The Journey to Gokarna: India Railways

Buddhas in monastery at Ellora Caves

The colors of India.

Today is the first long distance train ride of our journey. We have ridden in sleek convertible cars, fish-covered people-crowded trucks, cockroach infested buses, pimped out auto rickshaws, speed boats, slow ferries, kayaks, camels. We have taken public transit under its various names—matola, dalla dalla, tro tro, minibus, Gautrain, U-bahn, Underground. We have walked, rode, hiked, hitchhiked, trekked, climbed, paddled and pedaled. But when it comes to trains, we have done little more than an occasional subway, commuter or airport train. Nothing more than about two hours.

The India Railway system is impressive. It has 6,900 trains moving some 20 million people per day. It is the largest utility employer in the world with one and a half million employees. It connects the subcontinent and shows yet another reason why India is a wholly different place from Africa. And for me, it is a jigsaw puzzle to fiddle my way through with moments of success and moments of utter failure as we travel.

We finally booked our fist ticket in Nasik at the encouragement of Prabakhar, our first couchsurfing host in India. He connected us with a man named John who seems to speak English sometimes. Sometimes he is fluent, articulate and speaks surprisingly clearly with minimum accent. Sometimes he is completely incoherent and may not even be speaking English at all. Usually, he is both of these in the same conversation, within a sentence of each other.

Samosa men

Tucked in for a train night's sleep

We take an autorickshaw to Canada Corner. When I sat on a bench on the phone at Jehad Circle and asked him to spell it, Prabhakar said, “Like the country.” I asked him if he meant like the state, Kerala. “No, like the country, Canada, that is South of the United States.” North American geography aside, I understood it was in fact a place more familiar to me than I expected. But as we arrived at Canada Corner, it became obvious we would still need to hunt for the Indian Railways booking office. The rickshaw driver pointed to our right, said he would take us there for another twenty rupees. I declined, insisting the charade could continue longer than we would like. We would walk. We follow two more sets of pointing directions to one of those roadside stands that sells everything from cigarettes to SIM cards to shampoo. Inevitably, these places are always next to and across the street from two more stores that sell exactly the same things.

Here, we ask again for directions to the railway booking office. As we are being pointed with a doubtful shrug to a three-story concrete block of a building that shows no outward evidence of being our destination, our phone rings. It is a man across the street. When he sees me answer he waves and calls to me. It is John. He leads us up the stairs of the concrete building, to none other than the railway booking office.

It is crowded with Indian men, rupees and blue six-by-nine inch railway reservation forms in their hands that look to be carbon copies of nothing more than themselves. There are four plexiglass windows with semi-circular openings over an Indian institutional marble counter, three staff members, three rowdy lines of maybe twenty people each. Seems like chaos. John shepherds Annette and I around the back to a door that leads directly behind the plexiglass windows into the office with the booking agents. We discuss possible destinations and dates, the next steps in a southern India itinerary Annette and I outlined over juice an hour ago. We settle on a train from Aurangabad to Hubli, which turns out to be two tickets. One from Aurangabad to Manmad, which is on the main train line, about a two-hour ride. The second is a 24-hour ride from Manmad to Hubli, where we will switch to a bus for a final four hours to a boat or autorickshaw to Om Beach in Gokarna. We have heard about this beach since sipping fresh juice overlooking the Atlantic Ocean in Ghana in October. And Prabhakar recently added that it was his honeymoon destination after his arranged marriage.

John has to talk me through the form, as I do not know the train numbers or names. This same problem had rendered the online inquiry, booking and reservations functions on the Indian Railways website utterly useless to me. I needed to know, at the minimum, a three letter abbreviation for my chosen station. Preferably, I would also know the name and number of the desired train. Later, at Aurangabad Station, I would find the Indian train schedule booklet that contains all of this information. It is the size of the phone book for a small city, but smartly organized, more than 100 routes sorted by stops, lines and days operating with convenient stars, boxes, ellipses and other simple symbols, each carefully footnoted. It costs 35 rupees, about 70 cents, and contains a far better map of India, including its railway routes, than the one I had slowly begun to author in my head. This will supplement my Southeast Asia on a Shoestring guidebook reading as we look to line up all of our major train and airfare for the final leg of our trip over the coming weeks.

