Published Jan 30, 2015
The following is an experience I had in India in January of 2015, and not necessarily representative of India as a country, nor my opinion of India as a whole. I have Indian friends. I have had wonderful trips to India – this is simply a story of one that was not.
India.
Oh man what a nightmare.
I was here to see the Taj before heading south to Hampi, a climbing paradise for the remainder of the month. But boy did India throw me a few knuckleballs.
I landed on time and got my visa with no trouble. I expected India to be hot, but nope – same temperature as Europe. It’s only warm in the south.
I walked straight to the ATM and got out 6000 rupees (~$100), then walked to the metro ticket machine to get a ticket to NDLS main train station.
I put in 1000 rupees, my smallest bill. It said, “we don’t accept that denomination.” Then – get this – it didn’t give it back. Welcome to India.
The metro didn’t run until 5am anyway and that’s when airport staff said someone could come help, so I just waited, trying and failing to sleep or stay warm.
Patrolling the terminal, every other staff member was military security. Loaded AKs, MP5s and FN FALs slung over their shoulders, barrels toward the sky. This made me uncomfortable.
When 5am rolled around I had the staff call again.
“Wait a little. It will take time.”
Ok, fine. I expected that.
5:30.
“Nobody can come until 8am.”
Well fuck. The main trains to Agra are before that. I told them I wouldn’t wait, so they told me to go to the metro station customer service office, where they might be able to do something faster.
Nope. “8am.”
Evidently you need some badge to get into the airport, and the person with that badge wouldn’t arrive until 8.
The guy helping me was a pleaser type though, always wanting to get things right (or perhaps more accurately, never wanting to get things wrong), so he really didn’t like it when I told him 8am was too late.
He brought me back to the control room, with security camera displays, the system computers, keys to every single part of the station, and full shutoff and emergency controls for the subway.
I ended up being left alone, with fatal power at my fingertips, and no security camera in the control room to watch me. Multiple times. New faces came and went when I was alone, none batting an eye at me. Odd.
Whatever, it was warm. I sat there for 10 minutes before asking, “uh, what’s going on? Am I going to get my money back?”
“We called the woman with the badge, she will come early. Maybe 7:30.”
By now it was 6:10, so I just asked to get connected to the wifi (you need an Indian phone number to connect) and charged my phone.
Online, I found a train to Agra at 10:15. OK, I can still make it to the Taj at a reasonable hour.
By this time I hadn’t slept for 44 hours, which made me much more prone to stress and discomfort from cold. I was still holding together okay, though.
That would change.
7:30 rolls around and the woman arrives. We go to the terminal, open up the machine, and remove the money box.
No money inside. At all. At this point I’m not even mad, I’m just confused. I put money in it just six hours prior, and nobody else with a key has had access to the terminal until now.
The woman gets on the phone for ten minutes, rapid-firing a classic Indian mix of Hindi and English. After hours of waiting, I get my money back.
At 8:15 I arrive at the main railway station, NDLS. It’s raining.
Good thing I did my research online. The booking desk worker spoke minimal English and didn’t really feel like helping some random foreigner navigate the world’s most confusing train system (and what a system it is – more on that later).
I was able to figure everything out and get my ticket, shit class, for 90 rupees, or $1.50.
My train doesn’t leave for an hour and I’m starving, so I go try to buy food. The only open shop refuses to sell me anything, as I didn’t have small change.
Street food it is.
I end up 100 meters away, eating something. I didn’t know what it was before ordering, I didn’t know what it was once I started eating, and I still have no clue what I ate. Some moist indian bread with with fennel, spices, and onion spread inside; two nasty pickled carrots, and some slop containing chickpeas, mystery chunks of vegetables, and spicy broth. Not inedible, but not great either. But it cost 33 cents, so whatever. It was food.
Having seen a child washing dishes in filthy water around the corner, I popped two activated charcoals immediately afterwards, as I didn’t want to get sick. And, I didn’t – though some upset gurgling in my stomach convinced me that without the charcoal (which absorbs toxins), I would have.
Back at the station, I’m standing halfway up the stairs by my platform, out of the rain. The LED sign says this is my train, but the doors to each car are locked. It’s 20 minutes before departure, so I just stand and wait. I’ll follow what the locals do, that usually works.
Ten minutes before scheduled departure, the car doors still locked, the train starts moving.
Shit.
Maybe it’s not my train? I run back to the LED sign. The train number changed for the next train coming in.
Double shit. That WAS my train.
