I no toucha you bratha!

So it was back to Kasol before we could bus outta there the next arvo. We were reinvigorated and ready to enjoy the place and ended up having a great time. That night was a bit rough though. After the rat-scratching evenings on the mountain we were ready for some solid sleep in the fantastic little family cottage guesthouse run by Irving and his lovely wife.

Unfortunately our sleep there was a little disrupted when Fabio, an older Italian guy also staying in the guesthouse who is deaf in one ear, started an international incident. As far as we could piece together from various accounts, last night was a bit of a special day in this town where all the locals go to each other's houses for dinner, so the guesthouse owner took Fabio out to his mate's house. The house owner was asking Fabio his name, but from the "bad-ear" side so when Fabio didn't respond the guy came closer in Fabio's face and repeated himself a lot louder. Fabio (who'd already had a few drinks) thought the guy wanted a fight, so slugged him one.

He then apparently ran back to our guesthouse to get a knife, while the whole family of the Indian guy he punched (and most of the village as well) came back to our guesthouse at 2am in a nice big lynch-mob. That was where we came in, or at least where we bacame aware of it as we were dragged out of our slumber by the thudding of bodies being pushed around downstairs and thunderous screams of "YOU KILL MY BROTHER! I KILL YOU!!!" and "I NO TOUCHA YOU BRAAATHA!!!" repeated ad nauseum for at least 20 minutes straight. Rae wasn't so lucky, her wake-up call was a random body flying out of the melee and straight through her bedroom door, which didn't close properly. So poor Rae spent the bewildering next half hour with her body weight holding her door closed as the struggle went on outside.

Sarah and I watched from our upper floor windows as the fight was finally defused by a big group of village women all attaching themselves to the combatants and dragging them away from each other by sheer weight of numbers. Thirty seconds after they'd dragged the main angry villager away and things were calming, he reappeared suddenly, streaking down the alley between two houses with a stick and getting a few solid whacks on Fabio before he was dragged away again. To the obligatory chorus of "I KILL YOU!!!", "BUT I NO TOUCHA YOU BRAAATHA!!!"

Next day was drizzly and uneventful, but a good shopping day for the gals











Then it was time for the "disco bus" with it's flashing coloured lights, blaring Punjabi music and even a couple of handy drunk Punjabi sign-writers who sang along and adopted me as their Aussie brother, forcing shot after shot of homemade liquor down me and urging me to get them visas to Australia.