A Round-the-World Journey to Find a New Home #22

Vijaywada, and Train travel to Hampi

Vijaywada, well what can I say? Not a lot really. It has a lot of cinemas, a very confusing road layout and to top it all, only very average restaurants. Why we planned to stay two nights here I can’t quite work out… The tiffin shops (kind of takeaway places that do food in parcels if you ask) were quite good but other than that Vijaywada is a very forgettable place, so then let’s. Moving swiftly on…

Train travel in India is an absorbing subject, and well worth a mention since most of our travels will be by train if at all possible! From previous experience it is the most comfortable and rewarding way of travelling and a copy of “Trains at a Glance” is an invaluable purchase. For the outlay of 30 Rs., you have all the major train timetables at your fingertips, and since getting any sense out of the inquiry desk at any station is a huge task in itself it makes your life a whole lot easier. It also means you can plan forward travel and fill in those wretchedly bureaucratic application forms in the peace of your hotel without a plethora of Indians looking over your shoulder at what you’re doing.

I remember a time I was travelling by train back in ’89/90 on my first trip to India. I can’t remember where I was or where to or from I had come, it’s irrelevant really. There we were, myself and my travelling companion, sitting in a passenger train having set out maybe an hour before. It was quite unusual to travel on a train that was so empty, the compartment was almost empty bar a couple of Indian people. The scenery was quite nice and we were having a very pleasant time, thank you. However, as time went on and we stopped at various stations along the way, the carriage filled up. We were travelling on a passenger train that stopped at all the local stations and didn’t have reserved tickets. This means that the seats, designed to seat 4 or 5 were actually available to anybody who could squeeze his or her butt onto even an inch of it. Soon the bench we were sitting on was getting pretty squashed. More people were standing in the corridor and even the upper bunks were starting to fill up…

It struck me at the time that all these stations we were passing though didn’t seem to have enough patrons on the platform to fill this train to this capacity, but then this is India, and of course, anything is possible. Now, rights to seats is a very shady area in these no reservation class trains. The likelihood is that should you vacate it for even one second it would disappear in a vacuum of shifting buttocks and vanish more quickly than a wallet left on a station bench. This in mind, as we were fighting for shoulder space and pulling faces at each other; toilet breaks were only for the most desperate! In these confined spaces doing anything but inanely stare at each other or out of the window is close to impossible. Sardines have nothing on this, and if sardines were an Olympic sport then the Indians would surely win every time, hands down. However, I was endeavoring to read my book of the moment, which almost everybody in the compartment was trying to get a look at too. Not satisfied that it was just written pages with no pictures in a language that they couldn’t understand, they just kept staring at the pages, sometimes commenting on something. A murmur often went up as I turned a page, this obviously was more stimulating for them than it was for me.

Eventually the time came when my bladder was screaming for relief and I said to my travelling companion of the forced demise of my seat, and hoped that it might be possible for her to “shift up a little bit” into my space taking up more than a single person should so that I might be able to squeeze back in on my return. This seemed to work quite well, actually worryingly too well, the space where my bottom had been ceremoniously warming was left almost totally un-moved into. Puzzled and perplexed, I carefully picked my way through the crowd in our compartment and emerged into the corridor and set off to the toilet, when it struck me that the rest of the carriage was only sparsely populated! It seemed that we were the magnets for all these people and they were prepared to sit in particularly cramped conditions to sit with us in our compartment.

Needless to say we moved compartments, and thought it all very funny and sweet that they were that interested in us. This mirth and joy didn’t last long though as our newly acquired compartment starting to fill up again. I think we moved three or four times before they got the message, and only a select few were privileged to sit with us with the second best seats above us in the upper bunks, and standing room around the peripherals. We didn’t mind this, as long as we had some space to move around a bit, if only to change positions and ease a numb bum!

Although little interest is given to travelers now on the trains, as we have become as common as a tea vendor, you still sometimes get the feeling of being watched. And low and behold, when you look up there is someone who stares at you point blank with unblinking eyes as if you are of extreme interest even though you are just reading a book or cleaning your nails. The avid curiosity that beholds them, like a kitten after a dangling bit of yarn still amazes me. Us travelers have been pacing the length and width of India in legions for well over a decade now.

