First Days

2008-01-10, Bhubaneswar, India

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Our trip starts with a late takeoff. Our darling son-in-law who along with Barbara suggested that we book the seats with an empty seat between us so that if the plane is not full we have a whole row to ourselves. As we were booking on the Internet we were able to change our seats because we were sitting beside someone. So we moved and booked a row for ourselves. Turns out that the plane is full and that there are 3 seats on the entire plane with an entertainment center that doesn't work. And yes Barbara's and mine are two of the three seats without a TV screen. Anyway we slept most of the way and it turned out fine as we were awake only for meals.

Then the plane from London to Kolkata (Calcutta) was late in leaving which was OK because it meant that we spent less time in the Kolkata train station and more time in the London airport. Not that the trip was long but on the London to Kolkata flight at one point I asked what meal we were eating as the served on the basis of local time. Anyway we took a taxi from Kolkata airport to the train station and spent about four hours with a fairly substantial group of homeless people who were sleeping on newspapers. We skipped going to Kolkata and the train that we booked on the Internet is the train to Bhubaneswar (BBWR). As this is about 4 AM the train station is quite empty. Eventually we made our way to the platform which we thought meant climbing a fairly long staircase. We hired a porter because we switched from backpacks to rolling duffle bags and they are difficult to carry. The porter set us back about a dollar so if this keeps up we may be up to 4 or 5 dollars by the end of the trip. The train ride was fairly straightforward. We shared our compartment with a railway official who when we arrived insisted that he drive us to a hotel in what turns out to be a chauffeur driven official state car. The only problem was that he felt we should stay at 4 star hotels so we drove from hotel to hotel that quoted around $125 a night and up. Eventually we convinced him that we knew of several hotels that were more in our price range. He dropped us off and we exchanged email addresses.

BBWR with its broken sidewalks, polluted air and noise has little to recommend it other that its access to some important temples and interesting caves. These are ancient Jain caves carved around the 1st century BC. Chiseled out by Jain ascetics. While strolling in BBWR we came across Western Union office that had a money exchange. So we went in to cash some traveller's checks. After doing all the preliminaries we were asked to wait a few minutes. Ten minutes later I asked about getting our money and we were told that they sent someone out to the local ATM to get our money and it shouldn't be long. All told we spent about a half hour waiting for the cash. We had a good laugh.