Last Long Haul

June 16 - The Satyagrah Express train from Gorakpur to Delhi


* Note to self : Be sceptical of Indian trains named for swiftness. This is no 'express'.
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How fitting that I'm finishing my foreign sojourn with a marathon bus and train run. I've been traveling since I left the hotel in Kathmandu just over forty-seven hours ago. It'll take me at least another hour or two to get to my next, and final, one. The Monsoon has hit. I left in the rain and it's been gray or coming down most of the past two days. The various surges of aroma that typically shock your senses now hang in thick and constant in the humid air.

Any long piece of travel in the Developing World can humble you, but overnight rides weaken you in a way reminiscent of heartbreak. You rush to make connections or get through border crossings - in my case walking, taking a taxi, two buses and a bicycle rickshaw to get to and over the Nepal/India boder. You end up eating crappy food which invariably means carbs and fat. You're already tired physically and overwrought emotionally. Then, you battle through the darkness (or lack thereof, because no one will turn off the lights) and sounds and constant bumping and jostling of the moving vehicle. All night you fall, literally, chin-on-chest to sleep for just a few minutes only to wake up because of the pain in your neck. In and out. In and out. In and out...in and out of sleep for hours. You feel a surge of raw excitement at dawn both because you finally have something to look at out the window and the akward publicness of sleeping together is over. People know how to act in crowds during the day. Big public slumber parties are not so common. At dawn, your travel compatriots seem much more human for having gone through the same equalizing breakdown. You know, perhaps for the first time, a little bit about what they feel inside and you like them for it.

This particular trip started with a rainy taxi from Durbar Square in the center of Kathmandu. We rambled through the medieval lanes without a hitch finishing at the New Bus Park a couple kilometers north. Touts approached me immediately asking where I was going and to take their particular bus. I looked over the craft that were going to the border and settled on the one that looked the least uncomfortable. There was still an hour before the bus was supposed to leave but it was pouring so I sat in my seat and made a gloomy dinner of the sandwiches I'd brought. Apart from one English woman, I was the only onther non-Nepali/Indian. It took us an hour to wind through the traffic up and out of the Kathmandu Valley.

The winding continued for the next ten or so hours. As usual on buses here, the crew played an uninterrupted stream of Bollywood movie music. The good news is that this bus had a CD player - one of the first I've ever seen to discard the outdated, warbling cassette players. At least the music was clear! At our first stop, at around 11:30 p.m. I stayed onboard and tried to sleep. The crew left the bus door open, though, and the monsoon mosquitoes descended on me. I fought them for half an hour until the driver and crew came back from eating. We stopped for two more such breaks in the night and both times I had to get up and walk around to fend off the bugs.

Around dawn, we pulled into a larger town about an hour north of the Indian border. Our crew unceremoniously ordered us off the bus onto a smaller and supremely crowded local bus. I hesitated but none of the other passengers complained so I grabbed my bags and went along. I ended up sitting on a bag of rice in the aisle for an hour but it was fine. Everyone, locals and long distance travelers alike seemed genial - until we got to Bhairawa, still four kilometers from the border. That was the end of the line for that bus and we're directed to pile into an even more cramped 4x4 with no protection for our bags from the rain. The other option was to take a covered bicycle rickshaw. I had time to kill so I opted for the rickshaw.

It took probably five times longer and cost two or three times as much as the jeep but the silent ride along the rice paddies so early in the day was perhaps the best part of the entire trip. When you know you're seeing something for what might be the last time, you stare and listen and smell and absorb as much as you possibly can so it sticks deep in your tangible memory. You make a prayer of the luminescent green rice shoots and the quizzical buffalo stares and the smoke from the dung fires and the dripping of the rain and you listen to its rhythm and you repeat it back to yourself until you can do it all with closed eyes. Then you whisper thanks that you had a chance to see it and pray that others will have a chance to take a ride just like it.

We eased into a the small but very bustling border town where I changed the last of my Nepali rupees for Indian, filled out the exit papers and walked into India. At the immigration post there, I listened as one of the officials suggested to a young woman backpacker that she change her money with him. She asked what the rate was and he quietly mumbled one very much in his favor. I looked up as she was getting out money and mentioned that there were other places where she might want to see if she could do better. He immediately stammered, "Yes, there are official money changers, as well." She looked at me, looked at him and put her money back in her bag.

