Travelling

The crack of dawn. Actually, I was up before that, meeting my group at 0340 (that’s right, 3am in the morning) for my overnight trip to the Taj Mahal. Once we were all assembled, we went by bus to the airport. We were told that Indian security is worse than American, especially after the Mumbai bombings, so we were prepared to spend some time in security. It wasn’t really that bad. The only interesting part is that there was a separate line for women to be searched, behind screens. We went through security easily and then waited around for a while. The bathrooms in India are pretty interesting. They’re still holes in the ground, but this time they are basically the ceramic bottom of a toilet on the ground. Personally, if you’re going to pay for the ceramic, why not get the whole toilet? That’s what I want to know. Anyways, I digress. We all got on the plane, owned by SpiceJet (haha) and took off. They gave us breakfast, which consisted of some sausage, funky scrambled eggs, fruit, croissant and something else I can’t remember right now. Even if the food tasted a bit weird, it was a much nicer meal than what they give you in the States, from what I’ve heard. The landing was rough though, the pilot kind of got low to the ground and then just plopped the plane down. I wasn’t really expecting it to be that rough. After we arrived in New Dehli, we got on a tour bus and drove around the city. We got to drive past the governmental buildings and former palaces. We also went to the large arch erected to memorialize those who fought in WWII. After that, we went to lunch at a restaurant. After that, we went to the train station. We just barely made it, with the train taking off literally 5 minutes after we got on. We were in first class, so there weren’t many other people there and we all basically tried to sleep as the plane and the bus weren’t that comfortable. We were on that train for 6 hours. I know that movies often misrepresent things, but there really were some scenes from Slumdog Millionaire around the tracks. People in tents camped out between the tracks, some doing their laundry, with some ‘shanty’ towns on the far side of the tracks.

            We finally arrived in Ranthambore. As we walked along the walkway over the tacks, I looked up and saw an animal. “My that’s a large cat”, I thought. Except, it turned around and it was a very large monkey of some sort. It started jumping around and ran off with some other monkeys. We got into uncovered jeep-like cars and drove to the hotel. It had a large open courtyard in the middle, with a pool, that was surrounded by the different rooms and the dining room at one end. I happened to be the odd female so I did not have a roommate for this trip. We ate dinner and I had the best naan ever! EVER! Naan is this Indian bread and this place makes the best, most delicious naan I’ve ever had. After dinner, we played a little bit of games. This didn’t last long because we were all so exhausted from this travelling (even though I really didn’t do much of anything, it was just taxing to be travelling for basically 20 hours in one day), that we went to bed.