I do have to say, the morning train is always a bit of a struggle to get up for. Often times it is super early, leaving at 6 or earlier, and you need to be there about 30 minutes early to get your seat and stash your luggage. This morning was no different. The alarm clock went off at 4:55, and we were out the door by 5:25. Since we were told by the hotel staff to leave by 5:30, I didn’t want to chance eating breakfast so we went straight to the train station. Upon arrival we found out that our train had been delayed by 20 minutes. I found this out after seeing the enquiry clerks again at the ever so helpful enquiry office. They of course pointed me in another direction: to the ticket collector.

I went to the ticket collectors’ office to ask the same 3 questions I asked the night before and found out the train number was 4863, named Maridhar Express, and left at 8am. The last piece of information didn’t mesh with what I just heard on the intercom so I was skeptical. One inconsistency could lead to others, so I just took this information with a grain of salt. I then asked if I could upgrade the ticket, since we had no idea what type of ticket it was. I was told that only a conductor could do that. Slightly annoyed, I met up with G and we made our way to platform number one. Here we continued the same quest for information and got more inconclusive results.

After a couple of minutes of me watching the ticker tape of train information, I found out that our train was now officially delayed by an hour and twenty minutes. While I was being hypnotized by the ticker, G managed to locate the only other white people in the train station who, luckily, were supposed to be on a train to Jaipur. Coincidentally, the same train. While waiting, we were informed over the intercom four separate times that our train had been delayed. Each announcement was about a half an hour’s setback. When the train finally did arrive it was past 9 – well over 3 hours later than expected. Scrambling to get off the ground, G and I both hustled to find where we were supposed to sit, and chose a sleeper-class boxcar. Within moments of walking up the stairs we were told we had the wrong ticket. We were sent to the front of the train, with, in my experience, something that never sounds good: general seating.

As we were walking I was starting to sweat bullets. All of the boxcars we passed were looking full. When we finally found ‘general seating’, there were no seats to take. There wasn’t even enough room for us in the damn boxcar, but a nice Indian fellow made people move and sat us back in the prime seating: the small hallway between the two boxcar toilets. While trying to act thankful I was completely disgusted. The boxcar was abhorrently dirty, overflowing with people, and smelled of a freshly knocked over port-a-potty. Four hours of hell followed. Each stop doubled the discomfort level since each new stop had more and more people with tickets to Jaipur. We just kept getting more and more squished. When we first got on the train there was enough room to at least walk two steps. By the end of the trip there wasn’t even enough room to lift a leg.

Each new body also brought the room temperature up, and being in a hallway with no windows eventually made the ride more like a moving oven. I don’t even want to mention the stench as the heat seeped in. The one saving grace by having that many people in the boxcar was the fact that there was absolutely no room for people to move. Therefore, there was no way for people to get to the restroom.

For the last hour of our trip I stood while G sat on her bag. She was crunched between my bags, me, and the hallway walls. We had, quite literally, a 2×2 foot space of marinating hell to exist in. The only thing I could do was concentrate on my watch, very much wishing for time to go faster. At some point I had made it a game to see if I could check my watch every 4 minutes. Most of the time I couldn’t make it past 2. The sound of the train grinding, the Indians staring, the smell reeking, the heat melting, and the space cramping, all I could think was “I will NEVER, EVER, EVER, E V E R do this again.”

It took 1 nasty cheese pizza, 2 liters of water, 1 Pepsi, and a 1½ -hour long shower for me to even get to a point of CONSIDERING writing about this experience…