Sunauli, like border towns everywhere, is grubby. There is one long street lined with shops with housing bleeding out behind on either side. One half of the street is perpetually filled with huge, tandem-axle freight trucks waiting to cross into Nepal. Every time I've been through, the line is well over a kilometer long. The other half of the street is filled with a constant stream of pedestrians, bicycle rickshaws, cars, motorcycles and ox and horse carts among other manners of locomotion. It's never a pleasant stroll but the bus station is at the south end and you have to walk or take a rickshaw to get there. I was happy walking as it was early and relatively quiet but I needed chai first. I stopped at a stall and drank two. While I was there, a man came in and asked me, "Gorakpur?", the city where I was going. I said yes and he pointed out to his 4x4 parked across the street. There were already a couple men inside (this is important since they won't go until they get a full load of passengers) and his price was the usual 100 rupees so I grabbed my bag and got on board.

He and his two touts worked the stream of walkers coming from the border ruthlessly trying to get more passengers. Two other jeeps were parked there and the competion for riders was stiff. At one point, we had two more riders but there was an argument with the crew from the jeep in front of us about who approached them first. They ended up getting back out of our vehicle and hustled into the one in front. Rancor all around.

After about twenty minutes, our touts sprinted up from behind yelling and slamming closed all the doors. The driver started off before they even finished. We accelerated for about fifty meters and took a hard left down a narrow alley. We went another seventy or so meters and came out in a vacant lot. The driver wheeled the truck around and turned it off. After maybe forty-five seconds, two Indian police rode up on a motorcycle. One had a lathi (long bamboo stick used as a club) and one had a very old rifle. The cop with the lathi came over to the driver and started barking at him in Hindi. I've seen variations of this quite a few times now and I hoped that a foreigner there might temper his brutality a little. A couple times he shifted his glare from the placating driver to me assessing, I assume, if I could understand what was going on.

One assumption you can safely make about Indian cops is that they are guaranteed to be corrupt. They see many if not most law breaking as a way for them to extract bribes. A second assumption is that they are almost as certain to be violent. Indians may be used to this but it still shocks the hell out of me. This inquisition progressed as I've seen most do. The cop seems to bark, "What the hell do you think you were doing?" The offender says something trying to minimize or deny what was going on. The cop goes on, getting enraged that the accused would question what the HE saw. In this instance, the cop wanted the keys to the vehicle and the man to come with him. The driver pleaded but the officer just got more and more angry. As usual, a good sized crowd had gathered to watch. Eventually, he reached in the open door, grabbed the driver by the collar of his shirt and yanked him outside. Of course, that's never enough. He went on shaking him banging his head into the truck then almost throwning him into the mud. The cops took the keys, got back on their cycle and told him, I assume, to follow them back to their post. As soon as they were gone, the two other 4x4 crew guys frantically got us passengers and our bags out and told us to "GO!"

They might not look dangerous...

I was now happy to walk down to the bus park as originally planned. I knew some exercise would help shake off the grim adrenaline. At the bus park, I hopped on a half full small one and waited for it to fill up. Too much competition made that task take over an hour - not a big deal, my train wasn't until 3:25 p.m. and it was only 9: 00 a.m. but forward progress is usually preferable to stasis.

The rail junction of Gorakpur in India is a fabled nowheres-ville in the annals of South Asian travels. It sits at the junction of major rail lines and, if you want to get in and out of Nepal, you are most likely to pass through here. Lonely Planet says of it, "There is nothing to see in Gorakpur." After four visits, I have to agree. The Monsoon only made it worse. The normally dusty streets oozed with mud. I still had over four hours to kill so I made myself familiar with the rambling train station.

My ticket was only "wait-listed", a fact unknown to me until after I'd paid for it, but the travel agent in Kathmandu assured me I'd move up to a "confirmed" birth by the time of departure. Not true. I had, in fact, moved up, but only from 49 to 26. (*Second note to self: Don't trust Nepali travel agents.) Not only that but the wait list still had over 200 people on it. Great. I bought that ticket over two weeks prior and the best I could do with lead time was waitlisting. There were a few other trains coming through but I had no chance at an impromptu ticket on any of them. I had to get to Delhi to catch a plane, though. I asked three different counter agents and two other passengers who spoke English what I might be able to do. They all said to just get on the train and talk to the conductor. I resolved that I'd be on the train one way or another and deal with whatever happened once I was rolling. To be in Delhi in two days was non-negotiable.

