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Planes, Trains & Automobiles!
From Chitwan we took what was again sold to us as a 4 hour 'private direct bus' to the Sinauli border into India, but was infact a local bus that stopped every 5 minutes to pick up people and randomly blared out extremely loud trance type music, at 10am! The bus didn't actually drop us at the border so we had to get an even more cramped bus for the last 4km, so tightly crammed in that there would certainly be no escape in the case of an accident! Trevor also had to suffer having someone's bum in his face for most of the trip.
Once back across the border and through the bag checking process, where the staff looked at how much we had in our bags and decided they couldn't be bothered to search us properly, we then looked for transport to Gorakhpur. We were approached by a man who offered us a taxi ride to Gorakhpur for 150rps each which seemed like a good deal, however the car journey lasted 10metres and no more than 2 minutes when a passenger in the taxi tried to lock the door and in the process purposefully touched Sophie's leg, no one could produce any valid taxi ID and Sophie started shouting at everyone which included getting out of the car and shouting that she was going to report them to the police. After managing to grab our luggage we finally managed to get on a bus for another hellish 3.5 hour journey.
On arrival in Gorakhpur we made our way to the train station for the next leg of our long journey to Kerala. Having not pre-booked we had no train tickets and had to ask the station manager for advice, resulting in us buying a 'general' ticket which allows you to board the train with no guarantee of a seat. The first part of the our 5 hour journey we sat nestled right across from the toilets until Trevor eventually found some seats which were vacant; for how long we would not know. After swapping seats several times and being moved along by frustrated passengers who had pre-booked, the ticket master took pity on us and offered us some seating for 200rps, which we never ended up paying but still managed to get the seats. While not the best train journey we had ever experienced we couldn't really complain at a cost of 1GBP each!
We arrived in Lucknow, the city in which we would be getting our flights to Kerala from, at 3am and were them dragged around by various rickshaw drivers who falsely promised us cheap accommodation. Apparently at this time in the morning all the hotels were full (most definitely a lie), so tired and frustrated to say the least we ended up back at the train station and slept on chairs in the air-conditioned waiting room, which was surprisingly comfortable when compared to how most of the people in the station sleep; on the hard, cold platform floors wrapped in blankets, appearing not too dissimilar to the dead bodies being paraded around in Varanasi! At about 7am we woke up in the station as the cleaner was mopping the floor around us, and decided to head back into town again and try our luck finding a hotel. The first hotel we looked at was the hotel Mayur which, by the look of it, was still being built or perhaps repaired after an earthquake had hit it?!! At 800rps we decided it was way overpriced so we headed for another Lonely Planet recommendation, which not only had doubled in price, but which took 2 rickshaw drivers to get to as neither could understand English, one of which tried to over-charge us, and also ended up with us getting up dog poo on our bags…Could this morning get any worse?! We then wasted more time and money with the next rickshaw driver who kept dropping us off at expensive hotels even though we repeated our budget to him on several occasions. A couple of hours and money wasted later we ended up back at the first hotel (building site), tired and stressed out, where we managed to get a slightly cheaper room although it was situated on the top floor where all the building work was being done. In most countries this whole hotel would have been closed down while the work was being completed, they could have at least supplied us with hard hat!
Once in our room it was only then that we discovered why the room was cheaper; it didn't have a shower...just a tap with a bucket, after a long day of traveling a shower was something we had both been looking forward to. We spent the rest of the day first trying to catch up on sleep and then looking for a place to eat; after another frustrating rickshaw driver tried to rip us off, we randomly spotted a McDonalds and swiftly headed to it for some sense of familiarity and safety - our first McDonalds whilst travelling! We spent the evening hiding from the hell of Lucknow, eating snacks bought from a supermarket, watching films on TV in our hotel room and later washing each other using the bucket...delightful.
The next morning we got up at 4am as we wanted to make sure that any rickshaw driver in Lucknow would have time to get us to the airport. Sophie wasn't very well that morning and was worried about being trapped in an airplane seat especially if it was some distance from the toilet. Our 2 flights from Lucknow to Mumbai and Mumbai to Cochin went pretty smoothly, thought Trevor was disappointed at the lack of free food, though Sophie was fine throughout the flights. On arrival in Cochin we took a 4 hour bus to Allepey in Kerala on a bus that looked like it was built in the 1950's, and from there it was a quick rickshaw ride to our guest house 'Lake and Paddy' on the backwaters of Kerala. By this time it was about 8pm and we were ready to crash out!
Our journey from Chitwan in Nepal was over 1400 miles and took us 3 days including the night in Lucknow; we went on 4 buses, 1 dodgy taxi, 4 rickshaw rides, 1 train and 2 flights…With about 12 hours sleep we were both glad it was over, and clearly in the knowledge that we were back in India!!
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