We leave with two electric print outs in place of twenty eight hundred rupees in my money belt. The first has seat numbers for the two-hour ride from Aurangabad to Manmad, a city I did not know existed until today. The second puts us on a waiting list for a two-tier air-conditioned sleeper compartment and is refundable if we don't get a seat. I faintly remember reading in the guidebook about some complicated wait list and foreigner quota system for train travel in India. I don't remember the details but remember it mentioned we would get our money back if we didn't get a seat. John and the railway officials seem confident we will get a seat. And John doesn't take any additional money for the service. We are to check back with the railway office in Aurangabad, ticket in hand, in a day or so, to confirm seats.

Armed with our primary onward tickets for the next week or so, we celebrate over another vegetarian dinner with Prabhakar. Now in our second night with him, we loosen up to ask some of the questions we have been wondering. He sheds more light on the India menu for me beyond dosa (crepe-like), paneer (curd), dal makhani (brown lentils), alu gobi (potato and cauliflower), channa masala (spiced chic peas), samosas, tandoori, vada pav (small fried potato/lentil ball sandwiches) and naan. We venture into pav bhaji and other primarily sauce dishes that look like slop and taste like spice. Over dinner, Prabhakar tells us a moving tale of how he came to be a Hare Krishna. It starts with his mother's suicide and ends with the fact that he is going to file for legal independence from his father. Nevermind that he is 31 years old.

On the walk home, we pass a small stall with a few men around it. There are a few green leaves displayed prominently. “What are the leaves for?” I ask Prabakhar, looking to settle a discussion Annette and I began back in Mumbai. The leaves are often kept on ice. They seem to be filled with sweets and nuts. I assert it is for some sort of prayer or offering, like the brilliant floral garlands for sale across from temples. Annette insists it is for eating.

“You put it in your mouth.” Prabhakar explains. “And it makes you high.” “You should try it.” Given that we haven't tasted a foreign substance since the truffles and hashish of Europe and our spirits are high, we opt to give it a try. The man prepared two. He flattens the beetle leaf and rubs a number of mixtures across it, mostly with his bare hands. The ones I recognize are a sort of tobacco and clove mixed with several pastes and oils. “Keep it on one side of your mouth and chew on it,” Prabhakar says, having sworn off meat, alcohol, tobacco, drugs, garlic, onion, coffee and tea many years ago as a Hare Krishna in living man's only purpose for life – to pursue (but never obtain) understanding of God. “It makes you really high if you swallow it. It will last about four hours that way.”

The leaf is stuffed full and fits in my mouth clumsily. It tastes like some exotic and spectacular perfume. Not like the perfume smells, but like I imagine the perfume would actually taste—oily, pungent. In response, my mouth produces a huge amount of saliva, which I am told to swallow. I do so faithfully. I feel a bit of a buzz, like maybe I did when I smoked my first cigarette, or after two glasses of champagne. More like when I tried Kodiak for the first time. A bit dizzy. A bit sick to my stomach. It all reminds me of a starry night my freshman year of high school when I tried my first dip with Tim Cannon. I was dizzy and almost threw up. “All too familiar. And not much fun. And no longer anything to prove,” I think to myself as I spit it all out. Annette keeps chewing and sucking, insisting she likes it. But I feel good.

Tomorrow morning, we will wake with Prabhakar early and leave the house when dawn is still breaking. We will catch a bus to Aurangabad.

After three days of unsuccessfully trying to confirm seats on our first long distance train of the trip, Annette and I resign ourselves to being firm to make sure we get a sleeper berth, even if we have to sacrifice A/C in the process. We wake up before dawn again and wake the Shree Maya Hotel's desk staff sleeping on the lobby floor as we unlatch the front door on our way out. The train is at the station when we arrive. Annette sits in a comfortable seat with our packs while I try to decipher the map of our ticket to the reality of the train. Eventually, I find seats 93 and 94. They are across the aisle from each other. But, at Annette's request, I sit in the middle seat next to her so she can sleep on my shoulder. Annette points out the proximity to the bathroom, a fact I would happily ignore. For the last two days Annette's grumbly stomach, however, has kept bathrooms close to mind, nose and butt.

We doze on the train and wake to find a yellowed India outside the window. Certainly the tint in the glass and fans on the ceiling are useful for the swelter of summers here. But they seem unnecessary now. Outside the land is yellow and dry, punctuated by the spring green of onion shoots and the brown and splotches of white of once picked-over cotton.

