A Jeep with a View by Ben Taylor

[Apparently this didn't post the first time I tried. It is supposed to be after the blog "Land of One Thousand Waterfalls"]

               After writing my last blog post and being incapable of adequately describing the drives, I read Ben’s original yak (the one that was posted was a slightly sterilized version of this) and decided he did the roads the justice they deserve. Again, I cannot stress enough how safe we have been and there is no need to worry (seriously, though, do not take this blog post the wrong way or I'll get yelled at by Christy and Caleb). So, without further ado, here is the literary work of Ben T:

                “The road... the cows and animals, beeping patterns, rivers just flowing across roads... waterfall, the different colors of water... uhhh also the landslide... pretending to canoe

                People who complain about West Virginia roads have never been to India. Or, at the very least, they've never driven to Munsiyari. By the time we made this six-hour journey, we were well accustomed to pulling halfway off of cliffside roads to avoid oncoming trucks or herds of cattle, and we barely noticed our driver beeping excessively (ostensibly to warn other vehicles of our presence) and then whipping us around the innumerable hairpin turns. Still, I found it a bit disconcerting that whenever the road encountered a stream, the stream simply flowed over the road, bringing whatever rocks it wanted with it, and poured off the opposite edge - leaving our jeep to flounder gutwrenchingly through it. And I don't recall reaching a gravelled section of road back home, being informed that "we're driving on the landslide that came through yesterday," and then looking up to realize that the landscape for a hundred meters in every direction is blanketed in the same gravel.

                To be fair, I should mention that people who describe the view from West Virginia roads as "breathtaking" or "incredible" have also never driven to Munsiyari. The basic idea is the same - lush ridges sliced by lovely rivers - but here, dimensions are doubled, slopes steepened, and intensity of color racked up a few notches. I spent hours watching the same river, imagining trying to canoe each rapid or staring up from the bottom at the canyon walls. At one point the aforementioned landslide blocked the river, forming a natural dam and a braided stream beneath it; dark brown water from one stream and bright blue from another mixed intricately with the grey green of the river. But probably the most novel features of the landscape - it seemed like they were as common as "normal" streams - were the waterfalls, glimpsed from an hour's drive away or drenching us from fifty feet above our heads.”