Once we sorted out our home in Surat for the day, we crashed out on the bed to sleep off our fitful night of space exploration on the night bus from Udaipur. We got up about 3p and inquired at the front desk where none of the five men crowded around the desk spoke much English and tried to pantomime our desire for a train out of there the next day. I also told them we were interested in taking a short trip out to relatively nearby Dandi, where Gandhi had lead his famed Salt March in 1930.

The train ticket booking went well – I thought – until once we had registered and paid for our reservations for early the next morning, we then returned to the issue at hand of going to Dandi this afternoon, and the man told us that there wasn’t enough time to go today. Clearly, something had been lost in the translation that this was something we had wanted to do, and therefore probably shouldn’t have booked the first-thing-in-the-morning train if we were now not able to accomplish it today.

We find that though we like to stick to the tourist trail anyway, sometimes even if there is worthwhile stuff OFF the backpacker’s tourist trail, it’s not so easy to get there once you’ve diverged even a little bit, as we apparently had in Surat. So while I would have liked to go see it, and we were so close, we decided we could live probably ok without it. We had seen the site in Delhi where Gandhi had been shot in 1948 so we had at least gotten to walk (quite literally) in his old footsteps somewhere in India.

So we were glad to skeedaddle from Surat early the next day. Fittingly with the rest of our stay there, breakfast was an underwhelming, poorly translated interpretation of reasonable substance to start the day. We even got up super early so we could order eggs and tea and curd with banana and toast and so on to be sure to hold us over for our long day traveling. In fact, what we were able to get was toast. (With no jam, for reasons unknown). And…hot milk. No tea either. Who in India doesn’t have tea? Even Ramniwas in Jodhpur had said that, as an Indian, he simply cannot and will not leave the house without his cup of chai first – it’s bad luck. We must have found the one place that didn’t have even a tea bag in the entire country.

[ngfilename filename='P1120197.JPG']

So, shaking our heads at this whole silly experience called “Surat”, we gathered our things and made our move out of this strange city stopover.