I reflect on the highlight of Aurangabad—the Ellora Caves. We entered the world of the typical western tourist for a day and sprung for a guided day tour. It being through the state tourism commission, the guided tours are still cheaper than just about anything other than the public bus out the 30 km to the caves and back. We quickly found ourselves annoyed with the other tourists. The closer it is to us, the more critical we are, it seems, as my wife (who is closest to me) has certainly learned on this trip. So, when we see Americans in Africa and Europeans in India, we immediately form judgments. And they are far harsher than we would ever, enlightened travelers that we are, judge the locals. So, we spend the first part of the day being annoyed by white tourists. But that fades away quickly into the calm of Ellora.

It is a World Heritage site, which for as much as I can tell is hardly a guarantee of a great place to visit. The designation seems to increase the number of tourists present and probably provides greater protections and preservations for the site, but it doesn't guarantee greatness or grandeur. But the Ellora caves are incredible. They are thirty-two sacred Buddhist, Hindu and Jain caves carved into cliffs of basalt. To call them caves, however, is misleading. They are entire buildings—some four stories high. Monasteries and temples carved by hand fourteen hundred years ago. As our guide explains, they were not constructed; they were carved out of the mountain, from top to bottom without the use of scaffolding. Destructed more than constructed.

The most striking is a simple Buddhist Temple. The stupa-topped Buddha sits meditatively of stone maybe five meters high under a ribbed cavernous roof of stone. It faces Southwest, the sun perfectly peaking through the doorway to light the alter at any hour. When our guide chants, an “om” pours over the room and vibrates deep inside our organs. One man chanting harnesses the simple power of the space. And it is far more than just acoustical. One can only imagine the sound of a hundred monks chanting here.

We walk on to the most elaborate. It is a Hindu temple built to honor Shiva. The temple is crowded with tourists and schoolchildren, mostly Indian. It is the largest monolithic stone temple in the world. Hints of its past splendor are contained in red and yellow images on the rock, remnants of paint preserved in the shadows of eaves. The details are incredible. Far too many, too overwhelming to even try.

“What stop are you looking for?” the sleeping man next to me asks, having watched my neck crane around him to see if I can recognize any station names out the window. I had been watching the clock on the phone to compare it with the arrival time on the ticket to triangulate which station would be Manmad.

“Manmad,” I respond, enjoying the name of this new destination doesn't even exist in the guidebook.

“Manmad is the next stop.”

“Thank you,” I respond, tapping Annette to wake her. We gather our bags off of the luggage rack carefully, so as not to drop them on our fellow passengers below. We get off the train with some effort as people push past us to get on. Every year, a few people are trampled in the rush to get on and off a train in India. But this is hardly a stampede. Our bags smoosh people into the sides of the train as we pass.

Manmad is a bustling station that smells like shit. Our first order of businesses is to confirm our seats on the next leg. We climb the steps to a covered walkway that takes us across the six station platforms to the station house. We pass a beggar with missing fingers, another who silently holds a photo of Sai Baba and an outstretched hand. We go to the Enquiry Office. He sends us to Track 5. We go to Track 5. There I find two men in a small building under the stairs. They send me back to the station house to the reservations office. We pass the beggars again, stand in line in the reservations office. The main at the glass window tells me Track Four. I explain I want to know our seat numbers. He presses some keys on his keyboard and pulls out a pen. My hopes are dashed when I discover he has not written seat numbers. Just the word, “same” in all lowercase letters. I ask him if they will let us on the train. He tells us to talk to the Head Ticket Inspector at Track Four.

We walk back to Track Four. The Head Ticket Inspector's office is locked. We find a bulletin board with passenger manifests posted by train. Our status reads, “unconfirmed.” Annette sits on a bench, closer to the tracks than she would like. The tracks are lined with individual shits. The drain pipe on the toilet of the train just drops directly to the track. There is a sign on the bathroom door of each train kindly asking passengers not to use the toilet when the train is at the station. I now understand why. But with 20 million passengers, 20 shits a day will slip by, which is enough to stink a station.

I walk around the platform to the other side of the office. It, too, is locked. I walk back up the steps and over tot he next platform. I walk past a man selling huge cups of deep red pomegranate seeds. Several more have platters of bananas on their heads. I find two men in an office reviewing several electronic printouts. “Are you the Ticket Inspector,” I ask. “Perhaps you can help me” I hand my ticket to him. “We are trying to find out what seat numbers we have on the Goa Express train to Hubli.”

