The trip to Vilhe

I don't know where "Vilhe" was. On Wednesday the 26th we drove and drove, probably two hours. We passed through one small town (not so small) but that wasn't Vilhe. I don't know what it was, but I took some photos as we passed through.















Just outside of town, women were drying clothes near the river.



We drove some more, and there were always people, buildings, animals, vehicles... we were never totally away from people or dwellings.

THIS IS NOT FINISHED. I accidentally hit "publish" rather than "preview," and I'm about to be unavailable to finish it for a while. The pictures are mixed up below, and there will be more notes, and a video, but for those who come by early, here's soething to look at and I'll clean it up and expand later.

Because it was farther that we had expected, Raghu got hungry. The rest of us had eaten guava we bought at the toll booth, but he hadn't wanted any. In a much smaller village, we stopped in front of a store, so both cars stopped:



It didn't really look like a store to me, but here I discovered chikki. I intend to eat chikki forevermore.

Near the store was a blue something, and I asked. It was a little shrine, and the figures were rocks (boulders, kind of) painted (kind of). I didn't take photos because I thought it would be rude, but was told later I could have.

But after he showed Hema and me the shrine (and we took our shoes off to walk around front; Hema says it was a shrine to Mukkai-Devi), the man showed us some dung patties, made for fuel or for flooring.

Then he asked us to come back and look at what was going on behind his store/house, where people were cutting and threshing rice. Cutting it with a sickle and beating it on a stump. Two carloads of unschoolers ended up back there.

My favorite pictures are of inside the store.





















































There were three slideshows here that don't work anymore. Click for an overlaid gallery of all the photos in that folder, then. The "x" in the upper right will bring you back.

Those cover my arrival, seeing Hema's house, and Pune, and a dead snake in a gutter, and various other not great photos. Sorry. :-) For me, it was interesting new things to see, and children to talk to. I already knew Raghu and Zoya, from their visit to Albuquerque, and Tejas was with us a fair amount.