Indian Experiences

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Back into the busy and hectic India. We flew from Port Blair to Chennai (formerly known as Madras) and got swamped up with the hectic life, noise and pollution.

We immediately decided to leave that city as soon as possible and booked a train to Cochin on the West Coast.

One of my favorite experiences is queuing for tickets (train tickets, ferry tickets, etc.) It is really difficult to find out how it works first. If you have to queue normally, you have to 'fight' to stay in place. The Indians just jump the queues and it can take ages to finally reach the counter. It is difficult for us because the Indians do not keep any distance to others, so you are always very close to the others and touched by someone. Sometimes there is a separate counter and queue for ladies. Then it is very easy for me and in addition it is not a hassle with pushing and keeping in line. On Havelock I found the best solution...ladies are officially allowed to jump the queue and go directly to the counter. In my case, there were about 15 - 20 men standing in front of the counter, when I came I could go in front of all of them and got the tickets in less than 5 minutes. As you can imagine, that's my favourite option ;-)

Anyway, to get the ticket to Cochin we could go to a counter especially for foreigners and got the ticket within 5 minutes. We took the night train in the sleeper coaches. We left Chennai at 8pm and arrived in Cochin at 6am the next morning. It was an interesting experience and although I thought that I could barely close an eye I slept quite a lot and arrived in Cochin pretty relaxed.

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