Change of plans
“The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men Gang aft agley.”
2 minute read ∼ Filed in : IndiaAll those preparations for India. We sat for hours, tried to master the Indian rail system, booked hotels on Booking.com. Plenty of nights we just gave up and decided - tomorrow.
We chopped and changed until we finally thought we had it. There were a few things that we’d need to do along the way, we thought we knew them all. Rajasthan we needed to book a taxi from Jaisalmer to Barmer, but decided it would be easier to do that when we arrived in Jaisalmer, otherwise we had it all done.
Except, the night before we set of for Jaisalmer we saw a gaping hole in our plans - Barmer to Udaipur. We had nothing booked and when we now looked at it, we could see why we had shelved it. There were no reasonable connections, one of the ones for the ‘tomorrow’ that we forgot to set aside.
We had tried to do as much of the trip as we could without flying and without backtracking, but now realised that since we couldn’t find a suitable way of getting from Barmer to Udaipur we’d have to abandon Barmer. That wasn’t hard as we’d only come upon it as a way of breaking up the journey anyway.
So, back to Jodhpur for one night and even then we’d have to break up the trip to Udaipur. Two possibilities: Ajmer or Chittaurgarh. No, we hadn’t heard of either of those places, but as we’ve found of everywhere we thought of stopping off - there’s probably a UNESCO World Heritage site anywhere a train stops in India. Chittaurgarh? Has such a place, at one of the largest forts in India.
Right, new route decided, let’s get down to booking. All that effort mastering the internet booking system should make it easy. Blundering through it three months ago, didn’t guarantee you anything. It was like starting again. The night before travelling to Jaisalmer was awful. All the details you have to put in for the ticket booking. You find the train you want, choose the class, put in the passenger details for each individually, including date of birth, passport number, drop downs for this and that. Then you are presented with and endless number of payment possibilities. You pick one and go through the whole process of filling in your card details, only to be told that your card is not valid for this transaction. Worse still, when you are taken back to the booking page everything you filled out before is gone.
After about five of these seemingly futile attempts I finally find the one payment method available for foreign travellers. Only three more of those to do. You would think you’d cracked it with that first attempt. No, that array of payment methods is so bewildering and like the first attempt I had to fumble around trying to remember which one it was. Almost midnight and finally all our new trains and accommodation were booked. Up at 5am next morning to catch a bus to Jaisalmer.
Luckily we were only about 300m from the place we needed to catch the bus. Jaisalmer next and New Year in Chittaurgarh.
