra. This was not especially fun to find out but at least we would have the opportunity to sleep in the car.

This time we took the same “Ambassador” type car as we had taken the first time but this time we only had 3 of us plus our driver which gave Zach and I plenty or room in the back seat. It is actually a really comfortable car if you only have 4 people in it.

We set off and Zach and I were out before we were out of Nuzvid. We stopped after about an hour and a half for breakfast, yogurt over rice cakes, with coffee to wash it down. I can’t say we liked the rice and yogurt combo…

We headed into Machilipatnam and straight to the police headquarters. Of course the guy we needed to see wasn’t there so we went out to make some copies and then back to the same restaurant we ate at twice the previous time we came here to Machilipatnam. Thankfully this restaurant is really good so that wasn’t a huge burden for us!

After food we headed back to the headquarters and actually finished up our paperwork in about an hour. It was really nice to finally hold the finished permit in our hands and walk away knowing we wouldn’t have to come back here again!

After that we headed to find the fish market because our driver wanted to find fish to take home. We found the fish market and it was quite the experience. Most of the fishermen had come and gone already but a few people were still there trying to get rid of the last of the days catch. It was really disgusting around the stalls, because like the rest of India, cleanliness is kinda on the back burner. There were only a couple types of fish being sold along with shrimp, crabs and small sharks.

We then headed off to find some papaya, which we found but Robert Franklin must have forgotten we had asked to stop for some because we buzzed right on past a million papaya stands! Oh well, next time.

We then headed back towards Nuzvid but were still in search of fish to buy for our driver. We stopped at little villages along the way home, but it was no use, the fish we were looking for were not around.

Suddenly we pulled off to the side of the road about 2/3’s of the way back and got out of the car. We thought we were looking for some more fish to buy but it turns out the place we stopped was on a manmade lake that they use to farm fish. At the time we stopped there were around 30 or 40 people unloading these long metal boats of hundreds of 2 to 3 foot long fish. They would load the fish into crates and then 2 guys would each put a crate on their heads and then haul it over the bank and onto a tarp to the guys packing the fish in ice. There was a big pile of ice that the truck had brought as well as a couple scales. We were told this fish would be taken to Delhi where there was a great demand for this type of fish. The truck was no refrigerated of course so the drivers would work in pairs and drive all the way to Delhi nonstop.

It was really cool to see as they unloaded all these fish. There were several young boys working and they all wanted us to take their picture and show them.

When we first arrived the boat they were unloading was about half full. As we were leaving another boat was being poled up to the unload point and it was loaded all the way of to the edges of the boat. It was only a couple inches above the water!

This was one of the most interesting things I’ve seen so far in India and I’m glad we stopped even though we didn’t find any fish for our driver. Actually have fish in the car would have stunk so I guess that’s a good thing we didn’t find any!