TRAINS

Indian Railways is the world's largest commercial employer with more than 1.4 million employees, transporting over 18 million passengers daily - and is also a law unto itself.

The British were instrumental in laying down 63,327 kilometres of rail track during colonial reign and we, along with millions of Indians have depended upon the trains in order to move across the country.

Our experience of taking the trains has varied between 'pleasantly relaxing with a lovely view of the passing countryside', all the way through to ' I feel like a refugee stowaway, will this ever be over?'. By the end of our 6 week trip we will have travelled for a total of approximately 3960km over 103 hours!

The booking system remains an unsolvable mystery to us and includes different ticket quotas for foreigners & nationals as well as a disastrous system of double booking thousands of seats on every train. In more detail - even if all seats/sleeper berths are booked, Indian Railways will still sell non refundable tickets for waitlisted seats so that one has to arrive at the station and check the paper postings on every carriage of a train 250m long to see if one has been allocated a place. However in high wedding, tourist and NRI season ( Non Resident Indians all tend to visit at this time of year) everyone piles onto the trains , seat allocation or not and proceeds to cram, squeeze and wriggle into every available space for the 12 - 20 hour journeys overnight cross country.

The lucky ones ( like us) manage to charm and/or beg our way into sharing a corner of someone elses tiny bed all stacked 3 high in the less luxurious non air conditioned carriages - with which we have become very well aquainted. The unlucky ones end up curled on the floor in the exposed moving space where the carriages join each other, right next to the stench of the toilets ( which are genrally decorated with an assortment of human faeces in different stages of drying out around the bowl of the Indian-style squat variety).

I write this blog ( from which I am obviously rewriting at an internet cafe) from the most jaded perspective, at dawn after 12 hours on the train and hopefully only 2 more to go. I could most accurately compare the smell of this particular carriage to the average British public loo. I am teetering on the top bunk of 3 berths curled into a teeny space which I begged off the rightful owner of this bed after Nick, me and Gina were booted out of the supposedly available beds we had been assigned - and were also required to pay hefty bribe money to aquire. Nick is curled on the filthy floor below, semi-spooning with an ancient bronchitic Indian woman - the same floor over which he had seen 3 enormous cockroaches scurrying just hours before. It is incredibly cold as the wind rushes in through windows that dont properly shut and not even his face is exposed as he has covered himself with every item of cloth he could find.

I realised very starkly last night while hovering over a large pile of someone elses poop in the train toilets that my standards of what I deem acceptable in cleanliness has been drastically recalibrated! Even Ghandi was quoted on his observations of Indian rail passengers in 1916 saying '' We do not trouble ourselves as to how to use it; the result is indescribable filth''. Equally and more appropriately to our experiences was Ghandi saying '' Indians spat where other had to sleep''.

On a far more positive note, the level of generosity and hospitality of most people we have met on the trains has been quite astounding. Their willingness to help us have a more comfortable journey, most often to the detriment of their own, merely because - as they have said- we are their guests in India, has amazed and humbled me.

By the way - you may have noticed large gaps in our blogging. This is largely due to the prehistoric internet speeds at most cafes so we might blog in retrospect when we get the chance.

Bryony