Yesterday we caught the bus down to Kochi. It is a fairly preserved 14c fishing port and is probably India’s answer to Rye.
We are staying in a nice hotel only 100m from the Church where Vasco De Gama was originally buried.
Today we have been looking at trains. It is complicated.
There are 4 classes of travel, there are also at least 6 different types of seat/beds. There are three types of conditional ticket ranging from – definitely going, through – turn up you might be lucky, to – waiting list only.
Trains are booked up days in advance.
As a result we have found ourselves unable to get a ticket out of here until the 4th.
Today we went to the train station armed with a hefty train time table.
We have now bought 6 tickets each for the next 3 weeks. This means that we have had to guess how long to spend at each of the destinations but at least we have tickets.
We were required to go and see the fat controller in his air conditioned office so that he could put us in some reserved tourist carriages.
One of the first questions any Indian asks after ‘Where are you from?’, is ‘What do you do?’. No harm in telling him I suppose. The great Indian middle class back scratching jumped into action. ‘Really? Oh in that case I will give you these seats.’ Nice one Mr Controller.