After a minor snag in getting my train ticket, I was finally on my way from hot and hazy Bombay to the golden, palm-lined beaches of Goa. There was no heartache this time in leaving the city: the skies had turned a sickly, bilious yellow, and the air, devoid of wind, was heavy and thick with smoke. And I knew I would be back for the Christmas and New Year holidays when the weather would be less hot, or what a Mumbaiker might describe as being “a little on the chilly side.”
Quick digression: is it Bombay or Mumbai? As a Bombayite told me recently, Mumbai is a city, while Bombay is a feeling. Everyone I know who is Indian still calls it Bombay, although officially it’s Mumbai. Neither choice will offend.
I had booked tickets on the much anticipated new train, the Tejas Express, which supposedly runs with limited stops and will get you from CST in the Fort district of Mumbai to Karmali in central Goa in about ten hours. Not only that, but it was the exciting new train that had wifi and media display monitors with movies, music, and games. I’d read that the wifi was a pipe dream and only worked in the major stations, which turned out to be true, but the entertainment was alright, though there was only one movie in English: Zero Dark Thirty. I don’t want veer off into politics, but I felt a little self-conscious watching it, especially during the end when the troops rush in to kill Hussein and his men, but no one was paying any attention at 5:30 in the morning.
For the first four or five hours of the trip, we were zipping along through gorgeously green, lush fields that I could not stop snapping pics of, but about halfway to Karmali we began stopping at every station, and sometimes we would wait for up to twenty minutes. During this time, the train doors stayed locked and no one was allowed to get on or off. Usually, there are various snack vendors who crowd on at every stop, and while some chikki and a chai would have been nice, I’d been warned before I took my trip that there were roving groups of thieves who were hopping on and off trains at stops to snatch everything they could from unwary travelers.
As people started to get exasperated with the long waits at the stations, the gentleman across from me explained that there was only one track, so we had to wait until another train passed before they would switch us back to the main track. That explanation seemed to make sense until we started to stop at the bigger stations where there were multiple tracks in view. A seasoned traveler on this express train was sitting across from me, and she said that she had never experienced the stopping and waiting before, so I am not sure what was going on. A number of people around me were complaining, and a dad holding his squirmy daughter as his tired and grumpy wife let out a series of sighs, joked that the train must be running on IST: India Stretchy Time.
We finally reached the station about half past five, which was only a couple hours beyond our original ETA. The woman sitting across from me with whom I’d been chatting during the trip kindly waited on the platform to make sure I found the pre-paid taxi counter. The prices were pretty reasonable, considering that I would have had to take four buses (all running on India Stretchy Time) and then schlep my bags another ¼ mile to reach my hotel. If you are trying to stick to a budget, I recommend you focus on keeping your lodging and meals on the cheap as opposed to skimping on transportation. Third-class train tickets in packed, non-air conditioned compartments full of men who may stare at you the entire time have been romanticized in novels and by young backpacking bloggers, but all my Indian friends have told me to take a AC class 2 or better. The price difference will be negligible unless you are a shoestring budget, but the hassle it saves is beyond monetary worth.
Overall it was a lovely trip, and there was even a western-style toilet in one of the bathrooms, as I discovered toward the end of the ride after swaying side-to-side over a glorified hole in the floor (glorified only because there was a flush button and I couldn’t see the tracks below) the first couple of visits to the bathroom. Our train left promptly at 5 a.m., so there wasn’t much to see for the first couple of hours, but when the sun started to come up, that all changed. Unless we were in a tunnel, I couldn’t tear my eyes off the gorgeous scenery as we flew past lush rice paddy fields, lazily meandering rivers, and distant mountains cut with rushing waterfalls. And as it was just past the monsoon, everything was a eye-popping verdant green that shone more brightly for the contrast with the red clay fields recently harrowed and seeded for the next growth cycle.
Next stop, Kerala, but for now I’m going to chill for a while in Goa to catch my breath and relax before heading to the Ayurvedic hospital in Kottakkal where I plan to have my main detox. For the next couple of weeks, my blog will be more focussed on the tourist tip angle and how to have fun and eat well in Goa. While it is lovely here and there are plenty of Ayurvedic massage and treatment services, Goa is not renowned for its authentic Ayurvedic healthcare centers, although I don’t see how a massage or two will hurt. Stay tuned.
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