It's a minor miracle I've made it back to Mumbai, the fates seemed determined to leave me stuck somewhere; things started to go somewhat less smoothly once we attempted to leave Jaipur. Our intention was to take an overnight train to Agra on the night of April 1. We dutifully lined up at the train station, where the person behind the desk mutely handed us a form to fill out in response to our questions. We filled out the form and received our tickets.
What we didn't realise was that our train actually departed at 2am... on April 1 (a salient deail the apparently dumb ticket man omitted to mention). As a result, we found ourselves attempting to usurp some poor gentleman's bunk in the wee hours of the morning (after having camped out on the railway station floor for a few hours). When we realised our mistake, we dashed out of the train (it was scheduled to make only a ten-minute stop in Jaipur), and desperately searched for a bureaucrat of some sort - something usually not very difficult to find here, as we've discovered. Naturally, as with auto-rickshaws and McDonald's, the ubiquitous suddenly becomes non-existant when you really need it. Finally, we found a conductor, and fell upon his mercy - luckily he took pity on us, and found us two bunks, though we did have to pay a penalty fee amounting to twice the original ticket price.
Agra is much less dirty and its touts far less aggressive than I had been led to expect, though the air pollution is quite intense. This is bad for my asthma, but it's even worse for the city's many monuments. The most famous of these, of course, is the Taj Mahal, which most certainly lives up to all expectations - we even managed to pry ourselves out of bed at 5am and get there at sunrise. We also saw the Red Fort, and the "baby Taj," a mausoleum designed entirely by one of the Mughal princesses for her parents. We also made our way through a residential and very un-touristy part of town to find yet another Mughal tomb, though we did pick up a crowd of young children along the way (not the first time I've felt like the Pied Piper in the last nine months).
Our train trip to Delhi was made much less chaotic than it might have been by a very kind gentleman who helped us upgrade our tickets from "unreserved" to second class - "unreserved" means you squeeze yourself onto a wooden plank beside two or three families, or, if the train is crowded, you sort of dangle out the side somehow. This morning while pulling into Mumbai at rush hour, I saw inter-city trains with people literally sitting on top of the trains, clinging to windows on the outside, and even riding between the cars.
Interestingly, our friend on the train worked for a large American bank at its call centre, and he had several amusing stories to tell involving cultural differences and American slang and idioms. My favourite was a woman who was trying to delay payment on her credit card because her dog had died - to which my friend answered, perplexed, that he didn't understand why she was so upset about a dog, that in India several people die every day from starvation. Naturally the lady got quite upset, and my friend is now careful to express deep sympathy every time a customer reports the death of a pet...
Delhi was much more intense than Mumbai, even though it is apparently the smaller of the two cities. We were staying in New Delhi, the part of town built by the British after they razed part of the old town they didn't like. This area feels a lot like a North American city, but somewhat dirtier and with more beggars and way more people. Every large international store you can think of has found a spot somewhere in Connaught Place. The mandatory fast food chains are also there (as an aside, there is not a single McDonald's in Tanzania), as are an abundance of very good upscale restaurants, mostly filled with Indians, part of this country's booming middle and upper-middle class. Old Delhi, on the other hand, lives up to the image of India painted in movies - very crowded, extremely busy, dirty, and exciting.
Despite the fact that I like to consider myself a relatively seasoned traveler, I found Delhi quite stressful (though perhaps if I hadn't just come over here from eight months in Africa I would have found it less so). One major plus in Delhi was the metro system, which is very new, and rivals any of the European systems I've been in, though it's still quite small, as it's still being built.
Leaving Delhi was also challenging. On Sunday, Mahmud and I booked a hotel room for myself in Mumbai - I traveled back here alone, since Mahmud will be staying on in Delhi for some time. The next day, we phoned to confirm my reservation, which had somehow disappeared... I spent half the morning on hold with KLM attempting to reschedule my flight back to Canada (ironically, though the call centre was almost undoubtedly in Delhi and it was 10am, I was calling during off-hours, Eastern Standard Time, so it took me about half an hour to get through to someone). The other half of the morning was spent trying to reserve a room in Mumbai.
Finally, Mahmud and I made our way to the New Delhi train station, one of India's main stations, expecting to find a relatively calm square meter or so, and perhaps a restaurant to have lunch at (as had been the case in Mumbai). Instead, we found ourselves in a gigantic, packed, open-air railway station with no restaurant and definitely no calm square meters. We wandered around the maze-like grounds for a while, desperate at this point even for a McDondald's, before finally caving in and going all the way back to Connaught Place, where we did eat at the Golden Arches, I'm ashamed to admit. We then dragged ourselves all the way back to New Delhi train station, where we managed to find our way to the first class waiting room.
At about 4:00 (my train was to leave at 4:55), Mahmud offered to go into the main station to check which platform my train was leaving from. He came back somewhat confused, since my train number didn't appear to be on the board. After another trip into the station and back, we finally scrutinized the cryptic train ticket more closely, only to discover (of course) that we were at the wrong station. A mad dash across town in a tiny taxi ensued (with me laughing somewhat hysterically in the back seat - at a certain point there's just really not much else to do). We pulled up at the much nicer and correct train station, where there was a large restaurant area with several very decent-looking lunch options, and I made my train with about fifteen minutes to spare.
Eighteen hours later, I arrived in Mumbai. Tomorrow morning, I'm flying to Dar es Salaam (via Doha), and I'll be back home, nicely tanned, in (snowy?) Montreal on Friday evening. I have lots of nice photos from India which I will post once I'm home (and have a good internet connection). It feels very strange that my nine months abroad are nearly over - they've been everything I've expected them to be. But I'm also very happy that I'll be at home on Friday...
