February 17, 2018. Solo backpacking India can have a steep learning curve. I had arrived in Jaipur sick, literally and figuratively. I had caught some airborne flu-like sickness somewhere (I don’t know how but I noticed a lot of people don’t cover their mouths when sneezing or coughing, aside from a lot of people spitting everywhere) and I was too weak and uncomfortable to move around on my first day. The bad train experience from Agra to Jaipur surely threw me off-track (pun intended). I had also craved for anything familiar to comfort me. For a while, I was so tired of everything that was so strange and foreign (which was almost everything I had experienced and sensed in India). I felt exhausted and I felt like I was stuck in an environment where I was alone and helpless. The fact that I was traveling alone made me feel miserable. I had likewise lost some faith in Indians especially after having confronted cunning locals who only wished to milk tourists like me dry. They offered exorbitant services when I am most desperate and in need.
Out of desperation for something familiar I went to a McDonald’s somewhere in the old city which looked like it was stuck in the 90’s and still–nothing was familiar on the menu except the fries! No meat allowed for this predominantly Hindu country. Their burgers were of cottage cheese patties (paneer) and their chicken burgers were too strange and spicy for me.
I then took it slow from thereon and soon enough I recovered and carried on this amazing albeit difficult journey. Traveling India solo weeks on end is challenging indeed. But that’s one of the things that make it quite an extraordinary and fascinating experience.
February 16, 2018. One of the worst and most inconvenient experiences so far in India was waiting for the train ride from Agra to Jaipur. The Indian train network is vast and extensive but renowned for its caducity and inefficiency.
My train was scheduled to pass by the old Agra Fort station at past 10 in the morning and I was in the station half an hour before the train was scheduled to arrive. I didn’t want to miss it, since it would just be one of the train’s many stops from its origin, I think from all the way in Varanasi. It was announced that it would be delayed by 3.5 hours to around 2:00 PM. At 1:30 PM, they announced that it would arrive at 2:30 PM. At 2:00 PM they announced it would arrive at 3 PM. At 2:45 PM they announced the train will arrive at 3:30 PM. This series of false hopes continued until the train finally arrived at 7:30 in the evening. That was a delay of nine hours. They might as well have announced it from the beginning that it would arrive in the evening so I didn’t have to endure hoping and waiting in such an inconvenient and unkempt station. I didn’t want to leave the station because every time an announcement comes, they’d say it would arrive in just half an hour. I had almost dropped dead out of fatigue on the floor! Worse, it took another half hour before the train left the station!
The actual train ride itself was just more or less 5 hours. I arrived in Jaipur at such an ungodly hour so weary and disappointed I had wanted to abandon this trip altogether. But all is well. Part of the authentic Indian experience to just leave it all up to fate and not on a strict schedule. In other words, be flexible.