One very short night in Jhansi
Trip Start
Sep 17, 2007
1
81
272
Trip End
Oct 08, 2008
Jhansi,
India
Wednesday, December 26, 2007
We had another brief wait outside the Tourist Booking Office, this time with a French woman who switched between English and French somewhat frequently. Fortunately her accent was clean enough for both Travis and I to understand her. Woot! Then the doors to the office opened and we raced to the head of the queue. But our train was full! Travis says they shouldn't say such dispiriting things when the next sentence is, "but there is another train half an hour later." So we had a train to Jhansi! Whew. But Jhansi was not our final destination. We were taking the long route to Varanasi so that we could stop in Khajuraho and make faces at the creative sexual positions carved in stone on pretty much every temple.
Again we had a friendly Indian man seated across from us on the train, and again he told us when we needed to get off the train. Again our train arrived three hours late. Somehow, no matter what time we're meant to get into a town, we always arrive at midnight. Why is that? But I think Jhansi is a stopover to more interesting places, so pretty much every hotel operates by the 24 hrs. The hotel we chose said it was full, which caused us to look at each other and say, "That makes life a little more interesting..." At which point the man at the desk asked what time we were leaving, and, because it was 5 hours later, he gave us a room. We had a midnight thali while watching Dukes of Hazzard and then had a very short sleep before rising to catch the early, five hr bus to Khajuraho.
Our rickshaw driver from the train station agreed to come get us in the morning. Unfortunately, while Travis was arranging this he neglected to negotiate a price then and there. So our driver tried to charge us for last night twice, in a completely convoluted fashion totally designed to wrest a sneaky agreement out of the tourist. You see, he said, "60 rupees: 20 train station to here, 40 here to bus station." So if you said, okay and then tried to give him 40 rupees because you paid him the 20 last night he would get mad at you for not paying the agreed upon 60. See? Tricky. Travis points out that he actually started at 80 rupees and we finally did get him to a simple 40, but it was a little too stressful at 5 a.m.
Then, at the bus station our driver told us to get on a bus, so, because we were running late, we did. It wasn't the bus that we really should have been on. The Pradesh has a special bus that runs efficiently and is specifically cited by the LP. We watched that bus drive away while the engine on our normal bus refused to start. Then we lurched along for about an hour (though most of the hour was spend not moving, causing Travis to freak out about not getting to Khajuraho, which was extremely important since LP said there were only three buses a week (Tuesday, Thursday, Sunday), and if we didn't take the bus that day (Thursday), we would be stuck in Khajuraho for ages and end up with only one or two days in Varanasi) until it turned out that the gear shift was broken. I made Travis feel better by telling him about the time I broke the shift on my dad's truck and he took the rest of the day welding it back together.
Just when we were about to get off the bus and figure out something else, the bus started and kept going as if nothing had ever been wrong. We had gotten on the bus at 5:20, it was now 6:40 and we still had at least five hours to drive. This may not seem so bad, except that the bus we needed to catch was scheduled to leave at 15:00. It didn't give us a lot of time to eat and wander around the temples.
We were both surprised, therefore, when we arrived at the bus station only half an hour later than we had originally expected to on the fancy bus. But that wasn't the only fortunate thing - the friendly chai man who is in charge of the bus schedule and ticket distribution while the normal office is closed told us that there is, in fact, a direct bus to Varanasi every day. We wouldn't be stranded. Trav's relief was palpable. We bought a ticket for the next day and set out to enjoy the town.
Erin