He flips through his papers until he finds one with “2780” handwritten on the top in permanent marker. He scrolls down, his eyes following his pen tip. He then looks at out ticket and reads what the last man wrote. “It is same. No change.”

“So will we be able to get on the train?” I ask. He responds with an Indian head shake that looks to be a mix between a yes and a no. Despite the many times I have gotten this response, I am still not sure what it means. “What should we do?”

“Talk to the TT when the train arrives,” he says. I confirm that “TT” is short for ticket taker. We have another two hours until the train arrives, so we set off in search of breakfast. Up the stairs, past the fingerless and Sai Baba beggars, past the Reservations and Enquiry offices, past the autorickshaws lined up outside. We walk until we find a man rolling samosas. “Looks fresh,” I comment to Annette, who is wisely more wary than I of cold street food. Two men are working, folding tortillas of dough, stuffing it with a potato coriander filling and pinching them closed. Then they drop them in a wok of grease. The grease doesn't sizzle at first. “The grease doesn't look hot,” Annette says skeptically. But after he drops each samosa into the grease one by one, he turns the gas up until the grease starts to bubble. This man is a professional. He does this every day. He has learned that it sucks to splash yourself with hot grease when you drop your freshly rolled and pinched samosas in. Start with cooler grease then turn the heat up, I think to myself.

We order four samosas while they are still cooking and stand aside, take photos and watch as one man rolls out dough for more samosas. A woman comes by with an open hand, singing something. The man gives her a small looking doughnut, as if he kept it aside just for her. Another man stakes out his ground in front of us. He has a taped crutch and tattered clothes. He takes turns staring at Annette and I, saying something in Hindi, I presume, with an outstretched hand. We have no place to go. I watch our samosas cook. I look at him enough to convince myself that it is OK to look away. I look away enough to convince him I am not going to give him anything. As the samosas start to turn gold, I reiterate our order and go to pay. The vendor waves the man away with a shout. He obeys. I put twenty rupees in the vendor's dough-covered hand. He puts four samosas in a cone of newspaper.

We order a chai and a black tea at the hotel next door in order to sit. Annette asks if we may eat our samosas there. The waiter shakes his head in that half-yes, half-no Indian way and says, “yes” despite the sign next to our table that says, “No outside food.” The samosas are hot and delicious. While I eat, I ponder cooking them at home. What ingredients would I need? Coriander, potato, turmeric must be part of the yellow spices. Maybe some garam masala spice mixture. Is this mustard seed? I could probably find a recipe online for the dough.

We eat and drink and read for an impatient hour (such is life before a twenty-hour train ride with an unconfirmed seat) before returning to the train station. I am amazed for the first time of many when the train arrives three minutes early. This train originated in Delhi and has been traveling for two days before it arrived to Manmad. It will travel for another two days and arrive at each station within a few minutes of schedule. All this despite the occasional goat or cow in the tracks. No, we are no longer in Africa.

We board the train and find ourselves walking through people's living rooms and bedrooms with our boots. Our backpacks prevent us from turning around in the aisle. So, we back out of one car and another in search of the TT. Finally, we find what looks to be a vacant berth, drop our bags and sit. But it isn't vacant at all. There is a wool hat hanging on a hook, prayer beads atop neatly folded sheets and a blanket. It belongs to a Tibetan woman, her family spread through the adjacent two compartments. We smile and tell her and her family that it is temporary. She smiles in return from the next compartment.

As the train pulls away from the station, I look for the TT for ten minutes or so before I find him. I explain our need for a confirmed seat. He disappears for a while. I wait between cars with the porter. He slides over to give me a seat on his bench. I can smell the bathrooms. The one on the left is labeled, “Indian toilet.” The one on the right, “Western toilet.” A steady stream of people go in and out of the one on the left. Nobody goes into the one on the right.

