Beep Beep

Sam's stalling a bit on his latest post, so I thought I would put a couple short ones up for all the fans out there. His post will tell about the camping portion of our trip, but this is the harrowing account of our bus ride back from Lugu Lake. It's a fairly mountainous area and the roads are usually slow and windy, and this one was no exception. The constant changing of direction makes reading difficult, at least for me, and my iPod was dead after 18 days on the road, so I mostly entertained myself by staring out the window or straining to catch a bit of Tha Carter III from Sam's headphones.
This was fine for a while, but halfway through the seven hour trip a small box on the dashboard beeped for about five seconds then went off. We debated what it was (possibly a radar detector) but couldn't come to a consensus. It soon started beeping again, this time for longer. The driver looked frustrated and whacked it a couple of times to no avail before hitting a button on the side and stopping the beeping. This only appeared to be a delay switch of some kind, because the noise kept coming back, more and more frequently and for longer periods of time. The driver was content to ignore it for a few minutes, hoping it would go away, but his anger would build to the point where he would hit it again (this never did anything), mash a few other buttons and eventually submit to the only apparent solution: the delay button. This bought us only a minute or two each time. Sam and our friend Seth both had music players to drown out the beeping, and I did my best to ignore it, but a prolonged, high-pitched sound can only be ignored for so long.
After forty minutes or so of this, I went and looked at the box for some sort of power cord that could be unplugged. The driver informed me that it was impossible to unplug or turn off the device. I tried to point out that this was impossible, that anything electronic can be turned off somehow, but he was adamant. My quick investigation seemed to confirm this fact and I'd left my hammer at home, so I resigned myself to my fate. Soon after this, Sam kindly lent me his iPod to help maintain my sanity, and as the soothing bars of "Got Money" drifted to my ears, the beeping promptly stopped. I didn't understand what the driver said when I asked him what it was. I'd like to think that it had no function at all other than to drive me crazy. If so, it was well on its way to accomplishing that goal. By the time the bus stopped for construction 15 minutes later, my ears were still ringing.

The rest of the trip was blissfully beep-free.