India

Thursday arrived and brought with it the impending arrival of Geraldine, albeit at the end of what would become a somewhat agonizingly long day.  I spent most of it wandering around, eating, waiting.  I switched hotels from the fleabag I was staying in (surrounded by slums), to a nice hotel so that after a 30+ hour flight Geraldine would have somewhere semi-pleasant to recover. 

The new hotel was nice enough to help me arrange a taxi to the airport and back, and a driver who would be more than happy to wait for her arrival to drive us back.  When the time came to head to the airport, I was surprised that joining me in the cab were 2 hotel employees and one of the managers (owners?).  Along the not-quite-direct route to the airport, we proceeded to leave each of them at their respective homes (or somewhere close).  Apparently, they had decided to take advantage of a taxi paid by the tourist to avoid long busrides home.  I would have been annoyed, except that the taxi ride took me through a bunch of random barrios (and many slums) that ordinarily I wouldn’t have seen, and still managed to get me to the airport an hour before Geraldine’s flight was scheduled to arrive. 

When we got to the airport, I made the executive decision to pass the following hour in the airport restaurant, as I hadn’t eaten anything and the driver didn’t speak any english, and thus couldn’t protest.  A very polite man, he followed me meekly into the restaurant, where we proceeded to spend at least 40 minutes eating our meals, each of us staring off in silence somewhere above the left shoulder each other, awkwardly ignoring the fact that we couldn’t communicate in the slightest.  When the bill came, I began to do the mental calculation to figure out what I owed, but soon realized he hadn’t made the slightest movement towards his wallet, and resignedly pulled out an extra hundred rupees to cover his as well. 

He soon earned his dinner however, as Geraldine’s plane was delayed from 10 until 12, and even then it took almost an hour to get out of customs, baggage, etc.  She was pretty exhausted and wide-eyed with crazy sleep deprivation, and we went straight to the hotel and to sleep. 

Surprisingly (or perhaps not), she adjusted much better than I.  This may be attributed to the fact that she had me there, that she’d been in Asia before, or that we didn’t really do much the first day, but it’s probably more likely that she’s simply tougher than I am.  I’ve grown soft on a steady diet of facturas and Argentinian siestas.  Either way, we spent the first day tentatively exploring a bit and introducing her to the spice level in the food. 

We decided that given that we would fly out of Mumbai at the end of our trip, it would be better to head directly out of town and get moving.  So, on the second day after her arrival, we caught an afternoon train to Ahmedebad, 7 hours to the north, where we would catch the night train to Udaipur, arriving the next morning.

Our first experience with train travel was mixed.  During the day, we rode in AC chair class, which is the nicer of the two main chair classes.  The seats were pretty decent, comfortable at least, and the aisle was a neverending stream of men passing selling various foods and drinks.  Spelling and understanding aside, ‘Garam Garam’ soup turned out to be our favorite, being a spicy tomato soup with crunchy croutony things in it, dispensed by a man from a large metal thermal container into small paper cups.  (For future reference, my one experience with train samosas showed me that despite my previous experience with what I considered high spice levels in my food, I am quite amateur when it comes to India). 

We arrived in Ahmedebad at night, in the dark, and there were required to switch trains from our chair class, to a Sleeper class train.  Sleeper class is the cheapest sleeper car on night trains, and we thought we’d dive right in and go economy as quickly as possible, so as not to get accustomed to higher levels of luxury.  We found our train fairly easily, but the whole thing was dark and fairly ominious, grubby and tightly filled with many people sleeping in their bunks.  Using my headlamp, we found our berths, and after fumbling around for a ridiculous amount of time locking our bags under the bottom bunk, proceeded to wedge ourselves in the tiny upper berths that we had reserved. 

For reference, Sleeper class cars on the train are divided into sections of 6 seats/berths.  The upper two are folded away during the day, and all 6 passengers in any one section sit on the bottom berth.  At night, the berths are let down to form beds, in two rows of three high, facing each other.  (On bigger trains, there are also two extra berths across the aisle, running the length of the train instead of across the car like the 6-packs). 

The train we were on was a narrow-gauge train, so the cars were much narrower and the bunks smaller.  (There aren’t many narrow-gauge trains left in india, but we managed to find one).  The result was that when I lay in the top bunk with my head touching the side of the train, my feet only stuck out slightly from the end of the bunk.  However, my left shoulder jutted out slightly into space, and between my face and the ceiling one would be hard pressed to stuff much more than a small computer monitor.  Oh, and they were grimy with dirt and I don’t wish to know what else.  We were both a bit surprised at the conditions, but settled in as amiably as possible for the night. 

It turns out that a train with no glass on the windows hurtling through the night in the cool season can actually get quite cold.  Cold enough in fact that I put on my thermal top, gave the rest of my warm clothes to Geraldine, and shivered violently in and attempt to keep warm until morning.

It also turns out that in Sleeper class, it is perfectly acceptable to fart loudly and long as often as one wishes, as many Indian men took great advantage of. 

We arrived in the morning a sorry couple, and took a rickshaw to one of the nicer sounding hotels in our guidebook.  It turned out to be great, nice rooms with lake views, a terrace to eat on, and very clean and relaxingly white.  It being early, we decided to nap, and tackle Udaipur at a later time.