I give up waiting for the TT, tell the porter where I can be found and go back to sit with Annette. A steady stream of people come through selling ice cream, chai, channa, a huge sack of popcorn, biscuits, potato chips, omelet sandwiches, samosas, takeaway boxes of biryani, key chains, cold drinks. Even without personal hygiene products, it reminds me of the tro tro lots in Ghana. It reminds me of the way the guidebook described the train from Dakar to Bamako that changed our plans with its extinction as a “city on rails”

After an hour or so, a small Indian family exits the train with a parade of luggage. We move our stuff to their compartment and take our shoes off. Shortly thereafter, the TT appears and says we can have seat 41 for now. After Pune, he will find us a second one. I find the Tibetan monk in 42 is sitting in seat 41. I slide my backpack under the seat and settle in. He is going to his monastery in Hubli. A man walks by with a carton of strawberries and drops them on the seat between us. He persists in trying to sell us strawberries. The monk and I both smile at his persistence. He picks up the crispy Ziploc bag I got from our overstocked U.S. Army friend in Dar Es Salaam next to me, pulls out my notebook and flips through it. I look at him curiously and refuse the strawberries before he leaves. He moves on to Annette in the next compartment with his unique blend of curiosity and marketing. After another twenty minutes or so, the monk retires to his bed above and closes the curtain. I fold up half of the bed and sit with my feet up. Annette stretches out in the next compartment for now.

We ride for close to eight hours. We sleep a bit while we can. We play cards. We read. I look out the window. We do everything slowly, knowing we have many hours ahead.

We stop at Pune around 6:30 p.m. A family that has confirmed tickets boards to displace Annette from her seat. So she moves to 41, where we both stretch out as best we can. I wonder how the two of us could sleep in this space. I walk in search of the TT who is nowhere to be found. I wait between cars, finding joy in hanging out of the open train door while the train is moving and watching India go by. I feel like a dog in heaven, tongue dangling, head outside a pickup truck, with full faith in my owner to deliver me safely, wherever we are going. We skirt the edge of the mountains before sunset. As the train crosses over bridges, I see nothing between my sandal toes and the water one hundred meters below. .

Eventually the TT turns up. “We have two people in one seat,” I plead, handing him my ticket. “OK,” he says before disappearing again for hours. The TT emerges again amidst dwindling hopes. “Do you want two together?” he asks. My spirit yelps approvingly in reply. He walks us three compartments down from 41 to look at our new home. There are two top shelf beds above an Indian couple in their sixties. We move our bags, kick off our shoes for perhaps the final time of the night, ask for new sheets, pillows and blankets and climb on up. I fall asleep reading. Annette wakes me for dinner, which I scarf down before curling back up in bed. It is the best sleep I have had since India.

When I wake up, the train has stopped. It is 5:40 a.m. I reach for the pocket in my jeans that are crumpled up above my head. It says we arrive Hubli at 6:20 a.m. I get down from my bed. The man across from us is packed, shoes and jacket on, baggage neatly piled on the seat behind him. The monk in 42 is awake and packed as well. I get off the train to ask somebody where we are. A young India man who rode between the cars with me for a while says Hubli is the next stop. I wake Annette. We pack, fearful of forgetting something on the train and never seeing it again. The couple below us is packing too.

We exit at Hubli. It is still dark. An autorickshaw driver delivers us across town to the new bus stand. There, we discover it is another two hours until the bus leaves for Gokarna. Annette sits with her Ipod and the luggage while I walk. I find an ATM and withdraw money. I watch dawn over Hubli. Two pigs are foraging for food, the first I have seen since arriving in India. A dog crosses the street. It is quiet.

Eventually, a bus arrives at Bay 3 as promised. It drives down monkey-lined streets with “caution elephants” signs four hours through the mountains to Ankola. Here we catch a bus the final 45 minutes down to the sea to Gokarna. There we catch an autorickshaw that barely makes it over the hills to Om Beach. Like all beaches, it is the end of the road. Some stairs wind down to the Arabian Sea. We are welcomed by dreadlocked white folks in harem spants with Om scarves. And lots of people with backpacks. A long-haired white man in his sixties digs in the sand by the water's break, looking for Buddha perhaps. Seven Indian men in their underwear play volleyball loudly without a net. A handful of Tibetan monks lift their ropes to dip toes in the water playfully. Fish eagles circle above, looking like white-breasted miniature bald eagles. A kingfisher with a red head and bright blue wings alights on the rocks. A lone palm tree sits on the horizon of a rocky peninsula jutting at the Southeastern end of the beach. Signs for Ayurvedic massages bracket the kilometer-long beach. Cows sit amongst sunbathers on the golden-brown sand. Tomorrow morning, we will see dolphins just off the shore and settle into the pace. Right now, it just feels strange.

Buddhist Temple at Ellora Caves. This is all carved out of one rock.