Mumbai – Bangalore, India – January 31, 2008

 

Evy fainted yesterday morning, which added a little excitement to everyone’s life.  Having been with Ev in similar situations at least twice before I wasn’t quite as worried as might be expected, but it’s still a little troublesome for all.  The main issue was the fact that we were to leave this morning at 6:30am for a 24 hour train trip and at 10pm last night she still had a temperature of 39/102 (C/F).  Fortunately for us, Manu Uncle is a doctor so we were given various instructions & medications.  As it was suspected to be a case of food poisoning, rather than something more virus-like, & we are expected in Bangalore tomorrow morning, we did indeed leave Mumbai this morning.

The train ride is something else.  We’d opted to take the train against Tata Uncle’s recommendation of flying (which would’ve been twice the price) in order to see some of the countryside.  It was only after we’d booked the ticket that various family members chimed in with comments such as ‘the glass is so dirty on the windows you won’t be able to see anything anyway’ and ‘if you want to see the countryside you should go by bus’.  Oh well, too late.  Manu Uncle kindly took us at the ungodly hour of 6:30am from the family apt to the train station.  The early morning coolness of 18 or so degrees Celsius (just under room temperature) had the driver wearing a toque instead of his usual red baseball cap.  Manu Uncle delivered us onto the train, waiting with us for our fellow passengers.  He also kindly killed the first flying bug I saw crawl out of the mattress edge & the set the second one free outside of the car.  They were about half an inch in length, I don’t think they were bed bugs… I hope…should definitely have paid more attention to Aynsley’s descriptions of the little critters.

We were very excited to see our windows were decently sized & not too dusty.  We sat down next to them, and prepared to watch the countryside go by.  There’s a lot of countryside.  We got to see it in great detail.  In Germany, this train would be considered a ‘Bummel Bahn’ (sp?), which loosely translated would be the ‘Toddling Train’.  There is a reason why this train takes a full day to get from Mumbai to Bangalore.  Evy went to sleep on the upper bunk fairly shortly, while I went on to read 3 of the 4 books I’d bought at the 2nd hand bookstore in Mumbai.  The selection wasn’t exactly stellar there, but it was kind of funny reading a Christopher Pike I’d last read in high school& then John Grisham’s The Pelican Brief while traveling through India and seeing people riding oxcarts in villages.

There is a creepy guy who keeps coming by and looking at us, I’ve hidden the computer under a blanket but I probably shouldn’t even be typing on it.  The one companion we’ve actually conversed with is a middle-aged woman who’s just come back from a 6 month trip to Kenya where she was visiting her baby & grandson.  She’s never had blueberries or seen peanut butter.  I wasn’t quite sure how to describe the taste of blueberries, & she was fascinated by our jar of peanut butter that we’d brought along from Mumbai to go with our bread.  I am now going to attempt to sleep with the video camera, ipod, stills camera & computer under my head, passport around my neck and wallet by my pillow. A small bug just crawled above the head rest.  Maybe 2 mm long, with long legs.  I wonder what bedbugs look like.