Trip to Khajuraho

After a big day at Agra, this would be a long travel day. We were up and ready early, but due to morning fog and the usual inefficiency, the train was running late. We first waited for 45 minutes in the hotel lobby, while Sujay worked the phone to keep tabs on the delay time. Then we drove to the depot, where he kept us on the bus for another half hour or more. The bus was surrounded by some of the most pathetic beggars imaginable. Many of them, and more, followed us inside when it was time to continue our last minutes of waiting on the platform. The depot is a high traffic area, which makes excellent opportunities for beggars, street merchants, rickshaw drivers, and pickpockets.

We had to move quickly and assertively to get on the train. It does not wait long in the station, there are many pushing to get on as others are trying to get off. We rode "Second Class," the way real Indians do, not in the First Class cars designed for tourists. The car was very warm and was something of an olfactory experience. 

The train's state of maintenance made Air India look exemplary by comparison. We were surrounded by a well-dressed extended Indian family, traveling together. The center of their attention was a little girl of about 4 or 5 years of age who was being totally spoiled by her grandfather, aunts, and uncles.

Food servers on the train have a name that connotes something very different in the U.S.

We were on the train a little over two hours to Jhansi, where we got off, met our new bus, and had lunch at a hotel not far from the station. I wondered where we might have eaten had the train been on time -- or is it always late? The meal was yet another buffet, but included a local vegetarian dish we had not been exposed to previously, and it was quite good. Their raita, however, was pale in comparison to what Sujay had mixed up for us the previous evening.

As we continued through the countryside on the narrowest, bumpiest, poor excuse for a paved major highway imaginable, we noticed a great deal of activity in some of the villages. Our guide explained that this happened to be the Hindu new year, a very auspicious day for all manner of things. 

Many villages were celebrating with fun fairs, with hundreds and hundreds of families crowding into a small area where there were vendors selling special foods, balloons, kites,etc. there were even carnival rides, after a fashion (consider a tiny, four seat Ferris wheel turned by hand). 

We ambushed a family riding home from a fair in their ox cart, just so we could take their picture.

And we interrupted an open air wedding at a roadside shrine by pulling the bus up close and taking photos through the windows. The groom didn't look very pleased, but the wedding guests loved it, responding with a great deal of waving and smiling, despite the solemn moment.

A bit farther down the road the bus stopped at an unlikely spot in open country, where there was nothing but a shack beside the road and some animals. When we god off the bus and walked through the gate we discovered a rather large well pit, with no wall, railing or other barrier around it. You wouldn't want to miss you step near the edge, because it was a long, straight drop of about 30 feet to the bottom. 

The well was equipped with a chain of what appeared to be cut open cooking oil cans. The farmer hitched two oxen and drove them in a circle. A simple but ingenious system of rods and gears converted the horizontal movement of the oxen to the vertical rotation of the wheel driving the chain of cans. In short order, the cans started dumping well water into a trough, from which it flowed out to ditches in his approximately one acre garden. It was a neat system!

The bus stopped again, after an hour or so, at another of the tourist-oriented truck stops one finds along Indian highways. We used the "facilities" quickly, then began walking briskly on a circuit around the parking lot because we had been sitting for many hours and needed to stretch our legs. A young boy of about 15 watched us intently with a big grin on his face. It was clear that the Americans were crazy for walking around in circles so fast, going nowhere.

We arrived at the hotel in Khajuraho about 7ish and ate a meal. It had been a very long day of travel.