Clambering aboard at 6am, happy that it wasn't a long trip - three hours or so - but a close-up look at India in early morning where travelers were waking up in second class sleeper, slowly climbing down from upper bunks and resettling themselves on bottom bunks and going back to sleep as the super-efficient bespectacled railway lady in blue uniform slammed and fastened the middle and upper beds to the walls. Hawkers jostled by selling tea and doughnuts and did brisk business. Two young women, one just pregnant, stirred and ate and then curled up like cats on window seats.
From Delhi to Kochi, almost the length of the country, I'd flown down to India's southern tip and eaten the most disgusting spinach sandwich imaginable and gone on to spend the night in a $5 flea-pit in Ernakalum where a mosey round found a small dock for passenger ferries taking people over the water to Fort Kochi Island.
There wasn't a lot of street light and yellow eyes glistened from the darkness in which red hot cigarette tips burned. Plant life grew wild and abundant, festooned with the plastic colours of garbage. In high high humidity I slurped a fresh orange juice at a stall where friendly locals were chewing the evening cud, searching for some breeze off the bay, and who questioned me gently about my origins. Being British here, I was realising, is nowhere near as bad as in Argentina and I was soon enamored by the posh, perfectly pronounced, amusingly pitched, very polite Indian-accented English that almost everyone seems to speak. A tuk-tuk driver pulled up and with reefer clamped between his teeth he asked, "Would you be enjoying a ride to your hotel, sir?"
Waking at 4.30am in a grimy and steamy room, ceiling fan rattling since the Raj, I splashed water on my face, slung on a few clothes, shouldered the bag and headed out into the pre-dawn where on broken pavements I stepped over men and women sleeping rough on tarpaulin and sacking, some of them snoring, one old boy with a big smile on his face.
It was a short walk to the station where I found a jolly coffee shop owner selling some sort of doughnut without cream or jam and from a plastic seat on the street I watched the little town on a railway junction wake up. Sleepy men in knee-length sarongs wandered down to the newsagent for the morning papers; children bought bottled milk from a bejeweled old crone, cow tethered to a fence railing; taxi drivers rose from make-shift back seat beds and stretched and yawned; and at 6am I caught the express train to Varkala ...
From Delhi to Kochi, almost the length of the country, I'd flown down to India's southern tip and eaten the most disgusting spinach sandwich imaginable and gone on to spend the night in a $5 flea-pit in Ernakalum where a mosey round found a small dock for passenger ferries taking people over the water to Fort Kochi Island.
There wasn't a lot of street light and yellow eyes glistened from the darkness in which red hot cigarette tips burned. Plant life grew wild and abundant, festooned with the plastic colours of garbage. In high high humidity I slurped a fresh orange juice at a stall where friendly locals were chewing the evening cud, searching for some breeze off the bay, and who questioned me gently about my origins. Being British here, I was realising, is nowhere near as bad as in Argentina and I was soon enamored by the posh, perfectly pronounced, amusingly pitched, very polite Indian-accented English that almost everyone seems to speak. A tuk-tuk driver pulled up and with reefer clamped between his teeth he asked, "Would you be enjoying a ride to your hotel, sir?"
Waking at 4.30am in a grimy and steamy room, ceiling fan rattling since the Raj, I splashed water on my face, slung on a few clothes, shouldered the bag and headed out into the pre-dawn where on broken pavements I stepped over men and women sleeping rough on tarpaulin and sacking, some of them snoring, one old boy with a big smile on his face.
It was a short walk to the station where I found a jolly coffee shop owner selling some sort of doughnut without cream or jam and from a plastic seat on the street I watched the little town on a railway junction wake up. Sleepy men in knee-length sarongs wandered down to the newsagent for the morning papers; children bought bottled milk from a bejeweled old crone, cow tethered to a fence railing; taxi drivers rose from make-shift back seat beds and stretched and yawned; and at 6am I caught the express train to Varkala ...