Mark the day, June 2, as the day I cursed myself. The wood computer table I knocked must have only been veneer.

This installment of misadventures began Thursday night as I was leaving Dharamsala. An Indian friend, Jain, offered to drive me to the bus station where I would catch my 8 PM overnight bus to Manali. Halfway there I realized I'd left my sweatshirt behind. Jain insisted we had time to pick it up so we spun around, picked it up and sped back to the bus stand to board just as the bus closed its doors.

Fast-forward through the sleepless bus ride during which I was continually jarred by bumps and dips amplified by my unfortunate location just over the left rear tire. At one point, the bus inexplicably screeches to a halt. Another traveller tells me during a 3 AM chai break that the bus had stopped to scare away a leopard trying to kill a cow in the middle of the road. I misheard this as "leper" and formed some fun mental images to entertain myself for the next few hours.

At 6 AM, the bus breaks down about an hour outside Manali. The busdriver and his sidekicks disappear without a word, leaving 30 bleary-eyed travellers wondering what the hell is going on. Reminding myself I am in India and that the process of procuring parts at dawn and performing the necessary repairs could take some time, I grabbed my pack and hailed a sunshine yellow Maruti heading my way. Its driver was a middle-aged, extremely kind and creative man named Rinoo who designed and runs a beautiful artist's retreat / cat and dog zoo in Goa, exports his own furniture designs to Scandinavia and plays really wicked tunes in his car. He's a mountain man making his annual pilgrimage to the Himalaya and I happened to be in the right place at the right time.

Freed from the bus, Rinoo and I took our time getting to Manali, passing along a mountain ridge into the small village of Naggar, home to a spectacular carved wood castle-cum-hotel and a museum for Russian artist Nikolai Roerich. After breakfast at the castle overlooking the entire Kullu Valley surrounding by Himalaya (Manali lies at one end of this valley), Rinoo drove me to the State Bank of India to reclaim the ATM card I lost in Gorakhpur. Attempting to prove my identity, I then realize I've lost my wallet containing my passport, credit card and driver's license. The bank man takes pity on me and with a significant squeeze of my hand insists that I join him for chai later (augh) and releases my card with only my checkbook as ID.

Since I had lost my ATM card in a previous scatterbrained maneuver, at least I had access to money, so the hunt for the wallet begins. Rinoo generously offers to drive me an hour back to where the bus is still broken down by the side of the road nearly four hours later (HA! knew it). We search the bus and turn up nothing except my pillow, which I had also accidentally left behind. We call the castle where we had breakfast and the place I'd had dinner the night before. Nothing. I go to file a police report. There's a long wait and they tell me to come back tomorrow.

I check my email and yes!! There's email from Jain in Dharamsala telling me I'd left my wallet in his car and to call him immediately. With only an hour to spare, he agrees to try to send it on that evening's overnight bus from Dharamsala to Manali. He misses the bus and tells me he will try again the next night. Equipped with the bus number and instructed to look for an Israeli couple to whom Jain had given my wallet, I go to meet the bus at 6:30 AM. I learn the bus had arrived at 5:30 and the couple were nowhere to be found. A rickshaw driver tells me where he dropped them, *surprise*, right in the middle of Isreali-central, up the hill in Old Manali.

I've spent the morning rather befuddled, wandering around Old Manali asking at guesthouses, talking to random Israelis and putting up posters. I called Jain; turns out he gave the couple his phone number just in case, so now it's a waiting game. Rinoo was ready to leave for Leh today and I was forced to abandon our plans to drive together to stay yet another day in Manali waiting for me and my passport to be reunited. As Chris once said, "These are the dog days of India."