The long unwinding road
We didn�t know it at the time but we had an adventure ahead of us! We were to travel from Pune to Bombay where we would then get onto a train at Dadar station enroute to Chandigarh. The night before, I let sleep win the battle, the loser was the bag I�d be packing for my trip, consequently I was only a few hours away from departure and I still hadn�t begun packing.
Cut to sometime in the future: The last eight hours have been one extraordinary chain of events. The plan seemed simple enough or so I believed. We had to leave at 4:30 pm from Pune to reach Bombay by 7:30. Well in time for our train that was to leave at 11:00 pm. Lady Luck declined to show her thirty-two pearlies that evening and so we ended up departing two hours late. The reasons may as well lie in the past! Murphy�s law was having a field day with us. Our bus from Pune was destined to be held up by a traffic jam for two hours just outside Bombay. With time ticking, we decided to ditch the bus and make our way to the station by local inner city trains. It would turn out to be our best decision yet. We found out only much later that the traffic jam that held us up went on for another four hours! So after hiking it to the nearest station from the highway, we bought our tickets and were unfortunate enough to watch the first connecting train leave the platform just as we got onto it.
BLOODY MURPHY!!
Eventually we did make it onto a local, though our second connecting train would also be missed under circumstances that resembled the first. We finally made it to the platform at Dadar station just as the clock struck eleven. We must�ve been quite a sight: ten young men and women making a mad dash across the footbridge to get to a train that was just about to leave! We had braved massive delays, traffic jams, hikes in the middle of the night and one missed connector after another. Something as trivial as a moving train was not going to stop us just yet! We piled ourselves onto the train and breathed loud sighs of relief. Well actually we whooped and hollered like a bunch of football hooligans. It didn�t matter; we�d made the train. Our relief was to be short-lived though, in the madness that preceded the wild celebrations, we had lost one bag and several people happened to have lost footwear during the sprint. Mixed emotions would reign supreme that night. We didn�t have confirmed tickets, which meant that we had to sit wherever we found a spare seat and when you have ten people to a group, that is never easy! I ended up finding myself a nice lil spot on the floor. The girls were lucky enough to be offered seats by some young men, at that point I don�t think we really cared about the intent with which they so readily gave up their seats to these girls, we would keep our eyes open at any rate.
There were 28 more hours to that journey. All of which involved bodily contortions and berth hopping. For someone who is a little over six feet and some 90 odd kilos, it�s never easy.
All ten �adventurers� would eventually reach their destination, over a day later, safely and in one piece; well almost!
We didn�t know it at the time but we had an adventure ahead of us! We were to travel from Pune to Bombay where we would then get onto a train at Dadar station enroute to Chandigarh. The night before, I let sleep win the battle, the loser was the bag I�d be packing for my trip, consequently I was only a few hours away from departure and I still hadn�t begun packing.
Cut to sometime in the future: The last eight hours have been one extraordinary chain of events. The plan seemed simple enough or so I believed. We had to leave at 4:30 pm from Pune to reach Bombay by 7:30. Well in time for our train that was to leave at 11:00 pm. Lady Luck declined to show her thirty-two pearlies that evening and so we ended up departing two hours late. The reasons may as well lie in the past! Murphy�s law was having a field day with us. Our bus from Pune was destined to be held up by a traffic jam for two hours just outside Bombay. With time ticking, we decided to ditch the bus and make our way to the station by local inner city trains. It would turn out to be our best decision yet. We found out only much later that the traffic jam that held us up went on for another four hours! So after hiking it to the nearest station from the highway, we bought our tickets and were unfortunate enough to watch the first connecting train leave the platform just as we got onto it.
BLOODY MURPHY!!
Eventually we did make it onto a local, though our second connecting train would also be missed under circumstances that resembled the first. We finally made it to the platform at Dadar station just as the clock struck eleven. We must�ve been quite a sight: ten young men and women making a mad dash across the footbridge to get to a train that was just about to leave! We had braved massive delays, traffic jams, hikes in the middle of the night and one missed connector after another. Something as trivial as a moving train was not going to stop us just yet! We piled ourselves onto the train and breathed loud sighs of relief. Well actually we whooped and hollered like a bunch of football hooligans. It didn�t matter; we�d made the train. Our relief was to be short-lived though, in the madness that preceded the wild celebrations, we had lost one bag and several people happened to have lost footwear during the sprint. Mixed emotions would reign supreme that night. We didn�t have confirmed tickets, which meant that we had to sit wherever we found a spare seat and when you have ten people to a group, that is never easy! I ended up finding myself a nice lil spot on the floor. The girls were lucky enough to be offered seats by some young men, at that point I don�t think we really cared about the intent with which they so readily gave up their seats to these girls, we would keep our eyes open at any rate.
There were 28 more hours to that journey. All of which involved bodily contortions and berth hopping. For someone who is a little over six feet and some 90 odd kilos, it�s never easy.
All ten �adventurers� would eventually reach their destination, over a day later, safely and in one piece; well almost!
posted by Pierre at
11:10 AM
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