Train Trip
Late, always rushing, it has to stop! I should have known better than to leave only one hour to catch my train up into the Himachal Pradesh state of India. I had a ticket on a night train, a sleeper, that was to deposit me up by the Pakistan border. And from there I was going to take a taxi to Dalhousie. Dalhousie is a notorious hill station that was popular with the British. From what I’d read, not much has changed over the years (lots of nursery food on the menus) and I was looking forward to taking a snoop around. And getting into the mountains. The Delhi air was hurting my lungs something horrid.
My Punjabi taxi driver didn’t know how to get to the train station. And we got stuck with another one of his family’s lousy cars. It kept dying. I think he was trying to cover up that the car was conking out because he’d then hop out of the car and run over to the nearest person on the street and ask directions. While I was in the car yelling out the window and shouting to him I knew how to get there (and what kind of bloody taxi driver are you not to know the way!). I started swearing a lot and giving my own directions. But he found out about a short cut. Through the alleys of Old Delhi. Cows were in the way. Crowds were not moving. On a Friday night at 9pm a short cut through Old Delhi? I missed my train.
So, I’ve spent the last two nights in Delhi and rearranged my plans.
I went back to Chicky and his guys to do some work on POSTHOC for a few hours. I walked into the store and I felt like I’d come back to a room of friends. They wondered why I was still in town. (Or they wondered why they hadn’t gotten rid of me). Five hours later, I had checked all my bills online, answered all my emails and was showing them how to use Macromedia’s Dreamweaver to build websites. When I left, Chicky wrote a little note on one of his open-me-up business cards to the owner of a hotel called The Brentwood up in Mussorie. The note requested that I be given the best room at the best price. Wow. Turns out Chicky’s parents are coming up here later this week. I was offered a lift but I needed to get out of Delhi pronto.
Train to Dehra Dun
The Northern Railway certainly looks after their passengers on Express trains. I think they have the same view as Virgin Atlantic does on their flights: keep feeding the passengers and they have less chance to get uppity and restless. If for no other reason than you have a darn tray in front of you. First we were served tea. And we all got our own thermos filled with hot water! (Is this the kind of water I’m not supposed to drink? I don’t understand this, everyone else was tucking into tea and their "glucose biscuits" and so I copied them.) And then breakfast. And then more tea. Except I was in a dilemma. I wanted to keep drinking tea but then I didn’t want to have to pee on the train. So, I cut myself off after one cup. And put lots of salt on my breakfast.
Annoyingly I couldn’t see out of the train window. It was all blurry like out of an airplane but worse. The whole reason I bought a darn InduRail pass was so that I could sit and look out the window. Far more fun, I ended up standing in the open doorway of one of the cars for six hours. I got a little scared when we went over a dry riverbed that I’d fall out and break my legs with my luggage going on ahead of me. But not scared enough to move. Dry riverbeds. They’re a rainbow of colors. Garbage and plastic bags rotting in between all the stones leaning down river.
The plains up to Dehra Dun were fields and fields of lush green despite the fact that it’s been a fairly poor monsoon season here. The fields were filled with women working.
From Dehra Dun, I caught a "share taxi" with four others to go the remaining 35kms up to Mussorie. I was given a bargain ticket ($4) because I agreed to sit in the front seat. I thought I actually had a good deal. Until we started moving. The fact that there were no seat belts is a given. But we nearly died at least three times as we climbed up to the hill station. Once, purely because our taxi driver had a silent ego fight with another driver coming in the opposite direction. There clearly wasn’t enough room for both of us because the road had washed out but neither were willing to wait and so with horns blazing, both cars charged. We skidded on the gravel that went over the edge. We had to stop and pour cold water over the engine. It was overheating.
My first site of the Himalayas for real made me grin out loud. Foothills or not. It’s exciting. It ranks right up there. Right up towards the top.
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