Next thing I know, I’m an actor in every western film in India, chasing down the moving train.
It’s moving slow enough, and I’m able to catch up. I jump on the last car, which is open, intended for luggage. Not my car, obviously. I have more platform runway, so I take a bet and jump back off, sprinting further up the train to the first car of my class. It’s still locked. I drop back a car, where a guy is hanging off the side, and jump on.
“Agra?”
“Agra!”
“Agra, Agra, yes?”
“yes, Agra!”
Phew. I’m on the right train. And even though I’m not in the right car, at least it has normal seats.
My friend continues to hang off the side, yelling Agra to the Indian locals.
As we clear the platform, he jumps off onto the rails and disappears.
I hang off the opening where he once was, waiting for the train to pick up speed. A serene moment, hanging out of an Indian train underway. Here we go!
I’ve got the whole car to myself. It’s glorious. I can stretch out and get some much-needed rest.
A few minutes in, the train stops. Confused, I peek outside and see a red stoplight. We must be waiting for another train to go first on the shared track, I thought.
Five, then ten minutes pass. What’s going on?
A whole car to myself.
Something’s not right. A thin, haggard local covered in dirt jumps on. He looks left into the excrement-covered indian style bathroom, turns and gives me a perplexed look, then jumps back off on the other side.
I take another look outside. We’re not going anywhere anytime soon.
Grabbing my bag, I jump back off the train and walk towards the front, looking for someone to explain what’s going on.
A few cars up, I see someone in a doorway.
“Agra?”
The guy angrily responded something I couldn’t understand in Hindi. I asked him again, and he growled, “Neh, neh, neh Agra!”
Uh, well, what do I do then? I decided to get another opinion.
A few more cars up, a man with some basic English tries to explain the situation to me.
“Two hours Agra.”
Pointing at the train’s floor, “this train, Agra, two hours?”
“Neh, neh. Agra five hours, here two hours.”
Huh? I tried to clarify, and he made a motion as if he were screwing something in.
Oh. So they were working on the train for two hours, then going to Agra, which was three hours south.
I told him I’d wait on the train.
Pointing back towards the station, “Neh, New Delhi. New Delhi two hours come back.”
I checked my phone GPS – we were indeed north of the station. The train would have to pass back through the New Delhi main station on it’s way to Agra.
But the station was open air, wet, crowded, and cold. I didn’t want to wait there. If I couldn’t get the right train when it was scheduled to run, how the hell would I know when it was back and leaving for real? I doubted the LED system would show that.
So I decided to go back to my lonely car, where I could lay out and sleep, and wait there. It would roll back through, right? It’ll all be fine.
I laid down, using my bag as a pillow, and half-slept for 30 minutes. There were workers outside, doing maintenance on the neighboring train. One came aboard, and berated me on what the hell I was doing on the train (I think, it was in Hindi).
Not knowing what else to say, I told him, “Agra, agra.” I pulled out my train ticket and gave it to him. He studied it, seemingly without understanding, and then angrily waved backhanded towards my bunk, walking off.
I sat back down. Despite meditating, I was nearing the edge. I was cold, hungry, sleep-deprived, and confused. More had gone wrong in 12 hours than in my previous eight months of travel combined. It’s not like I’m an amateur, I’ve never had much trouble getting around.
But nothing will prepare you for India.
Then it began.
“Fuck it, it’s $1.50, I’ll catch the normal main train tomorrow morning. I need sleep.”
I jumped off the train and walked back towards the station on the concrete path adjacent to the tracks. A gaunt stray dog shuffled past, digging through the piles of trash that were, well, everywhere.
The path split away from the tracks. I passed pull-carts, a cow, and the occasional motorbike. I took an overpass back towards the station, but somewhere along the way took a bad turn.
Meanwhile, I had snapped, and rogue thoughts raced through my head.
“What the hell am I doing here? How am I ever going to get anything done?”
“OK, calm down, this is just Delhi. The south will be calmer and nicer. Right? Kerela was fine, but that was ten years ago and I wasn’t controlling the logistics…”
“Fuck it, let’s just skip this entire trip. Let’s just fly back to Saigon and put my head down and get some actual work done. Man, Vietnam looks like Switzerland compared to this city. I need to check the flights there.”
I passed a pile of human shit on the sidewalk.
“I wonder if my ticket out is refundable. I can’t really afford to just eat that price…”
“I came all the way here to climb though, Hampi will be great, right? It’s just the cities, rural India will be fine.”
