Senior Citizens, Disabled, Freedom Fighters, Tourists

Yesterday we achieved a very important task - booking our train tickets for the final weeks of our time in India - involving getting down south to Kerela and then (via one flights) travelling up to Darjeeling and (we hope) a good view of the Himalayas.

Getting all the tickets booked was little less than miraculous - after some initial research using the timetable book we approached the ticket counter marked for tourists (and freedom fighters among other groups) checked out some further information and were sent away with request forms to fill in for each journey - a total of 8. Back to the counter where the clerk started checking our forms, finding a number of mistakes and correcting them, it all took time whilst the line behind us grew longer and restive, perhaps even mutinous! So we were sent away when the checking was done to wait whilst the queue was dealt with and the clerk took his advertised 'recess' after which we were finally called back. One by one he started issuing our tickets but inevitably by the time one was done someone had pushed forward, guesticulating, shoving their form through, shouting about one query or another. In truth we were quite happy to let him deal with people - international relations could otherwise have been damaged!

Finally we had our tickets although I had no idea with what degree of success, the high noise levels and my poor hearing meant I had nodded through all sorts of queries in the hope that it would work out. We staggered away from the counter after three hours with what we hoped were the right tickets.

The Shahs driver Ghitu drove us back to the house but it was only later when Sehal Shah came home that I was able to check the tickets with him.
"All OK, you will get on every train and because you are a foreigner they will definitely allocate you a berth"
I said that back in 1974 before computers that booking that number of tickets could have taken three days
"Three days! Three months - they would have had to telegraph all your destinations!"

So we have our tickets, we travel thousands of kilometers, there are six overnight trips and one trip to Kerela is about 30 hours. And the cost for second class with our senior citizen reduction?
About 125 pounds for the two of us - match that Richard Branson!

Of course we have already done one rail trip from Udaipur to here on the very slow and old fashioned narrow guage railway. We had a four person compartment but shared only with a nice psychiatrist from Chittogargh, it left on time we chatted for a while, made up our bunks with the supplied bedding and settled down at about 9.30pm whilst the train wended its way through the invisible hilly landscape. It rocked and bounced, rather comforting, rather like being in a large pram pushed by a drunken nanny. It got us here on time, the night passed reasonably quickly, a knock on the door at 4am to get ourselves ready for arrival where we were met by Snehal Shah and his daughter Sunaina.

Brian