As I said, one of the most common sights in India is the tea, or Chai, vendor and on the trains it is absolutely no different. From first light to dusk and after, droves of these people walk the length of the train plying their trade. Sometimes with two or three working your carriage at once! The call of the tea or coffee vendor is very recognizable, it goes like this; chai-chai-chai-chai-chai-eeee, or coffee-coffee-coffee-coffee-coffee-eee. And of course you have the vendors multi-tasking with coffee-chai-coffee-chai-coffee-chai-coffee-chai-ee, all ending with an upturn in the intonation and said in a grating voice that reminds me of nails dragged down a blackboard. With all the competition and given that chai is only 2 Rs, they can’t be exactly raking it in. You can purchase a wide variety of foodstuffs, drinks, fruits, nuts etc on a train, all without the hassle of leaving your seat. It’s all quite civilized really.

The Morning Chorus

Whatever class of seating you endeavor to travel by on an overnight sleeper train, you will probably be witness to the morning chorus, just maybe in differing intensities depending on class. Indians (unlike Thai’s, thus a little amount of adjustment is required when traveling between the two countries) go to bed early and get up at the crack of dawn. Inhumanely sometimes. On the trains it starts in the early hours at the first sign of the skies reddening. It begins with a few coughs and a little light chat amongst traveling companions. It then crescendos to full blown conversations with no effort not to disturb your fellow passengers, therefore everybody wakes and the carriage becomes a heated debate at the house of commons. The lights pop on everywhere and I tend to look about bleary-eyed searching for the natural disaster that must of occurred during the night to start something like this up. With the first signs of life, now enter the chai and coffee vendors, not wanting to miss out on a single second’s worth of selling time (chai-coffee-chai-coffee-chai-bloody-coffee-eee). Then comes the rush for the toilets and sinks, seeing as there is only one sink and two toilets per carriage, and the 2nd class 3 tier sleeper carriage berths 64, you can imagine the frantic rush to get there first. (This phenomenon can also be witnessed at opening time of any institution that requires queuing, specifically railway booking offices, funnily enough)

Part of an Indian’s morn ritual is to spend around 7-8 minutes trying to bring up some unearthly substance that lies within them with the loudest, stomach turning coughs, hacks, and wretches which sounds like a particularly nasty way to die, and then spit what they have accumulated out without abash. When there is too much of a queue at the sink/toilet this is normally done in situ and the offending phlegm is ejected from the window. If you are unfortunate enough to occupy the window space then you are in for a front row seat!

Other things that take place are the brushing of teeth, and the scraping of tongues, yes, the scraping of tongues. This is done with a tongue scraper, which is a bendy flat bit of metal with handles at each end, and is used during before or after the teeth cleaning session. And there we have it, probably only experienced in India, the rare and captivating sounds of the morning chorus as witnessed on the Vijaywada-Hospet Hampi Express. It is truly a captivating experience not to be missed during anyone’s travels in India.

The advent of westerners travelling India so frequently may or may not be linked to the advent of western style toilets on trains. I’m not sure, however I can’t remember there being so many back in ’89/90. It is always wise to avoid the western style toilets (WST’s) on trains if at all possible. Many a time have I opened to door to a WST and found shoe prints either side of the seat, as if perching yourself upon the seat squat toilet style was the way to go. Not only is this a precarious position, unlike in the squat toilets, they don’t provide handles to steady yourself whilst in motion (Dual sense). This in mind, you can imagine the state of some of the WSTs, and this altogether puts you off using them. The thing is that when an Indian enters a spoiled western latrine (as they are called on trains, latrines) and sees the sad state of affairs, it doesn’t do the westerners credibility for cleanliness much good!

All that being said, train travel in India is still the way to go in my opinion. You get to see all sorts and all walks of life in the passengers and through the windows to boot. Nowhere else can you see such integration of classes and castes than on a railway station. This kind of intermingling just doesn’t happen elsewhere in India to my knowledge. Not only that, it is almost like being let into someone’s family home when travelling on a train. All the home interactions take place between families travelling together and often you get offered some of their private fare as well. Not to mention the sights that constantly flash past your window, the train is often slower than the bus and that gives you plenty of time to take in the surrounding landscapes and what’s happening upon them. Urban, rural, farms, villages, people at work and the slums on the peripherals of towns, you get to see it all. It’s surprising how many people stop to look up and wave at a passing train, young and old, laborers and others, and it’s always fun to stick your arm out of the barred window and wave back and possibly shout a greeting. The train is the one place that an Indian cross dresser can get away with walking up to you, shaking your hand and asking for 5 Rs for the privilege. Great eh?