Leaving Ispiice

25th Nov – I left Ispiice – Sascha, Verun & Aeoife & the local community. 5am bus to Chakki bank to catch a train to Agra where we were meeting Jay. For once in my life I was early for a train, this time 3 hours early! I tried to focus on this been a good thing & get over my inability to spend time waiting for things. This lasted for about 50 mins as I tried to write my journal , then I felt too tired to write but unable to sleep so I thought it would be a good opportunity to use the internet! It seemed like we were in the middle of no where but I was sure there must be one near by so I asked various people & they suggested a 10 min walk & I would find one. Whilst we had been there the same little begger boy had come upto us 4,5 times, each time we said no, I will not give money to kids even though they do look desperate & it breaks your heart, you know it will not help them, it only encourages them to continue begging. I left Natasha with the bags & headed to find the Internet, I managed to find the main street which interestingly didn’t seem to have any women on it, so I had a lot of curious eyes looking at me as I walked what turned out to be 15,20mins the wrong way! As I didn’t have any luck I turned round to go back, hot & tired, I still had my thermals on from the bus journey, as Dharmasala & the bus were freezing! As I was about to give up I found the interenet, by this time I only had about 30mins before the train, so quickly checked my mails & headed back to Natasha.

Now this would be both me & Natashas first train journey in India & neither of us were very savy about how things worked. I had a reserved ticket but when I looked at the sheet there was no seat or carriage number on it, whoops! Natasha didn’t even have a ticket & ended up by a local class ticket. We thought we would blag it so Natasha could sit with me on my sleeper seat, even though it’s the day you still have the beds out to lie down on so 2 people could share! When the train arrived it was heaving & hot! I made a decision that we should just sit on a free seat! We did this & when the guard came round, his English wasn’t too good & he gave up trying to get us to move & sort out Natashas ticket by saying she had to pay a fine by disappearing & not telling me where my seat was supposed to be. After feeling ok for a while & eating the amazing packed lunch Aeife had given us for the journey things started to get a bit troublesome after about 3 hours, the train was a 12 hour journey (that cost £5!) in total & I thought we were going to end up standing! Jay had said that all the train journeys he had been on the inidan people were really nice & let him join them in a good seating area even if he didn’t have the right ticket. This was not the case with me & Natasha, some Indian men got on & demanded that we were in their seats & that we didn’t have the correct tickets! They called the guard & after much kaffufle the guard told us we had to move & to follow him. Meanwhile the guys who were taking our seats had much fun laughing at us! I got slightly annoyed when none of them even helped us get all our backpacks down from the upper beds, you definitely get the feeling that women are not as respected as men in India! The guard took us to the guard room & basically kicked out some other guards & then finally with the help of another guard they managed to locate my seat, we were in the totally wrong carriage! As the right carriage for me was about 5 carriages away they told us they would find us a seat in the carriage near by. In the mean time they asked us if we wanted chai & then were really nice to us. They told us not to show anybody Natashas ticket as she shouldn’t be in the sleeper carriage! We got all the usual questions that you get in India, how old are you? What do you do? Are you married? When they find out my age & the fact I am not married they find it very strange & you get the distinct feelling they look at you like “poor girl left on the shelf” hahaha . I don’t care, the break from the squashed seat we were in with the sun blarring through was really nice & we actually had a seat & free chai!

Eventually the other guards wanted their seats back & moved us to another seat in the normal carriage, to our horror though they kicked some men out who were sitting there. We said we didn’t want to take their seats & we would share but the men moved anyway! The little seating drama was good as it wasted at least a couple of hours of the journey. When we settled into our seats the train didn’t seem that bad & I was quite enjoying seeing some of India. Every possible stop Chai sellers, beggers etc would join the train & try & get you to buy something, we were very grateful we had our packed lunch from Ispiice & our nibbles so we didn’t have to eat the food that passed by!

12 hours later we arrived outside Agra but then the train was held up for 1 hour outside the platform, by this time it was 11pm & we had been up since 4am so we were v.tired. Infact I had awoken at 2am as I couldn’t sleep as I was excited about going on my road trip through Rajasthan. First look of Agra train station at night & the place looked like a hole & it pretty much is apart from the Taj Mahal. We successfully found our hotel & met up with Jay who had travelled from Rishikesh.