- the journey from hell, Part II
plus
- bureaucracy of which Sir Humphrey would have been proud
the restless night was a jarring shudder of seemingly endless duration and merely periodic sleep, most of which - at least in Edd's case - was no more than the odd half hour. Philippa managed to get a little more, not even disembarking from the coach. but after Edd's epic liquid intake the day before, he was off the coach every time it stopped by necessity! that and to experience the untrammelled joy of standing up and stretching. the driver continued in his habit of strafing the ceiling with fluorescent light at every stop, just in case anyone had been foolish enough to go to sleep and risk missing the opportunity to get off. each successive middle of nowhere siding was dim and indistinct in the small hours, usually with a solitary light hanging forlornly over a chai stall. the driver was by now stripped down to a stained singlet vest - we were fearful of what he would be wearing by the time we got to Ahmedabad. we don't know if it was the late hours or the stress of the journey, but the other passengers were some of the least friendly, unsmiling Indians we had met on our entire trip through this country of generally generous, welcoming people. we stayed in our elevated box and caught fitful moments of sleep out of simple exhaustion.
mercifully, the sky began to lighten as dawn approached. we must have left Rajasthan around this time for the first time since our journey into the state at Jaipur. the piecemeal infrastructure disappeared and the roads were suddenly smooth, wider and frequently tolled. Gujarat is a very business and industry-minded state. it imports a third of all of India's goods and is responsible for a quarter of its GDP. it's also the birthplace of Ghandi, with a rich and diverse religious and geographical make-up. in the short term, this meant a smoother ride past a visibly greener environment with many trees and arable land, although it was clearly still a hot and dry state. even a small change in the road would have meant more sleep, so tired and miserable were we both, so we both eagerly grabbed an hour or half hour here or there when we could.
the morning rolled on and on, our view minimal because of the small window, our comfort non-existent. it was difficult to enjoy the ride to Ahmedabad, one case of the journey surely not being better than the destination. as we crawled around the clock face to 11am, our scheduled arrival time, we could not even read or write in the confined space.
luxurious stuff for two people for over half a day at one stop that we hoped was our last, Edd asked the man who had greeted us when we had first got on all those hours ago how far we had to go. 'two hours,' he replied. it was like some Kafkaesque nightmare.
reaching some urban, developed areas, we thought that we must be in Ahmedabad , but it was still longer yet before we would reach the city proper. from our restricted viewpoint, it was a heaving mass of traffic, noise and people, probably the largest city we'd been in since Delhi, or possibly Jaipur. every shop that we could see appeared to sell oil or engine parts, countless corrugated steel roofs held in place by broken fragments of brick and concrete. it was not an auspicious start.
it somehow took over an extra hour for the bus to reach its last stop, after a total of 14 since leaving Kota. even getting off was a trial, with other passengers roughly pushing and shoving. we had no idea where we were, but we knew that it was not one of the city's main bus depots. picking one of more responsive rickshaw drivers waiting nearby, we set off on the final leg of our journey to our new hotel.
our first impressions of Ahmedabad were reinforced by our first rickshaw ride. the streets were chaotic; vast numbers of green and yellow rickshaws criss-crossing each other in no apparent order, intermixed with weaving bikes and pedestrians, all subsumed beneath the klaxons of coaches and lorries. it was a heady, intense and assaulting change from places like Bundi.
our new home, the Moti Mahal, was just off the main road near the railway station. pretty clean it was, too, with a good enough room and an AC we treated ourselves to after weeks of going without. Ahmedabad was very hot indeed, stifling even, and we thought we'd need it, not least after our journey here. the only real problem with the hotel was its height. like the 7 1/2 floor in the film Being John Malkovich, the reception was on a mezzanine level that clearly did not actually exist, but had been put in anyway by the builders, the ceiling less than 6 foot high - Edd couldn't even stand up in it. perhaps small spaces were a Gujarati thing? our room wasn't too low, fortunately, and after we had checked in with the thoroughly disinterested manager, we could at last shower and rest.
we wanted to sort our refunds for our late Kota train, which we understood was possible, as well as get the next stage of our trip planned. we had mainly come to Ahmedabad to see the world famous Calico Museum of Textiles, a tour of which Philippa had already arranged for tomorrow, Sunday. since our bodies had no idea what time of day it was, we had lunch in the hotel's restaurant - all AC, a first - and were pleasantly surprised by the food, prices and superfast service. then, still in a strangely awake mood, we popped across the road and along to the station.
