Story about missing our train to come later...... Here's the rest of the story .......
Christmas day started out with so much promise. We got up at 4AM to catch the train from Delhi to Haridwar. As we were walking to the car a man said "Happy to Kris mass" & I said back "Merry Christmas". We got to the train station 30 minutes ahead of time, found our platform (despite being given the wrong directions), parked ourselves under the sign for our train (we even found our names and seat assignments on the board) and felt very pleased with ourselves for having gotten thru such a zoo of traffic and mass of people all on our own.
Time for the train came and went, but no train. We thought it was kind of odd that we didn't see any conductor or bunches of people wanting to get on the train, but how could we possibly miss an entire train coming and going? We searched and finally found a train attendant and found out we'd missed the train - it had been quietly waiting on the other side of the stairs/platform and pulled away on time without us!
It was extremely difficult to get anyone to help or speak english and some guy finally took pity on us and pointed us to the international reservation office - NOT!!!!! It was a scam!!!! Some guy in a tiny office with no official papers told us he was government (NOT!!!!!) and sat at a computer pretending to get us new tickets. I was getting nervous and Ajit noticed he was typing gobbledy-gook on the computer, so he tricked him into giving us our papers back and we ran out of there! The office is the big blue sign in the photo above. We ended up having to pay $130 to hire a driver for 4 hours to get us to Haridwar.
And to top things off, I had a "gastronomical emergency" on the road ..... you haven't lived until you have to use a "squat" toilet at a gas station in the suburbs of Delhi!!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment