One word… Trains! That is how we have spent our day – we left New Delhi at 7am on our delightful, air conditioned tourist train heading towards Amritsar. We were served tea, biscuits, toast and a hot breakfast (all of which I ate – Jayne was on feasting on dry crackers!!). We enjoyed the view for about 5 hours until our train suddenly stopped in Jalandhar… It had been cancelled from that point onwards! We were still about 80km from our final destination so we had three choices… Taxi, local bus or queue at the enquiry desk! We chose the latter. A 10 minute scrum like queue later and a LOT of hand gestures, we had information about another train coming by in an hour. We just had to listen out to announcements for the platform number. Unfortunately, neither me nor Jayne have learnt Hindu in the past 3 days so we were at a slight disadvantage. A puppy dog look through the enquiry window by Jayne resulted in a lovely lady grabbing the station microphone and saying ‘go platform 2!’. And just like that, we were on our way again except this time we were on a local train – with all the joys to accompany it. We luckily found a pair of seats together next to each other and a window.
Tried to interact with two separate families – one resulted in just an exchange of smiles. The second family had a child which I managed to make cry and Jayne managed to make laugh (it’s a parallel universe!!) 80km and 2.5 hrs later, we had arrived in Arimtsar. Got seriously lost trying to find our hostel. After 30 minutes, several demands for divorce and popping into a tomb engravers to ask for directions, we found it!! A quick local dinner before watching a bit of crap TV to sooth Jayne’s stomach. Looking forward to a warm shower and a good nights sleep somewhere significantly quieter than New Delhi.
Trans Travels 