I almost forgot that I did not complete posting the rest of the saga. Today is May 17th, 2011 and one of my readers (a new addition as a reader) who is like my own daughter asked me "how did you unite with the others afterwards?"
Now I will write whatever I can recall.
We woke up in the morning, had a bath in the attached tiny bathroom. The hotel waiter brought us a bucket of hot water. W came back and sat in the front room of the booking office. All the autowalas started coming one by one. They were all looking at us. Each and everyone was whole heartedly sorry for us. Around 8 a.m., an auto arrived. We saw my husband Rao, our (useless) guide Anbu and another friend from the group Shankara Narayana (who adopted me as his sister). I ran and hugged Rao. Shankara Narayana and Rao hugged both of us. We never hugged anyone like that. I started sobbing. Anbu looked very compassionate at that time. He was equally worried for the two of us. He immediately went into my good books. They told us how they spent a sleepless night worrying about us and so on. Rao also had a small adventure. He trekked down all by himself without shoes. Someone stole his brand new walking shoes. When he came down, he also forgot the name of our hotel. By 10 p.m. he somehow located it with a land mark.
All the autorickshaw drivers were watching us like they did a happy ending of a movie.
Suddenly I remembered the driver who drove us around the previous night. He was parked at a distane and when I asked them, they unanimously declared that he was the one. I walked over, gave him 500 rupees (that I took from the 'brother') and thanked him. We reached the hotel.
