I’m posting this from Calcutta (best computers and internet connection so far), where we arrived around midday today, after spending the last 15 or so hours in the train we took in Benares.
Benares is a big and fairly nice city, as long as you are near the Ganja, where there is no roads, only very small, narrow and quite dark streets, where you can find all sorts of small shops, silks of course, but music shops too, quite interesting to be walking down these streets and suddenly hear some sort of techno music in a distance, some drums and flutes in another direction, people shouting and trying to sell their goods, avoiding the bicycles, motorbikes and the holy cows in streets less than 2 meter wide !
Benares is also the city where all hindies want to die.
Thousands of people, bathing and praying in the Ganja river every day, as pure tourists we took a boat to see this ‘scenery’ and discovered thousands of people in that dark brown water before the sun raises. We could also see a fire on the side of the river, obviously someone passing to the other side …
Before Benares we spent a few days in Khajuraho, a not so famous city for some very famous Temples. Everyone has heard of the Kamasutra .. well this is the place it is from. We visited some very nice guardens in which we found a few (6 or so) temples,
some of which have some very nice *hint* sculptures on them, but all are very beautiful however. The city is quite calm, not as calm as Orchha though, but still quite pleasant compared to some other cities we have been through! We ‘lost’ a day here, as we didn’t book our train tickets fast enough, we didn’t realise that what was going to be tomorrow was sunday, and that we wouldn’t be able to book any tickets then, so we did spend a very calm day there.
Now a little information on the buses and trains, in land, there is no roads as we know them, but only paths, which makes short distances very painful in 50 year old mini buses, all wreckling, missing half the windows, you can feel every single stone on the road, and bang your head a few times as you jump off your (hard) benches. One would think trains would be better, well its just a totally different story, no board in stations telling you what platform your train is, very few announcements you can barely understand due to all the noise going around, overcrowded platforms, totally misorganized train stations, having the station manager at one end of platform 5 for some odd reason … so when you finally get into a train, you have to fight your way to your seats, hoping somone isn’t already sleeping in it, in which case you have to wake him up (sometime, you will find several people in your seat !) and try to make him understand he shouldn’t be here … having to be very careful where you walk, people sleeping absolutely everywhere, in the corridors, under the seats, in that small area that links 2 coaches !! in front of the toilets … everywhere …
that basically summarize the fun we have had with trains, and i am still omitting loads of details! the first time we were going to take a train, we took the train just before the one we should have, it was an 8 hour trip, we jumped down 4 hours later somewhere and managed to get onto the train we were suppose to take, hm fun fun … second try was a little more complicated, i asked some military in the station to find me the platform my train will be stopping, he went to find the board … platform 6 .. so off we go, a train is there already, not our train number .. we wait a few minutes, we were early after all, then i discover that our train had been announced on platform 8 but noone had changed the board … so yes you get it, we had missed our train this time ! off i go to find the tourist office, sends me to the controller room in the main station, yep confirmed, train is gone, he sends me to see the station master on platform 5 so i can get another train, he sends me to the other end of the same (thank god) platform to get an authorisation to get onto the next train, that should be coming in in 10 minutes … when we got on that train, it was already packed, so as we couldnt find the train controller, we decided to camp at 1 end of the coach and wait, after an hour, and after trying to explain the situation to a dozen hindies (all very nice, but not very understandeable unfortunately) we finally get our hands on the controller, and put down some extra cash to get in 1st class and finish the night, which we did! Trains are hell …
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