Indian Rail

Agra – Day 1

Getting there is definitely half the fun, punctuated by heart-pounding anxiety.  First off, we’re on the same train to our first stop (Jhansi) with Richard and Sally (from Varanasi)!  Hooray – we spend a lovely 5 hours sharing a rather posh first class compartment, complete with reading lights, a wardrobe and joy of joys – a Western toilet (not in the compartment but in our train car).  I’d been having bouts of terror that on this 9-hour  trip (total for two trains) I would have to ‘go’ and be faced with the Indian train toilet.  I saw a photo of one and was truly gobsmacked!  It’s a hole in the train floor with a place on either side to put your feet – I’m not making this up, this is true!  In fact, our compartment even had an icon of a toilet – a real toilet – and a little red light/green light to indicate its availability.   Oh the things we take for granted!

We said goodbye to Sally and Richard in Jhansi with the promise to visit them in Melbourne on our next trip to Australia and invited them to come visit us in the States.  Now all we need to do is find the train to Agra . . . we have 33 minutes.  This is a big station – 7 tracks, crowded platforms and not a tote board in sight.  And it’s been raining so everything is wet, dirty, and slippery.  PA announcements are incomprehensible even though I detect a word of English now and then. 

We locate someone who looks official – a RR person, soldier?? – and ask how we find the track for a train.  ‘Go to track 1, Enquiry.’  We came in on track 7 and it looks like a 1000 yards from where we’re standing to the overpass to cross over all the way to track 1.  Just about now I am so grateful, once again, that we have backpacks – they’re heavy but we can manage a couple flights of stairs.  

Make it to track 1 and there’s no one at the ‘Enquiry Counter’ – arghhh!  18 minutes. 

We find what looks like two politicians (bureaucrats?) sitting on a bench, and I ask them if they know what track the Punjab Mail train will come in on.  Without hesitation, they reply ‘Track 4.”  15 minutes.  Back up the stairs, across the tracks again and somehow we find track 4.  10 minutes.  (Tim has finally stopped saying the ‘f’ word every 5 seconds!) Down the stairs and, miracle of miracles, here comes a train and a tiny illuminated sign blinks the number we’ve been searching for!  Hooray Punjab Mail train!!  5 minutes.  Now we just have to find our car – 2AC.  (Did I mention that trains spend just a few minutes in the station and then they leave!) 

We find it, even find our seat numbers on the outside of the carriage and we’re in, we’re on – we did it!!  We have ‘Lower Berth/Upper Berth’ which means a place to sleep (with a curtain no less).  And no sooner do we stuff our packs in the upper berth and cozy up in the lower berth than we hear chai wallah man come up the aisle.  Life is good.

Agra 6:00 pm – dark, raining, big station (one of the two in Agra).  And our driver is there, right outside, holding a rather droopy sodden piece of paper with our name on it!   Whew!  Off to Aman Homestay, enthusiastically recommended by TA.  Super place!  Dinner is at 7:30 – just time to wash up, unpack a few things and register that we’re in another city.

What a darling place we’re in!  It’s a true homestay – the family lives right here and their home includes a lovely, intimate garden complete with birds, bunnies and loads of beautiful plants.  It’s welcoming and so homey – love it!  The dinner table is filled with people from all over the world, most of whom are, like us, here for only a couple of nights.  Food is delicious – vegan, of course, and plenty of it.  We arrange for our train pick-up driver, Ashok, to pick us up in the morning.  We have two days to ‘do’ Agra and the prediction is more rain!! Not sure how much of the Taj we could see in the rain but . . .