I must say my first experience of long
distance train journeys in India was not as bad as I had expected, my
uncertainty was based around the fact I was only one class up from
the general seating class which is grim. I got on the train at
Udaipur and found my birth easily enough and settled in, chaining my
bag up and climbing to my bed the top of three. I read for a short
time before drifting into a slumber dogged with calls of
“chai”,”samosa”,”coffee” and other such chants. I think
my previous experience of long journeys put me in good stead for the
journeys ahead as I knew exactly how to lye and read for 12 hours at
a time. I woke early in the morning with the rest of the trains
occupants and set to reading. I took a cup of chai for breakfast and
a few hours later had some lunch courtesy of the endless stream of
refreshment vendors. The train arrived into Mumbai at one of its
northern terminus stations called Bandra after the first fifteen
hours at around one o’Clock.
At this point I had two hours to cross
the city to the station my next thirty six hours was departing from.
This was easier said than done. I quickly found the near by local
train station and got a ticket to the station I thought my train was
departing from. The local train system is more confusing than the
national one, mainly as the trains only list their final destination
as well but there are less people who can tell you which train is
which. Once on the right train I had my first encounter, with what I
now know to be a transvestite beggar, but at the time I just thought
them normal,albeit ugly, beggars who clapped loudly and expected
money. Once I arrived at the first station my flip flop broke and I
was left to waddle a hundred meters with one bare foot to a place I
could stop and change my shoes. Once the switch was made I found a
police officer to ask where I might find my train. He looked at me in
a sympathetic way and told me I would find it across town at the
train station I was meant to be at. By this point I was down to 45
minutes so I quickly found a taxi and asked if he knew the station I
needed, It turned out he did, and after haggling him down to a
reasonable price we set off to what I hoped was the right station.
The driver, and his two mates in the back, were nice enough and we
talked a bit on the way, “no I’m not married”, “yes I’m
only 23” and “yes I’m monogamous” seems to get me through
most taxi journeys. I got to the station and managed to find my train
with minutes to spare.
This leg of my journey to Kollam was
much the same as the trip to Mumbai but longer, two nights an
afternoon and a morning. I was on the middle bunk this time however
my seat was booked among a group of people and one of them was in a
different birth and wanted to swap so he could sit with his friends
so I obliged. The top bunk is preferable as you have the option of
lying down or sitting as your bunk is always down but when the rest
are up you also have a seat below. I spent the 36 hours either;
sleeping, reading or eating with the odd doodling in my moleskin. The
food on the long distance trains varies in quality however the price
is always phenomenal and I didn’t once get a upset stomach from it.
Once you have experienced a few trips on the sleeper trains they are
the only way to travel around if you have the time, if you were among
others it would be even better. Including the food and transfer in
Mumbai it cost me the equivalent of under £15 and that’s three
nights of accommodation and just under 2,500km, I would recommend it
to anyone.
I arrived in Kollam at seven in the
morning groggy and filthy. Once out of the station I had decided to
go to the tourist office for the area to get some idea of what to do.
I finally managed to get a rickshaw driver who knew the place which
was only down the road and after getting there it only took a couple
of minutes to book myself onto a backwaters tour that I had come for.
I had twenty minutes to get some breakfast in before the tour
started, which I just managed, and after only being in Kollam for two
hours I was heading out on a tour of its backwaters. The tour would
take place around one of the islands on the huge lake Kollam
boarders, to get there was a 25km taxi ride. We were only in the taxi
for five minutes before I witnessed two cars touch for the first
time, a bus pulled out in front of our car and in doing so scraped
the front left flank of the car. Our driver pursued the offending bus
and eventually stopped it in the middle of the road to confront the
driver who seemed to be having none of it. This chase continued a
couple of blocks before we ended up and a police station of virtue
and corruption where the matter seemed to be settled. We were soon on
our way again into the countryside. The drive would have been
pleasant if not for our drivers addiction to the sound of his own
horn, I kid you no for 25km he would use his horn at least 3 blasts
normally together every nine seconds. I counted. To get to the
islands we got a small ferry over a 100m stretch of water which was
built out of two boats lashed together but worked pretty well.
Another short drive on the other side saw us to a small village where
our guide was waiting with his hefty canoe. The five of us got into
the canoe; a Spanish couple, an Estonian woman, an Indian couple and
I. Our guide punted the canoe around the backwaters deftly, as he
knew them like the back of his hand, and pointed things out along the
way such as; fish farms, pepper plants, cashew trees, nutmeg trees,
bananas, chillies, snakes, coconuts and a plethora of other little
interesting things. The couple of hours we spent on the boat were a
peaceful contrast to the trip that took us to them, we even stopped
for tea in a little village where next door they were making rope out
of coconut fibres. The trip back to Kollam was much the same as the
trip out, I took the opportunity to ask the others on the tour if
there was much else to do in Kollam. After finding out there wasn’t
much else to do I decided to try and get another train back up the
coast as I was planning to be back up in Goa in a couple of days.
My next stop was a city called Kochi
which apparently is renowned for its fishing and has deep running
Portuguese and Dutch influences of its older suburbs. The train I
took there was grim, sleeper class turned into second class and for 3
hours I was a sardine, the only reprieves were when I managed to
wrestle my way to hang out of the door of the train between stations.
The relief of alighting the train was close to the feeling of
relieving yourself after having needed for a wee for a similar amount
of time. Before heading to the fort Cochin area over the water, which
I had decided would be the ideal place to stay, I attempted to book
my train out of Kochi to avoid a repeat journey of the one I had just
been on. I was out of luck it seemed as all the trains out of Kochi
towards Goa were booked for the days ahead, this was a problem to
deal with another day so I took a rickshaw to the jetty. By the time
I boarded the ferry to fort Cochin the sun was setting, over a far
more industrial dockland than I had expected from my briefing by the
lonely planet, though if there is a time to look at a dock you cant
do much better than dusk. I arrived in fort Cochin after dark and
began to wonder in the vague direction of the town centre, I hadn’t
got far when a rickshaw driver offered to take me somewhere in my
price range and tired as I was I took the easy way out....
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