1st Train Ride

It had to happen sometime. We couldn't stay in Delhi forever so we decided on the next stop to be Jaipur (another corner of India's Golden Triangle) also known as the Pink City. Apparently their old city is a nice uniform shade of pink.

India had been so overwhelming since we arrived we thought that we wouldn't be able to do the cheaper trains where some are standing room only, jammed in with all the locals etc. We decided instead to go for the more spacious, air-conditioned Shatabdi Express train. Yes, we're wimps. :)

Our first experience with Indian train stations was frustrating (for me anyways). We had no idea which platform our train was on. We were told it may be on platform 10 but the sign didn't show our train number. Here we are at 5:50 am (our train left at 6:10) and we had no idea where to go. I went down onto platform 10 and saw a big sign saying "May I help you". when I got there though there was no one there. Nice.

At 6:00 there was an announcement for our train. Thank god it was in English and we figured out we needed to go to platform 2. I really didn't need that stress so early in the morning.

We found our car and seats and the train took off on time.

The train ride itself was very uneventful. We got a breakfast and free newspapers, the scenery was quite nice. Mountainous as well as with lots of farmland.

The other thing you see from the train is probably India's poorest people. Just as the train was leaving New Delhi station, you see hundreds of homemade shacks, barely big enough for a room. It made Toronto's Tent City look luxurious.

People were sleeping on old train station platforms as well, and everyone using the grass beside the tracks as their bathroom. It was really weird to see everyone squatting anywhere they could. J thought they were just squatting like Chinese people do but I don't think Indians squat for fun.

A very humbling sight to say the least.

we arrived in Jaipur without any problems. Got picked up by the owner of our hotel because there are so many touts outside the train station. He told us he always tries to pick up his customers because if we were to take a tuk tuk, they'd take us to some other hotel where they can get a commission.

I wish we could say we saw a lot of Jaipur but we pretty much checked in, had lunch, then went out to get plane tickets back to Kuala Lumpur (see next blog).

Didn't even take a picture.