Gore told me we were in trouble with my plans to visit the Ajanta caves. There would be no transportation and it was farther than I thought from the train stop. Much easier, he said, to get off at Manmad and take the next train to Aurangabad. From there the car ride to the caves would only be about 30 minutes instead of two hours. He arranged the tickets for that transfer free of charge and we paid the conductor to let us stay on the train longer. Our thirteen hour ride turned into seventeen and a half. It was running late and we had missed our connection. The very next train was pulling out of the station as

we were running down the stairs from the footbridge loaded with our bags trying to catch it. The next was two hours later. It was more like a series of cattle cars than a passenger train. The odor of urine was thick in the humid air. Unlike the upper class coaches, this one had open air windows with bars and a welcome breeze blowing in as we rode through the countryside.

We stopped at a series of tiny stations standing alone in nowhere but still with lots of people. The car steadily filled to standing room only. There were no assigned seats, just sets of hardback benches facing each other with cockroaches and families and men traveling alone on them. The men stared. And they stared. So many eyes were on us the entire trip. And so many begging hands of the disheveled and dirty poor were held out to us. They were demanding of us. One man fell on me, in sign language saying he had tripped in the crowd. But Austin had been watching him. He said the other men bet him he wouldn’t do such a thing. I wasn’t hurt. Its just disturbing to think grown men would find that juvenile prank so amusing.

In Auragabad we again tried to avoid the taxi trap. From the guidebook we knew the hotel where we wanted to stay and it was just a block or two down the road. We walked there, fighting off the touts the whole way. The hotel was full. All the hotels were full. There were 35,000 OB/Gyne docs in town for a convention. It was a taxi driver that had followed us that got us out of that jam. He knew of a few places that might have rooms. Two did not. The nicest one had quadrupled their price. One smelled too strongly of Indian spicy food and did not have hot water except for two hours every morning and we were longing for hot showers right away. We settled on the Ajanta Hotel. It was overpriced but clean and they guaranteed us hot water. I refused to pay until we all had one that was at least lukewarm. We were not disappointed.