I will do these one at a time for those of you who are interested and as I gather my thoughts.
This one is from part of our train journey.
First I have to tell you more about the train. Each saloon has four bedrooms and a small sitting area. Each saloon also has two attendants. At first I thought I would find that too much (I'm not used to having staff lol) but we fell in love with our two minders. All the staff on the train are men. They would greet our buses after each day of sightseeing.
The train is kept out of main stations as much as possible and one day we were parked at a station in a dusty village. When we came back on the bus I saw a little corner shop and my friend and I told our minder we wanted to go buy some chocolate.
There are no Hershey bars there. There was a box of individually wrapped chocolates selling for 1 Rupee each and my friend asked to buy the whole box. No one spoke English but the 12 or 13 year old girl at the counter understood and made us understand that the box was not full. It was a box of 150 chocolates (smaller than a Hershey Mini) so we said we would pay 150 Rupee.
Our favorite minder was with us. It's a tiny impoverished dusty village and there were some children around. My friend asked our minder if it was ok to give the kids some chocolate. He looked rather dubious but said ok.
Well that just started a swarm!!! At first there were about 10 kids ranging in age from 3 to 12 or 13 and then there were about 30 kids within 3 seconds. By some magic wireless network kids came running from all directions. They were going wild and our minder very comically in his big Daddy role was trying to control them by shouting at them in Hindi.
They were really only mildly mindful of him. I'm still not sure if it was the right thing to do but I can't believe it was the wrong thing. Perhaps it was a bit of excitement for the kids and for us. We managed to excitrate ourselves from the kids and as quickly as they appeared they were gone.
I use the word 'minder' with deepest affection. Our group (we were all in one saloon together) really bonded with the two gentlemen who looked after us. They were absolute professionals and of course they look after a new group of tourists every week. But after we left the train we got a text from each of them wishing us well and saying they missed us. That was really special. I don't know how many other tourists would actually give their cell phone numbers to the staff.
We had their cell phone numbers as well because one afternoon we went 'off piste' and I thought it best in case we ended up in a jail cell somewhere to have a local contact number.
The Palace on Wheels is a venture of the Indian National Railroad (there are other luxury trains now because it has proven very successful) and so it is in their interest in promoting tourism to keep the tourists as far away from the real India as possible. We took advantage of every opportunity to get as close as possible. Sometimes that was the right thing to do and sometimes it got us into a bit of trouble.
More later
catlvr xx
