Been a bit lazy on the update front, really I’m holding out for my Quickpad…
Birthday on the 4th was good fun, got up relatively early to go on a dolphin spotting tour which was great fun and after that it was the predictable drinking/eating fest which you can’t really go wrong with on your birthday. Denise picked up a bottle of Cava on the sly when we were shopping in Colva:
After Goa, we moved onto Mumbai and had a horrendous train journey. We’d made a joint booking around a month ago and we were numbers 20+21 on the waiting list. You can expect at least a hundred or so people to cancel between booking and departure so we were feeling pretty confident of getting on. Unfortunately, when we got to Madgoan station and checked the latest boarding chart, I was permitted to board but Denise’s status was that officially she was not allowed to.
We had booked (both names on one booking) only to find out that just one of us could get on and we were now left with three options. 1) One of us goes to Mumbai and leaves the other behind, 2) We re-arrange a new ticket presumably for sometime in March or 3) Get on and claim ignorance. You can guess which one we went for.
As it turned out, anyone who dares to enter the train on waiting list status is expected to park themselves outside the toilets (and outside the carriage) for the duration of the journey – in this instance 15 hours. Not only that, but the guard was such a little Hitler that he insisted that as mine was the name allocated a birth, Denise would be sent out of the carriage to wait by the public toilets. I couldn’t give up my berth…
Fortunately for us, an Indian couple were so horrified by the guards behaviour that they gave up one of their berths for us. They spent the night sitting opposite each other on one birth and we did the same. How many miles do you think you’d have to travel on a British train before that happened? I think you’d be dead a long time before that came along.
After an imaginably unpleasant journey we arrived in Mumbai and found ourselves at a grotty hotel which was only just within our budget. We only had two days (including arrival) in the city and to be honest, we didn’t see a great deal. What we did see was some of the most desperate poverty so far in India: beggars being hit by cars and being shouted at for getting in the way, people sleeping out the back of taxis, babies crawling through dust and shit and (on one memorable occasion) a man stumbling off a cart on the pavement, lurching across the pavement saying: “Haaaaaaaaaash……?” to us and then falling over with a plaintive cry of ”Giiiive…..water….”
On one night walk back to the hotel we saw a man with one leg sleeping in a doorway and lying on his wooden leg with a blissful smile on his face. We thought it would make a great autobiography: My False Leg is My Pillow, proper The Guardian Book of the Year stuff…
The second day in Mumbai was spent sorting out a near monumental cockup with our Thai visa. Until recently and for years and years you could just turn up in Bangkok, get a 30 day visa stamp and if you wanted to get it extended you just hopped in and out of a neighbouring country and picked up a 30 day stamp. Not any more. You now need either a full tourist visa (for 60 days) which takes a week or so to process or you need to have a flight out of Thailand within that 30 day period to get the old stamp. Our itinerary has us leaving Singapore 3 months after first arriving in Thailand.
So, brown trousers time, a lot of frantic calls/e-mails home to help with embassy enquiries (thanks Dad, Gareth) and we’ve taken the easy option of arriving with a budget domestic Thai airline flight booked and printed out. Given that it was quite likely we’d have either been refused entry onto the India – Bangkok flight or deported home from Bangkok if we’d got that far, I’d say that was 80quid’s “insurance” well spent – we could have seen you all back in Blighty a bit earlier than planned.
Sooooooo, we’re now in Jaipur for a few days before hiting Delhi for the flight onwards (and how excited I am about going back there….). In contrast to our last train journey, we actually got upgraded to first class for our 18 hour trip here from Mumbai. Had very nice travelling companions in the cabin, one of whom (in the course of the usual ”and what do you do” introducions) turned out to be a very jolly, avuncular nuclear scientist.
That obviously put our sales/marketing background to boring shame and while we were both impressed, I couldn’t help imagining Day Of The Jackal-esque scenarios featuring squads of crack Pakistani cut-throat government assassins murdering him (and us as witnesses) overnight as the train raced across India.
The beds pull down to form upper bunks and we asked him at one point if we were keeping him and his travelling companion awake by reading and leaving the beds up. “Oh no.” he replied “I live in India and I work with nuclear weapons – I don’t get that much sleep. A-HAhahahahaha…” He was great fun!
Anyway, looks like we’re finishing up in a nice hotel here and then a week from now, it’ll be all fancy neon lights, motorways, McDonalds and electronics shopping. Can’t wait!
