into Gujarat

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Next stop after Mumbai was the city of Ahmedabad, not so much for the city of course, but because the state of Gujarat has several good wildlife spots, in particular the Little Rann of Kutch and the Velavadar National Park.

I was not sorry to leave Mumbai. The city is almost as much of a dump as Calcutta. And I mean that literally. There are piles of rubbish everywhere, and not just piles like "piles of leaves", but piles like mountains. India likes to think it is a first-world country but it is barely a third-world country. It is a country wallowing in squalor. In other poor countries in southeast Asia people may be living a simple or basic existence but usually they aren't literally living in their own refuse. In India that is the norm. It is especially obvious when on trains, passing through a lot of areas quickly. Houses just surrounded by great banks of trash, with the people living there simply keeping a path clear from their door to the street. I think this may be a direct consequence of the introductions of plastics. In the past everything was biodegradable - plates were banana leaves, chai cups were little clay mugs smashed after use - and so the refuse was either directly eaten by pigs and cows or broke down naturally. Now everything just sits there, the piles getting bigger and bigger and the people having no idea what to do about it except to just keep adding more to the pile. But, having said that, the same situation should apply in the rest of tropical Asia and it really doesn't. I mean, there is rubbish everywhere in other Asian countries, but the people aren't actually living in the rubbish piles. That seems to be a distinctly Indian thing. I have a feeling this may be something to do with it having been a British colony; it is like they have just been left with the ruins of their own country and don't know how to cope with it in the modern world.

There are trains from Mumbai to Ahmedabad but I figured I would probably end up on a bus. I headed to Mumbai Central where the train and bus stations are across the street from one another. There were A/C buses leaving at 11am for between 400 and 600 rupees (say, NZ$8 to $12). I was told they took twelve hours, which probably meant fifteen, so I'd be anticipating an arrival time of somewhere after midnight. I checked at the local bus station (as opposed to the A/C bus ticket stalls on the street) and was told there were only night buses from there. Just to be safe I also went into the train station to see if I might be able to get a seat.

There are lots of really helpful and friendly Indians in India. The ones at the train ticket counters are not among them. They invariably have an infuriating habit of simply ignoring you. It's like they have a one-question limit. I ask when the next train is, and this lady says 1.40pm; so I ask when it arrives in Ahmedabad and she just ignores me. I persist and eventually she decides to tell me it arrives at 9pm. I ask if I can get a seat and she ignores me. I persist and eventually she bothers to look on her computer and says all the seats are booked. I would understand if she didn't speak English, but she does. And same for every other person I've had to talk to at a train ticket counter. They almost refuse to give you the information you need to get the ticket.

I went back out to the A/C bus stalls to get a ticket for one of those, but the man there says that there's a train called the Sourashtra Express which passes through Ahmedabad and leaves Mumbai at 8.25am. It is now only 8am. I went back to the train station and ask the lady about this train, which she knows all about. Why did she not bother telling me about it? Lady just shrugs.

The Sourashtra Express costs just 150 rupees to Ahmedabad for a general seat (i.e. not A/C, not sleeper), and takes twelve hours. So it's the same length of time as the buses but gets there at 7.45pm which is much more convenient when trying to find a hotel on arrival! And in case you're wondering, no I don't know what Indians think "express" means either, considering that the other non-express train takes about seven hours for the same distance.

You may recall me discussing a few posts back about how I had been led to believe that you could only get train tickets online, which was not true at all. One of those sources (probably Lonely Planet because it is so untrue) emphasised this by stating that the classic overcrowded Indian trains were a thing of the past now. No, not even nearly! Up to 2pm the train was fairly quiet, lots of seats, but that all changed at a station called Surat. As the train pulled up to the platform it sounded like there was a riot in progress. What the noise was, was all the people waiting to board, and as soon as the train came in they started yelling and shoving at each other because whoever didn't get through the doors in time had to miss out. Each door was just a solid wedge of people as some tried to get off while everyone else tried to get on. When the train left the station the carriage was packed wall-to-wall, and it stayed like that for the next several hours. Actually that's not true, it didn't stay exactly like that - more people were getting on at each subsequent station! Still, better than the bus. I guess.

I got off at Ahmedabad Junction Station at 7.45pm and was found by a tuktuk driver who said he could take me to a hotel, and thus I ended up at the Hotel Mumak which looks somewhat unloved from outside but is quite nice to stay at and has the elusive WIFI. As ever, my first action after checking in was trying to find an ATM. I did find about ten of them. None of them worked. The next morning I went round them all again and eventually found one of them was able to give out cash. I also found out, to my surprise and eternal thankfulness, that the daily limit had gone up to 4500 rupees. The government had belatedly printed new 500 rupee notes after ditching all their old ones, so now the ATMs give out 2000s and 500s.

The raising of the withdrawal limit today was excellent timing. My next two ports of call were Camp Zainabad (aka Desert Coursers) at the Little Rann of Kutch and then Velavadar National Park, at both of which I can use only cash not card. I'd had no idea how I was going to manage this because there are no ATMs near those two places. Also related to good timing, the ATM card I got at the Madurai airport onto which all the American dollars had been put as rupees has basically been emptied, so from now on I will have to be using my own card. As I've said before, Kiwibank charges a $6 fee on every foreign ATM transaction (no fees on EFTPOS transactions luckily) so if I was restricted to withdrawals of 2000 rupees at a time for the next five weeks I'd be looking at around NZ$150 just in fees.

Much of the first part of today was wasted going round the ATM circuit, and then trying to find an internet cafe to print off some plane tickets. In India you can't enter the airport without an actual printed ticket (or able to show them the ticket on your phone), and while I can book the tickets on my laptop - if I can find WIFI - I can't print them off myself. My destination after Gujarat is the town of Dalhousie in the state of Himachal Pradesh, up in the foothills of the Himalayas. I was supposed to go here earlier in the trip, after Ladakh, to look for the Chamba sacred langur, but had to skip it because of the demonetisation and go to Sri Lanka instead. It's quite a long way from Ahmedabad to Delhi to Dalhousie, so rather than enduring days of road or rail travel I just bought a SpiceJet flight from Ahmedabad to Dharamshala which is the closest airport to Dalhousie (about 130km). That's on the tenth of January.

Once that was all done I rang up Desert Coursers (aka Camp Zainabad, at the Little Rann of Kutch) to see if I could stay there, which I could, and to see if they could help arrange my stay at the government's Forest Lodge at Velavadar National Park, which they also could. Sorted. It was a bit late in the day to bother going to Dasada, the town nearest Desert Coursers, so I stayed a second night at the Hotel Mumak.

My intentions to leave early the next morning were thwarted by needing to get out another lot of cash to make sure I had enough for the next several days. Not unexpectedly the ATM I had used the day before now no longer worked. I made my way around the others I knew of. None worked. I usually walk a couple of kilometres at least whenever needing to get out money due to the way the ATMs here stop working at random. You have a mental map of ten or so ATMs which you've found, and just go round all of them until you strike it lucky. Or not. I went round them all a second time, and this time found a good one. Back at the hotel their EFTPOS machine wasn't working, so I had to use some of the cash to pay for the room which was a bit annoying. Basically don't expect any sort of machine to work when in India, or at least not when you actually need it to work. I didn't get onto a bus to Dasada until 11am.

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