I ended my first journal entry with keen anticipation of a three day weekend spent in the mountains and the possibility of meeting the Dalai Lama, so you might expect me to have a lot to write about by now! Well I do, but sadly there is nothing to say about that weekend in particular because the journey never happened in the end! Basically we missed our train because of traffic and stayed in Delhi instead. It wasn't a big problem however, since the only loss of this was the cost of the railway ticket, which was just £5 (sleeper class). It is however worth mentioning the nightmarish scenario of our leaving, if only as a way of illustrating the utter chaos of this place! The plan had been to leave on an overnight train from Old Delhi Railway Station on the Thursday evening and return on an overnight train on Sunday, arriving back just in time for work on Monday morning. In the event, Thursday brought with it the worst rain of the monsoon and caused the worst traffic that Delhi has seen in over a decade – it was absolutely indescribable! The whole city was at a standstill during rush hour and the cars looked like little boats floating in the smelly, muddy water that lay stagnant across the many of the roads.
We were advised to leave for the station as soon as possible after work at the office since it was an understandably uncertain day for travel in the city. Our train was due to leave at about 9:30pm. I left the office at 5pm, managed to get home by some small miracle in an auto (it was still raining... very heavily!) and was packed and ready to leave by 6pm. The only problem was that Laura and her brother David, who are short-term volunteers with Asha and had decided to come with me, were not even home yet! They had come straight from Kalkaji, which is the slum that they were teaching English in during the day and had had a rather traumatic journey home; ending with a 2 kilometre walk in the pouring rain, since they couldn't catch an auto! Drenched and exhausted, we were finally ready to leave at about 7:30-8pm. Our spirits began to lift as the rain became lighter and eventually stopped but we then discovered that nearly all the taxis and auto-rickshaws in the area were refusing to take us because of the state of the roads. We had to pay an auto twice the cost of the journey to persuade him to take us and instead of going straight to Old Delhi Railway station, we asked to be taken to the nearest Metro station (it was our only hope since some of the roads were practically impassible). We were then stuck in a depressingly stagnant traffic jam for over an hour, with a neighbouring truck filling our auto with the noxious gasses from it's unfavourably placed exhaust. To make matters worse, the rather ungrateful auto driver didn't know where the metro station was and wasted another half an hour looking for it!
The scheduled departure time of our train came and went, but we persevered nonetheless in the hope that the trains were also delayed. When we arrived at the Metro station it was full of people doing just what we were and was extremely busy. For our subsequent stretch of our trip we had to endure a very exciting journey on a train that was quite literally bursting at the seams! As it stopped at the station, there was an alarming stampede to board it and when we finally got on, the doors wouldn't shut for the sheer pressure of people inside! We were squashed together like sardines and only managed to disembark at the right station by tumbling over and around the people nearest the door. Then, when we had at last alighted on the station platform, Laura realised that her shoe was no longer on her foot and it took another few minutes and a rugby tackle or two to retrieve it!! And thus we had arrived, it was passed 10:30pm and we were so exhausted (yet strangely invigorated) by our journey that we were beyond caring whether we actually caught the train or not. Surprisingly, despite most of the trains leaving hours later than scheduled, our train had somehow managed to leave precisely on time!!! so... we went home!
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