In the afternoon after going to the Dam we had heard around the town that there was to be a political strike. This didn’t mean much aside from the fact that by evening we had found out it was a full blown strike of the Iduki district meaning all services would be shut down including all transport (busses and ricks), shops, restaurants, and every business. We had planned to leave the next day but this clearly wasn’t the case. So we where sitting in a restaurant eating chicken curry when we get talking to these truck drivers about the strike. Anyways it turns out they are leaving the town in 15 minutes in their truck going to Kochin. Not wanting to be stuck with no services including places to buy food I asked if we could come with them. “ok no problem” they say “no hurry ok finish your food”. We finish up, pay the bill and I jump in the back of their truck, Clay gets in the front to tell them the way to our hotel so we can pick up our bags (its about 10 minutes away). We arrive to the shock of the hotel guys and jump out of the truck. It’s a small truck what they call a mini lorry, a perhaps 4m back tray and a bench seat cab. In the tray its not full just has some planks, some ropes a few bags of concrete and some cables. We grab our bags and “check out” jumping in the back of the truck heaving our bags up as we go. Its now about 10pm by the time we leave. Kochin is about 3 hours away. We take off and its all good at the start, im singing songs very loudly as the other guys in the back (theres about 6 guys plus us in the truck) make requests of popular western songs most of which I don’t know the words to. The stars are amazing clean pollution free skys and its great to be outside. As we descend very quickly down the mountain the driver seems in a hurry, luckily theres no other cars on the road, he uses too much breaks and not enough gears and the breaks stink but, thus is life. We move on through the night going down down down, you can feel the tempreture increasing along with the population density as the altitude decreases. By the end it had become uncomfortable, after all I was sitting on a plank and Clay on a coil of rope grabbing hard onto the side of the truck as it swerved around an unfamiliar corner a little too fast. We talked about the western movies they had seen and the actors they liked, all in broken English only some understandable. Finnally we could see the lights of Kochin in the distance. We approached the city and we stopped for tea. The driver had promised we could stay at his house but it was around this time that he decided that we couldn’t stay there anymore, the reason for this change of decision will forever remain a mystery but it ended up we got sort of dropped off at a street corner in Kochin kind of near the hotel area we had stayed at last time. From there we took a rick (which the truckies hailed for us) and went back to the sapphire hotel. I went in and Clay watched the bags but all the rooms where full according to the watchman. I went off searching for another room, I went to about 4 hotels but at 1am nobody is very keen to help even if they do have a room. I had found one very expensive one that wasn’t much good but when I got back Clay had got chatting to a guy at the Sapphire guest house who had come outside for a cigarette. He felt sorry for us and said we could sleep in his room as long as we left early the next morning before the staff woke. We snuck in and had a few hours of interrupted sleep we thanked the guy very much and snuck out at 5am feeling very tired.