Last night we took an overnight train from Trivandrum in Kerala to Madurai in Tamil Nadu ( a different state). Our train left Trivandrum at 8:20p.m and arrived in Madurai at 5:30 a.m. After my first, very plush experience on an Indian train from Agra to Delhi I had high expectations. To say that the train to Madurai was less than plush would be an understatement!
Our train adventure started the moment the taxi dropped us off at the train station. The moment after we got our suitcases out of the car, these men descended on us insisting on helping us carry our luggage. I basically had to wrestle my suitcase away from this one guy. To make things worse we had no idea what track our train was leaving from. Again to say that the train station wasn’t very user friendly would be an understatement! After some investigation Naomi discovered that the track had not been announced.
The significance of knowing the track number was that it would determine whether or not we had to haul all of our luggage up and down a bunch of stairs (handicap accessibility has not really caught on in India) and whether we needed to hire some guys to help us. Fortunately for us two of the guys, Tumge and Chiranjeev, from the Sree Chitra public health school had come to the train station to say goodbye to us. They appeared just as we were trying to figure out what to do. Instead of hiring the guys that were trying to exhort us, Tumge and Chiranjeev helped us carry our bags.
Once our train track had been announced and we managed to get all our luggage to the right track we had to figure out where we were supposed to board the train for first class…it was a very long platform. At this point a sign would have been really helpful but I guess that was asking for too much…sigh. We tried asking other people waiting for the train but each person gave us a totally different answer...sigh. When the train finally arrived we had to run a little bit to get to the correct car but we eventually made it before the train took off.
The train itself looked like it was from the 1970’s…we were in a sleeper car with four beds, two bunk beds and two on the bottom. The beds were made out of this scary looking blue plastic that was very dirty. I used a few wet wipes to clean my bed off, all of them came back totally black…and the bed still looked dirty. Sigh. I ended up putting some cloth down before sitting on it.
There was no a/c on the train but that was ok because the fans were sufficient. Actually in the middle of the night it was freezing! I am glad I had a little blanket with me!
We also ended up having this random guy join us and sleep on the fourth bed in our car. That was a bit scary. He did not speak any English and fortunately was quite harmless. Thankfully when we got off the train at 5am Naomi's host parents were waiting for us!
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