A really long trip to our next stop – Udaipur!

When the clock was approaching two we went to the reception to pay for our stay and to book a taxi to get to the railway station. The same man as at the check-in took our payment and Johan asked him to call a cab. We sat down on the couches in the reception and waited … And waited, and waited. Twentyfive minutes later the taxi had not arrived and when we asked the clerk at the desk for when it would arrive we found out that he had not understood that we asked him to order a taxi – and then he finally took up his phone and called one that got there in five minutes.

A little worried about being a bit late, we came to the station twenty minutes before the train was going to depart. Normally, we’d love to be at the station around an hour before departure as it takes some time to find information about the train, find the correct platform and above all to find the right place on the platform where the train car you have booked in would stop. In India the trains are really long and you can´t walk between some of the wagon, as between second and third class, and you will not get to your booked seat if you do not find your wagon right away.

The first mystery we bumped into when we came to the station was that our train was not on any information board. We ran around for a while to try to understand if there were some other kind of information boards, but without luck. I found an office where “the station manager” was said to sit and he said that our train would leave from platform number 2. So far – so good, we took our backpacks and sat down on the platform and thought our train sooner or later would show up. The departure time of the train passed ….

We went off to once again ask somebody regarding our train and this time we found an information stand. We gave them our ticket and told them the train number and the girl in the stand just laughed at us and started talking with her colleagues. And then, a couple of minutes later, she came back to us and said; platform number 2, but the train is three hours late. So that’s really how it works; as long as a train in India is on time there will be information on the boards, when a train is delayed it completely disappears from all the information boards at the station to, we understood eventually, get back on the board when the new delayed departure time is getting close. How people know what time their trains actually will departure is something we don´t understand.

As the clock approached 3 o´clock and we still had not eaten any lunch (we survived a long time at the hefty breakfast) we went into the station’s only restaurant, a somewhat sleazy one with a few tables. Johan went off to see what was available on the menu. On the wall there was a big menu with lots of different dishes but it was not long before Johan was stopped by a man who told him that this menu certainly was not right – instead he pointed on a sheet of paper that sat glued to the wall where it was written a few dishes. After a while we understood that all the dishes on the paper were part of the same dish, a Thali, and the whole thing, including rice and bread costed 70 rupees per person (1 Euro). We ordered a Thali each and something to drink. It tasted ok and we kept our fingers crossed that we would not get “Delhi belly” as the place was not super clean.

The time spent in the station became even longer than expected …. Three hours became four and then finally there came a departure time of our train, four and a half hours after the regular departure time. We had the time to see many Indians, cows, monkeys, rats, dogs and pigs in four and a half hours in an Indian railway station.

You also get the opportunity to see how many people can fit in a third class carriage on an Indian train and be amazed that no cows or pigs are run over when they walk around on the train rails.

The afternoon’s highlight was an Indian family who sat down beside me when Johan went away to buy some water. None of them could speak English but they really wanted to talk to me. They were almost fifteen of them and they were as curious about us as we were on them. We amused ourselves by taking photos with them which we then showed to them, I even had a little child in my arm in one of the photos.

At 19.30 our train finally arrived and we found our wagon and our berths. This was the first night train we would travel in,  initially we where supposed to arrive in the middle of the night, but due to the delays it would now not be until 7 o´clock in the morning. At first we had decided to sleep in shifts, if it felt unsafe to keep track of our valuables, but after realizing that there were only families and older couples in our part of the train, we decided that we both would try to sleep as much as we could. It went pretty well, except for a stupid wake up call be the conductor, who wanted to look at our tickets – a second time – at one o’clock at night.