The hours went by and 3:25 came...but the train did not. I found out it was a hour and a-half late. I won't relive the agony of the successive delays but each hour I returned to the platform, saw no train and went to the Enquiry desk to get the latest. I did this five times. We finally left at around 10:00 p.m. - six and a half hours late. I tracked down a conductor who immediately barked that the train was full. I pleaded with him about my flight and need to get to Delhi on time and that I'd take anything. I didn't even have to have a seat. I'd stand. He hesitated then said, "Go to Sleeper." I've seen plenty of people standing at the ends of the cars in Sleeper before. Now, I was going to count myself among them.

The car I chose was only about 2/3rd's full. I couldn't believe my luck when the train started rolling and several berths remained empty. I hoisted my backpack and bag into one, crawled up and was alseep before the last car was out of the station. I was exhausted. My next memory came when a man was slapping his hand on my bunk. He was asking me something in Hindi and, although I absolutely didn't want to hear it, knew exactly what it was. He was ensconsing his family into this compartment and they had the ticket for my berth. I looked down and around the car and my heart flooded with dread. There were people lying on every square foot of horizontal space. Not only was I tired, but I had my huge backpack to find a home for. I sighed, fell back, and told him, "OK, one minute."

By pure luck, there was a storage alcove at the end of the car just big enough for my pack. I stuffed it in and stepped out onto the platform. Hundreds of people slept everywhere on the cement. (See below video)

I was happy to discover that I'd slept about four and a half hours - better than nothing. I got back on and took a place next to the door. A family had taken the floor behind me (see below) and four of five scruffy men joined me standing. Everyone looked tired and no one spoke but in all the jostling, I never heard one raised voice. Indians have been through all this and more.

The train rolled on. Everything was quiet - a rare thing in India. Apart from thebuzz of the overhead fans and the clatter of the tracks, I heard nothing. Successive station platforms punctuated the darkness. At some stops, the lone light at either end of each car attracted clouds of bugs. They engulfed everything around, including those of us standing. Some of the men hopped off the car into the dim light of the station until the train moved again. I was reading and the white pages of my book looked like and entomology experiment. That happened only once. Afterward, I did the platform hustle, too.


(Sleepers awake in the a.m.)

Finally, the sky started to lighten. Passengers made their ways to the bathrooms at each car's end. I don't think I've ever turned and made room for people so many times in one stretch. It went on for maybe two hours - men, women, teens, women coming back for a second round with kids, old people (apparently incontinent based on how many trips they made). It was as if the whole train car refused to stay in their seats. Somehow, though, daybreak seemed to put everyone in a tolerant mood, me included. I'd be later than I planned but I was reasonably certain I'd make it to Delhi now. I just had to ride it out.

Rolling through that early morning countryside, I also felt nostalgia flooding back into me. Who knows when I'll see tropical fields and villages like this again? Hell, who knows when I'll ride a train again? The dim light and fatigue, one point, made me question what I saw. Out in a field about a hundred meters from the train were what looked like two birds. They were so tall, though, that I literally doubted my sight. Less than hour later I saw another pair, this time much closer to the train. An Internet search showed me I'd had the very good fortune to see these:

http://www.savingcranes.org/species/sarus.cfm

The train rolled on. Station after station. Even on a long ride, trains in India are rarely without interesting things to see. You get the impression that half of India's billion-plus people are on the move at any given time.

We eventually crossed the Ganges and down on the banks below the bridge, a group of people were having a funeral. The flames of the funeral pyre had just started to burn when we rolled over. The men stood around the pyre and the women, as is tradition, squatted in their own group a few meters away. The Ganges.....freaky.




On board, you never know who or what you're going to see. In India, there is a group of people called hirja's You might call them transsexuals or, in some cases, eunuchs. They like to refer to themselves as a 3rd gender. As you might imagine, they are quite marginalized. One way they support themselves is to beg on trains. I've seen quite a few and they always like to push for money from foreigners. I was happy to fork over a few rupees.



The last hour of the ride the air got grayer and grayer. The smog told me we were finally penetrating the 10 million(+) person mega-city of New Delhi. I was so tired I was numb. Finally, out the left window I saw a wall of the Red Fort. Relief.




Shortly, I was out on the street in front of the Old Delhi Railway Station in my rickshaw. The ride to the guest house in Pahar Ganj neighborhood took another half hour.



I think it was almost 50 hours from door to door. I gave myself a good, long scrub, at a tasty south Indian style meal....an slept. Fun stuff...but I think I'll wait awhile before I do another trip like that.