Far West India
Thursday, December 13th, 2007After typing the blog and wandering in circles around the lawn at my hotel for a few hours, I headed to the train station at around 22:00 to catch my supposed 00:15 train. I normally don’t come this early, but I didn’t want to walk the 15 minute walk too late. As soon as I arrived, I was kindly informed by the train status board that my train was going to be two hours late (though I did find out that I now had a berth). I now had to figure out what to do for four hours. I decided against getting a retiring room (beds at the train station where one can sleep while waiting for trains). I noticed for the first time that there were different lobbies for classes of tickets. Despite having a cheap (sleeper class) ticket, I decided to see if I would be allowed in the upper class lounge. Probably because it was so late, no one appeared to be checking tickets so I went in. To my surprise upper class lounge in India, at least at this train station, means the same hard wooden seats as are around the rest of the station. I believe the luxury comes into play in the fact that it isn’t absolutely packed with people. The rest of the station was rapidly becoming a minefield of sleeping people and dogs that one had to step over and around to get anywhere. Most of the trains looked to be an hour late. I read until it got closer to my time and then I went and sat in the main lobby in front of the board. I watched with increasing aggravation as everytime my train time approached it would slip by another 20 minutes. This went on for another 1.5 hours unitl I finally got into the train at 3:30 am. I was then pleasantly surprised to find that no one else, but me, was in my six berth compartment or across the aisle. This meant that I could run the fan to try to drown out some of the snoring. Indian people appear to get cold with the slightest wind so fans are usually out of the question. Randomly though people kept stopping in my compartment to tie a shoe or adjust a sarri. They would then turn off my fan as they left and I would have to turn it back on. I arrived in Jodhpur three hours late as expected. [read on]
cjun