Indian trains

Well, I had an illuminating experience last night. I took the train from Mumbai to Arangabad, and because I was late in booking it I could only get sleeper class, which is the lowest class sleeper car. Here are the rules in sleeper class:

There are no rules.

The conductor never comes back there. Even to check tickets.

This means that one berth can fit a family of five, no problem. If you don't have a ticket, it's totally fine if you and your luggage sleep on the floor. And if anyone gets up and takes their bag with them, it is perfectly acceptable to assume they're leaving and take their berth. It is packed like crazy. Until now I could never conceptualize the population explosion thing that's going on in Asia, but this brought it home for me loud and clear. This is what happens when there are more people than the existing infrastructure can possibly handle.

So needless to say I got precious little actual sleep. Lucky for me I had an upper berth so I only had to share with my luggage. I can't say I'm so lucky for tomorrow's trip (another availability issue, but now that the worst of the new-arrival scramble has passed, I'm booking 10+ days out). Tomorrow I'll have the lower berth, so I'll be at ground level for the whole fiasco. Oh well, at least I can put my luggage under the seat and not have to use it as my giant, whole-bunk-taking pillow.

Today, after arriving at 4AM and taking the bus from Aurangabad to Ellora, I got my first taste of Indian history. And what a taste. 34 rock-cut temple caves. Like Petra, only instead of sandstone, it's solid basalt. Amazing. And in the name of diversity, it had Jain, Buddhist, and Hindu temples all at the same site. A lot of them were anticlimactic, but the highlight was cave 16, the grand-daddy of all Hindu temples. It's really hard to explain, but when I get some pictures straightened out and posted you'll see. It's huge and covered with all kinds of muti-armed deities and elephants and lions and other fabulously Indian looking stuff. And bats. Tons of bats. I must confess, bats are my Indiana Jones snakes (he can't deal with them, even in pursuit of treasure). I braved a few areas, but most I decided weren't worth the possible rabies shots.

So now I'm back in Aurangabad trying to get stuff taken care of before my hostel locks up for the night (Lonely Planet has nothing good to say, so it's empty, but it's really not a bad place aside from dim lighting). I have a little over 45 minutes to find dinner, so I'm gonna split. I'll be off the grid because my sleeper class nightmare on the mail train will last a good 36 hours. Sweeeeet. I just gotta remind myself: when I get off the train, it will be to ride an elephant in search of tigers....