the first thing we noticed was that crossing the road in Ahemdabad is a dangerous and difficult past-time. everyone appears to be aiming at you, at speed, noisily. the second thing we noticed was that it was fiercely, frighteningly hot, even though we were by now entirely used to the 40C plus temperatures of Rajasthan. the station is huge, with a dozen or so platforms and a vast main ticket hall. it's also one of the few places with any Roman script in the signs - almost everything else in the city and the state is written in Gujarati, rather than Hindi. confusingly, the ticket reservation area is actually further along in another, distant building, again air conditioned (another first) and spotlessly clean (ditto).
we found the usual 'Foreign Turist' (sic) counter for tickets. the sign, as always, also indicated that the counter could be used by 'Senior Citizens, the Disabled' and our personal favourite throughout the trip, 'Freedom Fighters.' this one also added 'Cancer Patients.' the woman serving had good English but told us she could not do refunds - that was, of course, Counter 22 - so instead we got our 2nd class sleeper train to the popular Gujarati hill station resort of Mount Abu, just back inside the Rajasthan border 200 km or so away and our next stop after Ahmedabad. the tickets we wanted for the return journey were unavailable, and the waiting list was massive - and we'd had enough of waiting lists for a while. we decided to try again with the required, alternate form for a different class of travel, and in the meantime proceeded to Counter 22.
there was, of course, no-one there. Counter 23 told us that his colleague would be back in a moment, we waited a bit before he finally appeared. we went through all of the details of our journey, the delay at Kota and our own changed plans. the man behind the Plexiglas was helpful and typed away enthusiastically at his keyboard. after a while of this, he said that he'd be back in a moment - and disappeared with our old, Kota-Ahmedabad tickets. several minutes later, he came back - for such an enquiry as this, we needed to go into a side office and speak with Mr Joshi.
in the film Brazil, directed by Terry Gilliam, Jonathan Pryce's character lives in an Orwellian world geared entirely to the smooth running and continuation of endless bureaucracy. everyone has their ultra-specific task to do. lateral thinking is out. the railway is India's largest employer - almost 2 million people work for the service. the system they use was certainly started by the British, but it appears to have never evolved. we are sure that its modern day managers have seen the film Brazil and mistakenly believed it to be some form of training film for smooth and efficient operations. you can practically see the red tape jetting out all over the place, slowing things down to a choking crawl.
the side office was a collection of desks and chairs with no unifying features, stacks of well-thumbed of fraying ledgers scattered beneath missing ceiling tiles and only flourescent lighting. Mr Joshi was a middle aged, overweight gentleman with a strong desire to assist but a stronger desire to remain wedded to the Indian railway's style of doing things. over an interminable period, phone calls were made, consultations were had with numerous different colleagues, discussions held and argued over various slips of paper or our tickets, phone call returned and pondered. we sat mute, powerless and almost impressed by the monotonous inefficiency all around. after some time, Mr Joshi announced that... we would have to come back tomorrow, as - extraordinarily - the Kota-Ahmedabad train we had in the end not taken had arrived 7 hours late, some time after we had got here on the coach, and they still did not have the passenger manifests. he was apologetic and vowed to sort it out tomorrow.
resignation piling on top of fatigue, we went back out into the main reservation hall and managed to secure a return from Mount Abu near the end of the week. we had to go up the scale to the three-tier AC class in order to get a ticket at all, a notable rise in price, but also the class we would have taken had our Kota-Ahmedabad train arrived on time. the same woman who had served us before regarded us with a degree of bemusement, but she was also the first railway employee we had dealt with in India who searched around on our behalf for viable seats. everyone else has always just asked us to go away and come back with another form and try again, a mind-numbing repetition of box-ticking and finding separate and individual codes for trains, source and destination stations and class of travel.
energy sufficient had we only to brave the main road once more, still no cooler or less busy than earlier despite the late afternoon sun, and at long last collapse into sleep.
we woke ourselves up to ensure that we had something to eat, ushered into the restaurant by the finely white bearded man in charge, a man possessing one of the warmest, twinkliest smiles and greetings that we have encountered for some time. our waiter was the same as earlier as we tucked into the good food, again seated in the restaurant's upstairs mezzanine level, apparently constructed to the same strange head-scraping design as the hotel's reception. it was with muted but undeniable euphoria that we returned for the night and the deepest and most deadened of sleeps, sequestered at the opposite end of the corridor from the still raucous main road and cocooned in earplugged silence.
take best care
edd & philippa
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