21/1/10 Aurangabad back to Mumbai

We got up early and Liz had a cold shower as there was no hot water but Phil gave it a miss. While Liz was in the bathroom Phil sneaked into another empty room to use the loo and got a real telling off by the member of staff. He said "you should ask" which was a fare comment but Phil just told him he couldn't wait as we were both really unwell...hes such a little liar but needs must !! We walked to the train station and found our train. We were booked onto a better carriage than the way up but it wasn't half as entertaining. We had much less staring and couldn't open the windows and get a good look. Worse still we were sitting in a seat between windows so we had a really limited view outside. We had air conditioning though and more comfortable seats. Phil went to the train door to take some videos and started chatting to an Indian chap. He was a fashion industry worker from Mumbai and Phil was sure he was being chatted up but enjoyed his chat. The guy assumed Phil was a film maker as he was videoing and Phil didn't correct him as it was more fun pretending. Food sellers still came along the carriage with things we couldn't recognise but we ate some veggie dumplings which were really yummy and not too spicy. It was a comfortable ride and the views we could see were really lovely with lots of rural scenes and life very different to that in the bigger cities. The train pulled into Mumbai CST station where it terminated and we "deboarded" the train. It was pretty busy but none of the train stations have been as bad as we'd imagined, its just booking them thats painful. After running the gauntlet of taxi offers we crossed the busy streets to get a McDonalds as we just wanted some bland non curry food for a change to give our guts a rest from chillies. Can't believe the lifesaver McDonalds has been on this trip when we hardly eat it back in the UK. It was full of Indians all tucking into the veggie/chicken options available. Now that the marathon was over and the roads opened it was much busier everywhere but still with a nice feel to it. We went back to the hotel and went to the room we'd been allocated and it was worse than the first one. It was tiny with thin partition walls that didn't reach to the ceiling. We had an ensuite cold shower and the worlds most huge fan in the tiny space. We are not tall and our heads were almost on the ceiling but thankfully we only had one night there. It was pretty dirty with loads of dust and both of us were already coughing loads from pollution so it didn't help. We had a shared toilet with about twenty other rooms but the room did have a TV though so thats ok !!!!! We went straight out to use the internet next door and then ate dinner in the lovely restaurant attached to the grotty hotel. Phil had a message that confirmed our train tickets for the next day at 9pm when the reservations charts are released. Its really hard to be able to plan anything unless you've booked ahead months before as the tickets aren't confirmed till the last minute. We bought ourselves a couple of soft drinks then went to the room to try and get a few hours sleep before the trains 6am departure. The room was really noisy though and very light. It sounded as though we were right over a back alley used as a urinal so we got the ioccasional sound of running water...nice. Thankfully we couldn't smell anything. At 1am the ajoining room guests checked in and obviously weren't aware of the open wall between the rooms. They were chatting away for ages before they finally went quiet. At one point their TV came on really loud at which point Phil was about to explode. It was quite funny when they first arrived and they were asked if they'd like water. The porter bought it up and the conversation went something like this. "30 rupees", "oh we have to pay?" "we have no rupees, how many US dollars?" "30 rupees" "no we have no rupees, how many dollars?" "30 rupees". They must have been new to India as nothing is given for free here. The porter disappeared and returned to say it would be 1 dollar which they were really pleased with but they'd actually paid three times more for the water. You cannot get Indian Rupees outside India so if you can't get any at the airport you are stuffed. You are advised to carry receipts for ATM withdrawals and currency exchange with you to proove where you got the rupees.....they are pretty paranoid about things here. It was a bit of a struggle but eventually we did drop off about 2.30 am.