Friday, 30 January 2009
After a fairly sleepless night as SB has develloped an horrendous chest infection – never seen so much green snot come out of one person and it is really worrying, but going to a hospital in India is not on our list. We got up and left the hotel and managed to get a taxi straight outside. Thought we would have to walk a bit through the morning sounds of all the local mosques.
We got to Howrah and sat in the saiting area for our train to arrive. As usual the general class tickets had formed a massive queue all under the gaze of many armed army guards, but our carriage was more organised, so we boarded and locked away our bags. the conductor checked our tickets and we have the two upper berths, and the lower ones aren’t being occupied until Allalehbad which is during the night – he also reminded us to keep bags locks etc, obviously there has been issues on this train.
We settled in and SB went to sleep on and off for the remainder of the journey.
The scenery near Kolkata is all fields of rice and banabas etc, but as we go gradually inland this changes to corn and mustard etc. We are in an AC compartment as that is all we could get, so although it is sunny outside it is hard to judge what the temperature is – some people are rugged up in scarves and jumpers and some are in shorts and t-shirts. There is a food service available on the train which is okay, nothing fancy and means we don’t have to try and get food from the platform, we can just sit back and hope SB starts to de-snot. We have started him on some super antibiotics straight away, so hopefully they will weave their magic.
We both slept until being woken in Allahabad when some people got on and turned the lights on, but we managed to go to sleep again.