“OK, fuck the Taj. I’ll skip Agra. I need to get to the south ASAP, then I’ll be fine.”
“I’m just tired and cold now. I need rest. I’m sure I’ll be fine after some sleep and can carry on as intended.”
After asking a few shops, I found my way to a main circle that promised wifi.
I came upon a tourist office.
“Hello sir.”
“I need to find a hotel in the area.”
“OK, what is your budget?”
“Uhm, 3000 rupees is fine.” I should be able to find something quite nice for $50.
“Oh, I know great hotel nearby called Karat 87. Very clean, comfortable, nice rooms. It’s 3,400 rupees.” the bearded, faux-friendly man replied as he tried to sell me a room. Guy’s gotta make his commissions, you know.
Not a fool, I asked to get on their wifi. I found the hotel online. Deluxe room, 1,087 rupees. The price is whatever your budget is!
The man’s sliver of trustworthiness gone, I pretended to consider it while searching for something else online.
I checked a few hotels, nothing good, and then filtered to only show five-star hotels, sorted by price. Second result, $71. A week’s worth of rent. Definitely not in my budget.
Fuck it, I’ll take it.
I thanked the man for his help, and walked out. The rickshaws I stopped all tried to rip me off too, so I just walked back to the metro.
An hour or so later, I was in my new fancy hotel room, somehow surviving the cab ride over despite my driver’s best efforts to send us both to the hospital.
I showered, ate, and after 53 hours awake, I proceeded to take a glorious 8 hour nap.
It was midnight when I woke up, refreshed.
Three hours of travel logistics research later, I cracked again, this time more frustrated than confused.
Flights to Saigon were $330. There were no refunds on my ticket in February.
OK, looks like I’ll be staying in India. Let’s just take the train down, spend a little more for first class, and I’ll be fine.
Oh no, not so fast. It’s not that easy.
Evidently, all but shit-class tickets must be paid for and reserved online, on India Railway’s archaic website (fun fact: India Railways is the world’s largest employer, with over 1.5 million staff).
And evidently, they only accept Indian credit cards. And evidently, to create the account needed to purchase tickets on their website, you must have an Indian phone number. The work around involves sending their customer service and email with a copy of your passport, and then waiting between 24 hours to a week for them to get around to making an account for you.
A third-party website, Cleartrip, connects to India Rail’s system and fixes the credit card issue, but not the account issue.
Doesn’t really matter though, as evidently you also need to book these trains weeks in advance if you want to be guaranteed a spot. A fun little site predicts whether you will get off the waiting list for a given train, based on historical data, current waiting list length, and time until scheduled departure.
And it always told me the same thing, no matter which trains or routes I checked: you have no chance.
I couldn’t even fly to Bangalore and take a shorter train from there unless I rode the overnight train 8 hours in shit-class, as the online booking chess match would set me back over a week. Getting to Hampi would cost me another $200.
OK, looks like I won’t be staying in India after all.
At this point I found a flight to Bangalore for $150, paid Tiger Air another $150 to change my flight dates to Saigon, and almost fell back asleep when I had another oh shit moment.
I had just spent $300 to get myself a ticket out to Saigon, hitting eject on the nightmare that had become India.
I’d be landing the next afternoon at 5pm.
And I didn’t have a fucking visa.
I went to the site where I got my visa on arrival last time and checked what it would cost me to get it rushed.
$105, seventy more than without a rush fee. But I didn’t have a choice. I paid, went to sleep, and when I woke up, I had my visa on arrival in my inbox, ready to print. Phew. Money talks in Asia.
And honestly, coming off the shock of the death of my best friend from college, I’m kid-in-a-candy-store excited to be back in Saigon where all but a few of my close friends live.
As I write this, I’m in the Delhi domestic airport at my gate, about to fly to Bangalore. Interestingly, I’m the only white westerner in the entire terminal.
At check-in, two people cut me in line, one saying, “excuse me” as he barged in front of me and up to the desk. I told him to get the hell back, but when it happened again with an older lady, I couldn’t help but just laugh.
And of course, the flight was delayed twice, and is leaving a full five hours late.
Welcome to India.
—
I came to India for food, world-class climbing, and shit-eating-grin inducing adventure, roaming the endless granite boulder fields set in Hampi’s lush oasis.
And I’m sure those things are still there. But for now, northern India has sapped me of all energy, enthusiasm, or tolerance for things not working.
I’ll still be back some day. But I’ll be more prepared for the separate universe that is India (and smart enough to go straight to the south!).
