Taxi Driver

What would a blog be without at least one super-livid post?
There's a very angry rant coming about the cab driver we hired for five days but who was so evil (perhaps the least pleasant person I've ever met) that we got rid of him after one. But first, briefly, what I've been up to for the past few days:
We spent half of Monday and all of Tuesday in Bangalore. The highlights: the rickshaw driver who managed to find us every day and harassed us to pay him 300 rupees (6 dollars) for a city tour by rickshaw; the really beautiful 240-acre garden in the middle of the (highly polluted) city. Our hotel in Bangalore was nice, if you like camping indoors. The pipe that supplied the toilet with water broke on our first night and was never fixed, so we had to "flush" by pouring buckets of water into the bowl. I wore my jeans to bed.
In Bangalore and Mysore (where I am now), we've seen a bunch of palaces, temples, etc., but nothing really worth sharing here. Today we went to a temple on a hill outside Mysore. Pilgrims come to climb the 1,000 steps up to the Chowmundi temple. Climbing up would have taken too long, so I climbed down, barefoot (to have my prayers answered). Anyway, we're taking things slowly today, after having yesterday ruined by our cab driver.
Which leads me to my rant. I needed to write this, but feel free to ignore it:
We hired a cab driver to drive us around from Wednesday to Sunday. He was far and away the most terrifying driver I've ever met. And, considering my high-speed driving and the fact that we're in India, this is saying a lot. He nearly killed more than a handful of pedestrians (and I mean inches from hitting them at high speeds) and yelled at every one of them.
He tried to rip us off in three ways in the first few hours of our trip. When my dad called him on asking us for 50 rupees for a 20 rupee parking fee, he whined about it. (This wasn't about money. My dad happily bought him lunch and was prepared to pay for all his meals and give the guy a tip, but no one likes being taken advantage of.) He told us at least five times that we should/would spend only one day in Mysore and spend the other three in Ooty, our final destination (our plans were to spend two days each). When we decided we wanted to switch up the schedule and find a hotel first, he argued. When we told him we wanted to check out more than the one hotel he showed us he actually yelled at us and bitched for 20 minutes. We ended up picking a shitty hotel so we could just stop the madness. (We could hear him complaining about us for hours to the receptionist after we went to bed.) At one point, he actually told us he needed 3,000 rupees for a new tire (it was obvious that the tire was fine). My dad, justifiably told him there was no way we'd pay for it. The driver yelled for a while and threatened to drop us off on the side of the road (which I was perfectly okay with) or switch with another driver for the rest of the trip. I don't think I've ever wanted to punch someone so badly or felt so threatened by someone I was paying money to.
This morning we told him that my mom was feeling sick and that we would pay him more than half the money for the five days to basically go home. He accepted that. I think we were too nice, but I guess there's little else we could have done. (I would have liked to have refused to pay him or left without paying him a penny more -- we'd already paid for about a third of the trip.) My parents muttered something about doing the right thing and taking the high road, so I decided I finally stopped arguing with them. Anyway, I will be sticking to group tours or traveling on my own while in India.
Oh, and number of times I've been compared to Abhishek Bhachan: 4.