When we emerge this morning, stragglers from last night’s festivities are still on the streets looking very sore footed and exhausted as they hobble home. We haven’t been able to discover the name of the festival but apparently it takes place over four Sundays in July and involves men (women don’t take part), mainly young men it seems, walking in bare feet for around 15 hours as they visit the temples of the city. It’s no wonder that this morning they are treading lightly!
We sort a few bits and pieces, pack our stuff and go for lunch. Our train leaves < ?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" /?>
Agra at 17.40 and we arrive by rickshaw in plenty of time. Surprisingly there are no porters in sight and we have to carry our luggage. The station is heaving with people and there don’t seem to be any platform numbers. It requires some guesswork and a few enquiries to work out where we should be and which train is going to Jaipur; there are no destination indicators, the train number isn’t on the train and the name of the train – the only other identification – has been abbreviated on the side of the train. On the next platform the second class carriages are full to capacity and people are hanging out of the doors as it pulls away and people are running alongside in an effort to either push others into the carriages or an attempt to do the seemingly impossible and get aboard.
The journey through the outskirts of Agra reveals people living in some appallingly squalid conditions along the railway line – amongst rubbish and building material. People routinely walk along the tracks and children play on the edge of the tracks.
All the stations are in darkness apart from dim lighting around the exit and there seems to be a shortage of station signs which makes it very difficult to know when to get off the train. But we needn’t have worried, almost everyone gets off the train at Jaipur even though its going on to Udaipur. As soon as we are out of station we are surrounded by gabbling rickshaw drivers wanting to know where we are going. It’s impossible to shake them off even when we try to make ourselves heard above the din. Fortunately we are rescued by our pick up and whisked off to Hotel Karni Niwas which turns out to be situated in an unpaved and potholed side street. The room’s not bad though; large with two small balconies, marble floors and clean .
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