The train incident...

This is something that I forgot to blog about.

The train incident.

Booking a train is generally a simple process, right? You go online, you find the train, you book the ticket, you get on the train, you get from A to B. Ta-da!

But ohhhh no. Not in India. I am thinking of turning this into my catchphrase for this country...'Not in India'. Anything you would assume to be normal or rational...N.I.I. Firstly, booking an online ticket is quite an ordeal, although physically possible once you know what to do. Secondly, it kinda helps if the train you booked actually exists.

I can imagine the double take here. I'm sorry? It has to exist? Apparently not, in India (there we go again, N.I.I.). You can pay perfectly good rupees for trains that are no longer running.

This, of course, was not really the main issue. The main issue was sitting at a random train station for 3 hours only to find that our train was decidedly apocryphal; in the dark, in a town we knew nothing about, miles from the nearest hotel with only our luggage for company. Plus being unable to reach our desired destination. Fabulous. I was very tired after a long day's travel and a long night's small talk with a Chennai cricket team who were on tour. They were incredibly proud of their (admittedly impressive) trophy, and asked John and I to pose with them for photographs. This sent me off on another internal rant about how everybody in India wants something from you, they never just want you for the sake of 'you'! Grr grr grr stomp stomp stomp. At least these boys had pretty good english and understood our humour.

Demi-luckily, another train was arriving later in the evening...however, this train had no seats left, except in general class. Perhaps I need to explain this a little more. Indian overnight trains have several options...first class, second class, third class, sleeper class, and general class. The first four classes give you a 'bed' to sleep on at night...admittedly, not much more than a plank of wood with a bit of foam on it, but you get to be horizontal, and you normally get your seat.

General class is not like this. General class is the desperate, metal-grate seats, free-for-all of a class. Think 'holocaust train' and you're not far off. Really, you're not. Law of the jungle rules here...whoever gets to the seat first, sits firmly on that seat for the entirety of the journey (15 hours) or else loses that seat to whoever happens to be squished in nearest to that particular seat. I imagine there wouldn't even be a choice about the matter; the sardine-canesque physics of pressure would ordain that the space be filled whether said people wished to move or not. There is no glass in the windows...the draft and the dust and the smells unavoidably invade the nostrils at ten times their usual speed (and they are intensely invasive at the best of times! Particularly as Indians seem to equate 'train track' with 'public toilet').

Hopefully you're getting the picture. But we didn't have a choice...it was GC or no seat at all. We booked the tickets and prepared ourselves for the grim night ahead.

The train arrives...we wait patiently in the queue at the door, like Good Little Westerners. Fatal mistake!! Queues?! N.I.I. We look over and find a huge gang of Indians diving in through one of the windows of the carriage. Crap. It looks hopeless...only the weakest of the species are using the door...the elderly, the frail, the families with small children. All seems lost...and then suddenly, redemption appears!

The captain of the Chennai cricket team casually wanders over and says 'So, general class eh?' We explain the situation. 'It is okay, some of our cricket team left yesterday, so we have 10 spare sleeper seats on our ticket, you come stay with us.'

YEEEEEEES!!!!

So, a relaxing evening chatting with the cricketers, we compare musical tastes on our mobiles, and a trustworthy wake-up call later (the trains are consistently about 4-5 hours late but you have got to get up at the 5am or 6am the ticket tells you , as in accordance with Sod's Law) I am starting to believe that karma really bloody exists. In India, anyway.