Trains...

Asia » India » Karnataka » Mysore
March 17th 2006

Published: March 24th 2006

So... from Mysore to Mumbai in time for the Test... how best to manage it? Train to Bangalore then fly? Far too easy. And, more to the point, far too expensive. How about a 27 hour train journey? A bargain at about sixteen quid each, especially as it saves on a night's accommodation. Booked it well in advance in Kerala, so all we had to do was get from the hotel to the railway station.

Don't know if any of you have seen an autorickshaw, but it takes some doing to fit two western-sized arses in one auto, let alone two western-sized arses, two rucksacks, and two day packs. Tearing across Mysore at half five in the morning with all your belongings hanging out the side of an eggshell on wheels is good enough to wake you up...

Anyway, got to the station and found our carriage. The look is NHS chic - slightly shabby, lots of pvc-covered foam on the seats/beds, curtains all over the place, but essentially pretty clean and hygienic. You wouldn't choose to live there full time, but for a night... well, it's not too bad.

Once the train started to pull away, we got to check out our neighbours. Realised that they'd bagged pretty decent seats... we had one top bunk and one side one. At least it meant that we had a bed where we could sleep whenever we wanted and didn't have to share it with people who wanted to sit down. People sat next to us seemed ok - middle aged indian couple - pretty well off, by the looks of things. Not good on smiles though.

After a bit we started to get a bit peckish. This is when the first major problem presented itself. No buffet car. Cunningly, we'd brought some snacks with us. Two bags of bombay mix (confusingly, bought in Mysore for the journey to Bombay, but I guess it's close enough) and a satsuma. We had visions of having to eke this out all the way to Mumbai. Not ideal.

I knew that people thrust food through the window at you, but seeing as the windows were tinted and very much unpushthroughable (downside of being flash and travelling AC) I wasn't sure what the hell we were meant to do. People were coming back with food, though, so it must be possible. At every stop they were jumping off the train, seemingly secure in the knowledge of whether it was going to be the 30 seconds and off-type stop, or the wait-ten-minutes-while-the-driver-scratches-his-arse type stop. No apparent way of telling the difference, apart from through some sixth sense that is only given to residents.

Starving, we finally chanced it. We went together, figuring that both of us on a platform and our luggage on a departing train would be marginally better than one of us on a platform and one of us with the luggage. Denied the residents' sixth sense, though, we'd alighted at a platform where the only food going was junk. Breakfast was crisps, something like crisps, and coconut biscuits.

At which point the couple next to us took pity. Extracting what looked like a stainless steel picnic set, they offered us chappattis and pickles. Delicious. And then, to top it off, some delicious Indian sweets. The sort that are basically butter thickened with ghee and then sweetened with sugar. And more sugar. Yet more evidence of Indian hospitality.

Once we'd eaten, the immediate panic was over, and it was just a case of settling in for the next 22 hours or so. Dull isn't in it. Backgammon played a part, lots of reading got done, and totally aimless staring out of the window also featured heavily. Unbelievably, we were rolling through some incredible Indian countryside with the windows blacked out. OK - you could still see out, but through a strange sepia film. What a waste.

A few hours in, we discovered that the food panic was a little unneccessary. Totally unneccessary, actually. We were treated to a steady stream of people selling chai, snacks, and the ubiquitous unbelievably sweet milky coffee, which could well become extremely addictive. Not a bad way to go, really. Sod buffet cars, I want coffee wallahs on Virgin Rail trains...

Trying to sleep was about the only other notable event. Not great, but could have been much worse. Bed not comfy but not bad, train movement bad but not terrible. You're still a bit stir crazy after 27 hours on the train though. Only enlived by the huge number of crapping people we saw on the way into mumbai. The train cuts through the slums, and they clearly have no running water. So they disappear behing the slums (ie onto the railway) and have their morning crap in the open air. Hundreds of them. Fields full of crapping Indians. I might be fed up with AC, but for that part of the journey, I thanked god that we didn't have open windows. The smell at the train station was fruity enough as it is. I didn't see it, but Fi reckons that even there the tracks were festooned with little presents...

By that stage, though, I was so happy to be back in Mumbai and, more to the point, to be out of my train-shaped prison cell, that people could have been crapping on the platform itself and I wouldn't have been overly bothered... All we had to do was brave the rush hour in the most hectic city in the world, and we could finally check ourselves into a bedroom that didn't come with wipe-clean mattresses, station announcements that wake you up just as you're dropping off to sleep, and unsmiling but in reality extremely generous middle-aged Indian couples...

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