At Chennai, one of the longest queues I have ever seen waited patiently to board the general class carriages. There are no restrictions on tickets sold for general class, and it was very full. The queue stretched past at least half a dozen carriages. It was also mostly well behaved although I suspect this may have been because it was under the control of the railway police. There were a few families, but most of those queueing were working class men, carrying a small precious sports-bag with what could well ahve been all their worldly goods.
Usually, listening to Indian conversations is rather like trying to observe atoms - the presence of a foreign female alters their course. However, my companions in my 1AC carriage to Bhubaneswar (the very best class on Indian railways, my fare was rather more than a typical Indian monthly salary) were sufficiently rich to accept me at face value. To begin with they indulged in some very kind assessments of the lasting benefits of the British Raj, but after a while settled into what I think is probably a more normal Indian conversation in the best Lewis Carroll tradition, with extended debate over philosophical issues such as global warming, bridge building (3 of us had engineering degrees), and the problem of sharing the increasingly isolated islands of wealth with the wider population.
I think of myself as good at interpreting Indian English - I often end up translating for other foreigners, but I struggled with these examples of the very strong local dialect: "I want to siwt down" (not sit down, but "I want to shift [my luggage] down" and "hevelett p'kar" (sounds like a star trek character - actually hewlett packard).
One of the many quirks in the booking system is the "two queue" process. Large station booking offices have a dozen or so ticket windows, one of which (usually #1) you can'ta ctually buy tickets at. This is where you go - or should go - to pick up a blank request form and also if you need to research which train will get you from town A to town P on the 2erd. This can be a long winded conversation, as there are usually a couple fo alternative routes via towns H and O or C and E. Plus the debate about whether you'd rather be waitlisted ont he fast train or definitely seated on a slower one or in a lower class. So often the queue at this counter is quite long.
Once you know the system you can speed things up by hunting up your own train in "Trains at a glance", a cheerful summary of "important stations" which covers most of the places tourists go to.
I have had excellent advice from booking office clerks: they are good at knowing about trains which cross two different tables in "Trains at a glance", and also that if you take a 20 minute taxi ride West as opposed to a 10 minute taxi ride East, you get to a major station with a better choice of fast through trains.
So after a rewarding hour happily plotting my February travels (I replotted them another few times afterwards, but it's always fun to do again, especially when the placenames sound so exotic), and since Chantal hadn't decided where she wanted to go next, we just turned up. It was a very small station, with only one window for both booking and enquiries. I asked the clerk for "Mumbai", and then to be more specific, "a train which arrives in the morning".
I vaguely remembered from previous plotting that both the West Coast Kerala - Mumbai journey and the East coast journeys that I had been looking at for Feb took around a day or so: 24 hours +/- 4. He handed me the ticket and asked me to check: 9am departure, tickets don't show arrival times so I asked: 5am. Sounds good. On an Indian train there isn't much to do in the evening (err... or ever) so everyone goes to bed early once dinner is over, and gets up early too. Typically the passing chai wallahs, ("chaiah - gurum chaiah"), alarm clocks, ablutions (including heavy throat clearing) and mobile calls start around 6ish, so you will be up then. Since I don't linger late in towns after eating, I'm generally on an early routine too. So 5am sounds horrible but is actually only an hour or so early. And much better than arriving late afternoon in a strange city with dark approaching. Oh good.
As a timetable addict, I rechecked the arrival time when I got home: 0853 departure, 0450 arrival. Strangely though, the train is only listed in table 70, a fairly obscure one towards the back where the cross-wise routes (as opposed to mainline) are listed. Ah - that's because the route map shows us going East and then West, rather than directly North. I also look for the longer stops - major cities warrant a 10 or 20 minute pause, which gives you time to nip off the train for a newspaper and a packet of banana chips. Oh yes, here's a familiar name, Guntakal. I haven't been to Guntakal, but it's a station with good mainline expresses and a few minor connections to Hospet, the nearest station to Hampi. Chantal is keen to see Hampi so I have researched it a few times, but not having a major train line means there are quite a few detours involved.
How strange. Guntakal 10am. That doesn't make sense. It's - roughly - 1000km from South Kerala, so we're hardly going to arrive 1 hour after departure. And err... with a 5am arrival... how on earth...?
Oh.
Oh!!
Eeeeek!!!
Our helpful booking clerk failed to mention that this morning arrival is not 20 hours after departure. It's 44 hours later! 2 nights and 2 days! And, having only planned for 1 day in Mumbai, we would have missed the city altogether! Thank goodness I spotted it! Tickets are very changeable in India, so the next morning we rebooked for a more direct train which only took 28 hours.
23 Feb 2008
No comments:
Post a Comment