India. the saga continues.
We are presently in Rishikesh. a small charming and most important a little more laidback town. We are going to spend several days to re-charge our batteries.There are lots of restaurants and places for yogi and the temp while still hot is only in the mid thirties (never thought I would say that) and tomorrow we are going white water rafting on the Ganges. Should be fun!
Anyways more about the train from hell. We left Agra at 7:00 pm and since the trip to Ranthambore was not overly long. we elected to go by sleeper class- big mistake! Kim had warned us in advance that sleeper class versus AC sleeper 3 was rough but no one could have predicted that trip. Our compartment had 6 bunks. 6 people right. no! more like 16 to 20 people. the train was so packed you could not move. it was stop and go all the way.and of course hot and incredibly dirty, Kim saw a huge rat. We suffered for 4 and half hours till the extra 500 or so people in car got off, they were attending some sort of festival, most did not even have tickets and the conducter could not even get in the cars to kick anyone off. There were kids six deep on the top bunks and people sitting/standing everywhere. Thank God no one had to use the facilities because you could not move.Then it only took another hour to get into our own compartment and actually lie down by now it is 12:30 and we had been up since 5:00 am, we finally get our hotel about 3:00 am and were up again in 2 and half hours for our safari, and then when we were almost finished our safari we saw the tiger and it helped. It was very cool, he had been in the water when he was spotted and our truck was the first one to get there, so we got a really good look at him and some great pictures.