Cara's World: The Train

After Arga and the Taj Mahal Carl and I took another bus (sigh) to Jaipur. When we got there we found a really nice hotel. It was tucked away from the craziness, with lots of trees and green grass. We had a beautiful marble balcony where we ate breakfast and dinner. Both Carl and I were pretty exhausted from the last two and a half months of hard travel so we only saw the observatory and the "tiger" fort instead of the three billion other old forts, castles and other buildings tourist are suppose to see in Jaipur. Jaipur is huge, we had no idea it was so big till we got a view of the city from the fort.

Looking over Jaipur

We didn't love Jaipur so we started to develop a plan to get out only after a day. We really wanted to take the train because we were sick of buses and everyone we talked to said train travel in India was something we had to do. I'll be honest, I was sort of afraid of why everyone was saying we HAD to do it but nonetheless I wanted the experience. Carl tried to book a train online for almost 5 hours, I am not kidding, 5 hours (the guy has more patience than I will ever have).

Here are the problems with an Indian website that millions of people use: It crashes all the time, it doesn't work at ALL between the hours of 8-12am, it will not take foreign credit cards and it says there are tickets available when actually there aren't. So only a couple minor problems...

Once Carl had given up trying to use the worst website ever we went to the train station to try and buy the tickets directly. The TWO men selling the tickets looked utterly confused and they told us there weren't any trains to Goa or Mumbai for at least three days. We couldn't figure out if there weren't actually tickets or the men just didn't understand how the computer system works. We returned home and our researched reveiled that a bus or plane tickets likely wouldn't work so we were determined to take a train. After extensive research we figured out they release 10% of the tickets for every train the day before. It's called TakTal and you have to be at the train station exactly at 10am in order to try to get the tickets.

The next morning we woke up early and went to the train station. We filled out a form and checked if we did it right with the cashier. He told Carl it was unlikely we would get a ticket. Still we waited in line and old Indian men tried to push their way in front of us. Once we got to the front of the line the cashier actually started entering our passport information into the computer and actually got tickets to Mumbai for the next day! We were surprised but relieved we would be leaving Jaipur the next afternoon and taking our first train in India.

The trains in India are definitely worth taking. We got a bed and seat in the 2AC class. It was air conditioned and not crowded. Every 5 minutes someone would walk by selling chai, snacks or ice cream. We listened to music and watched the scenery go by in the afternoon.

At night we crawled up into our bed and let the train rock us to sleep.... Not really but it sounds way more romantic that way.

This is obvious but needs to be said: trains are so much nicer than buses, so much smoother, you can walk around, there is a bathroom, actually just a hole that empties to the tracks but its better than nothing. But seriously so much nicer. It cost about $45 for 17 hours.