Hong Kong, Chennai and the super exciting train ride!

Asia
November 6th 2015

Published: November 6th 2015

So Sunday it was finally time for my new adventure! I flew out of Amsterdam at 12:45 and two movies, two meals and a couple of hours of trying to sleep (without succes) later I arrived in Hong Kong at 7:00. From the airport I took a tram to Hong Kong island and started walking to the number one attraction there: The Peak. An adorable little tram toke me up the steep hill, to the top of the Peak, where I had a great panoramic view of Hong Kong. When I came down there was a huge line, so I was glad I got there quite early. 😊

After that I walked to Wan Chai, to find a restaurant called Happy Veggies. Which is, as you might have guessed, a vegetarian restaurant. I got three little dished that were served with rice and a soup. All very tasty! After that I took the ferry across the water to Kowloon. After walking around here for a bit, I decided to go back to the airport. When I arrived in Hong Kong that morning it was midnight Dutch time. So I had basically walked all through the night and i was quite tired at that point. At the airport I found a machine that gave out free tea. So I settled next to that and read the magazines I had gotten from Anneke and Peter, Heleen and Steffie. 😊

The second flight went well. Watched another movie and tried to sleep a little. After we landed, everyone had to go through immigration and here I got my first taste of India :p The guy that was supposed to work at our line, got up and left. So after a while someone in our line started directing us to the lines next to ours. The Chinese people were a bit hesitant at first. But the Indian guy just said: "it's fine, this is how India works." And it worked 😊

From the airport I got an prepaid taxi and I arrived at the hostel around 3:00. I had to wake the owner up to check in and to avoid waking anyone else up, I got a private room. Here, I fell asleep almost straight away.

The next morning I met three Aussies who had been in Chennai for a couple of days already. With one of them, Phil, I went to grab some lunch at their favorite restaurant: Hotel Prakesh. Here I had masala dosai, which is a very thin pancake filled with curry. It was really good! And the best thing was that you have to eat it with your hand. Or actually I should say hand, cause you're only supposed to use your right hand.

After that, we picked up his friend Patty and went to the beach. This was the first time I took a bus in India and it was quite exciting! First of all it wasn't very clear where the bus stop was. But after a while we saw a clear piece of pavement where some people seemed to waiting for something. This turned out to be the bus stop :p On the bus one side is reserved for ladies and one for men. Apparently I wasn't doing it right, cause an old lady pointed at me and then at a seat next to here. So I went ahead and sat there. She looked very pleased 😊

At the beach we walked along the water for a while, until we found a bridge. Halfway through the bridge just stopped and bunch of youngsters told us this was the famous Broken Bridge. Then they all wanted to takes selfies with us :p After our minute of fame we went back to beach and found a clear patch to play some Frisbee. On our way back to the bus we spotted a place where they sold veggie hotdogs, which we had to try. Delicious!

After a shower, Afrein and a friend came to pick me up. Afrein is an Indian girl I met when I was studying in Lithuania. At the time she was studying in Latvia and we met on a cruise from Estonia to Sweden, cause that's how these things go. :p We went to a really cool bar, where we had a couple of beers and some battered paneer. It was really great to see her again after such a long time 😊

The next day I went out with the Aussies again, and this time Patty's girlfriend Chenoa also joined 😊 we went to a really cool park, with lots of beautiful trees and cute little temples. The Ban Yan tree was the highlight of the day. It was huge and it looked like the branches melted down to the ground where they dug new roots into the ground.

Something that was also in the top three of the day was the little kitten we (hopefully) saved! On our away to the park we saw a guy holding this tiny kitten. He asked if we wanted to take it to the park so it would be away from the busy road. As soon as he put it down, it started following us so we slowly guided it down to the park. Halfway there, the guy came back with some biscuits to feed it. And after we had put it in the park, he waited at the gate for a while to make sure it didn't come back out. Super sweet of him.

After another great meal we got some beer at a super hectic wine shop. We drank some in the aussies' dorm, where Fred from England joined us. Later Afrein also came by. It was a really fun night with lots of talking about all the places we've been and the places we still want to go to. 😊

The next day was already my last day in Chennai, and I still hadn't seen some really cool rock carvings in Mahallapuram that were on my list. Luckily, the Aussies and Fred wanted to see them too. And Max, another Aussie, joined as well. We all got day tickets for the bus for 50 rupee (€0,80). After lunch we walked over to the rock carvings and they were pretty amazing. The area was huge and as apposed to other rock carvings, these were all carved from a single piece of rock. We walked around for about two hours and even saw some monkeys and made friends with a goat. After that we played frisbee again, cause you can't spend a whole day with a bunch of Aussies without playing Frisbee 😉 we got a bit over heated by that, so we decided to walk over to the beach to cool down.

After that we took the bus back to the hostel and after a last meal at Hotel Prakesh I took the bus to the train station. I had booked a ticket in the cheapest class: Sleeper. However, Afrein had told me it wasn't always safe to travel in this class cause everyone who can't afford the higher classes travels like this. And because my train ride was pretty long, she advised me to book an more expensive one. So I booked a ticket in a nicer class: 3ac. I had to book a wait list ticket , cause all the regular tickets were sold out. But a website that predicts the likelihood of confirmation of wait list tickets said I had a 97% chance of getting it confirmed. So when I got an email that my ticket got confirmed, I thought it was about the 3ac ticket and downloaded that one to my phone.

*this is where it gets exciting* (spoiler alert: It all works out in the end) When I got to the train station I found out it was the sleeper ticket that got confirmed, not the 3ac! But I got there about an hour before my train left, so I thought it'd be fine. I went to the Foreign Tourists desk and explained my problem. After a while they send me to another desk. After waiting in line there for a while I got send to different desk again! Here the line was even longer and by the time it was my turn, I only had ten minutes left before my train was about to leave. By this point is was fiercely sweating because of all the running back and forth and the stress. I explained my problem, and they asked me to walk around and come inside the office. Here I told them I had about five minutes left, which sped up the process enormously. A guy wrote my name down, ran to the back and returned yelling a couple of random numbers and letters. "B3 58, B3 58" I repeated that and when he nodded I ran out of there to the platforms. I saw two platforms that had a train there, so I asked someone which one was going to Kochi and luckily he knew which one it was. I ran over there and saw someone who worked for the railways and repeated my new mantra: B3 58! She said my berth was further down. As she said that the train started moving! So I jumped onto the moving train and walked through the train to my seat. I arrived there without an actual ticket, but luckily the ticket guy had some kind of list I was on. So as I said: In the end it all worked out. But now that I can cross 'jumping onto a moving train' off of my bucket list, I don't plan on doing it again 😉

And on that bombshell it is time to end, thank you very much for reading and see you next blog!

Hong Kong, Chennai and the super exciting train ride!

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