India Travels – Day 15 and 16: The Day of the 30 Hour Train Journey
We had to take a taxi at 10.30 for our 12.40 train to Varanasi. This train trip would take 30 hours!! We spent the whole day on the train station as it turned out it was running 6 hours late! When we were waiting for the train, we just listened to music or watched films on our phones. The WiFi at the developed areas of India can be perfect, compared to the complete absence of the Internet in the poor and undeveloped places in India. When the train finally arrived at the station I leap for joy onto the first carriage I could get my hands on! When we set off I just spent the rest of the day not doing much – apart from going to the back of the carriage and staring through the door at the beautiful rural landscape of India we were passing through, alongside the river Ganges.
Halfway through the journey we stopped at what looked like a rundown shack. A family got on the train to sell their goods. A boy told me that trains can stop like this quite a lot. However, you could see that these type of businesses were doomed to fail as they left empty handed money-wise.
The boy that told me about the train stopping was 15 years old. He was very knowledgeable for his age – he certainly knew more than I did when I was 15! I couldn’t always understand him because of his accent, but you could tell he knew a lot. Then I learnt he had 7000 rupees spent on him per month (£70 per month) to go to private school, whereas other children often don’t even go to school. Instead they sell products or beg for money in the middle of the road when the cars stop. India has a long way to go to give every single child the same opportunity.
At the end of a long day travelling across India we went to sleep again on the train, which now seemed like our second home! Click here to read about our next day, exploring Varanasi and the Ganges. Or read about our previous day – the day of getting lost on the train.
