We have hit hot, humid and expensive Mumbai (Bombay) and are loving ourselves sick getting the most out of doing anything but immersing ourselves in anything cultural.Our first question after stepping foot off the train was "Excuse me - where is the closest McDonalds?" followed closely by "oh and the taxi line?" of course. We have been told to stock up on the western food whilst here as we have learnt that any attempt at western food outside the big cities is never quite successful.
We caught the train from Udaipur with no hiccups and spent the night rolling around on the sleeper train next to 2 over-excited but extremely ballsey 19 year old South Korean girls. We were woken abruptly by an Indian telling us that we had 2 minutes to get out of bed, get to the next platform and board the connecting train which we didn't question as much as we should have at the time as our booked train was actually supposed to be departing 2 hours later - anything can happen here though so dishevelled and with one eye open only we did the best we could and hauled on our hugely heavy (and growing) backpacks and bolted for the train. It was like one of those extremely stressful movie scenes where the train is actually moving and the actor jumps on just in the nic of time to find his love. We only found two Indian men occupying what we thought were our seats - this is where it became clear (as the other eye popped open) that we had boarded the wrong bloody train!!!!
Crisis! Everyone who travels on the Indian rail network has some sort of horror story - or at least that's what we are telling ourselves. To cut a long story short it actually worked out for the best as a lovely man helped us to get off at the next station (almost another movie scene) and the train superintendant for that station felt sorry for us, called to make sure that our seats would stay reserved, ordered us some Chai and opened up an amazing glittering room that looked like it was only meant for royalty and let us wait in there until our train arrived. So it actually turned out to be some kind of blessing in disguise! We just didn't think that things like this happened in India but everyone says to expect the unexpected!
This is us in Udaipur with our friends Frida and Tove from Sweden
