Waitlist...................................

OK, now i actually have several excuses for why its taken so long to publish a new post - these range from sporadic Internet connection, the worst power design in a building EVER and the fact that I just had my birthday so I had to 'ahem' celebrate in the Indian family fun sober way!

But seriously I have also spent the last 17 days stuck inside of the local 'Railways of India' corp ticket office... This is due to me deciding i was much to cozy and lazy here so i have completely changed my January schedule. Originally this consisted of me going to a different boys town and generally hanging round Chennai a bit longer but I decided to something a bit different, how i do not know though - I have somehow conveniently forgotten to work that bit out yet... but one part I know have decided (as with every other backpacker in the entirety of south Asia) to head to Goa for new years... if you haven't heard it is famous for its parties (esp. new year and on full moons - the full moon this year happens to be on the 31st - double party!!), it also has some of the best beaches in the world and is within a days travel from me - or so I thought...

I was impressed with myself as i walked into the ticket office on the morning of the 9Th of November for being so organised and early in booking a ticket... the hour long queue seemed like minutes and I didn't even notice the incorrect English on the reservation sheet... then I got to the lady at the counter and handed in the sheet thinking how wonderfully simple India is...

I first got the impression that this wouldn't be so easy when the lady opened her mouth and started talking with one of the thickest Indian accents I have ever heard - and it didn't help that she was only whispering over what i was beginning to notice was a more of a mad angry mob than a queue. I told her that 'I wanted to go from Chennai to Goa - though not on the direct train but through Bangalore' this was because the direct train only leaves once a week and it was leaving to early... She promptly spent the next ten minutes trying to book me on the direct train , (O.k. - I know it would be very easy to blame me here by saying she probably couldn't understand my accent, but I had handed her a sheet with the exact itinerary of what I wanted) - when I pointed this out she then spent ten minutes undoing everything before typing it back in and ending up with the same direct train... as soon as she realised this she told me I had filled the form out incorrectly and she started helping the customer next to me. After four more attempts at filling out the form she finally accepted it (I only actually filled out two forms - the one that in the end she accepted was the same one she had turned down - I just gave it to her again without her realising)

Eventually she worked out that a if a man wants to get from point A to point B but there aren't any direct trains he can connect through point C (point C being a place nicely in the middle of point A and B)... five minutes later it had even clicked into place that Point A: Chennai B: Goa C: Bangalore, a few bits of data entered in and BAM - a result!!! I would be wait-listed...

It turns out that whilst India has a population of about a billion people they actually have the rail capacity of Luxembourg. The trains are apparently so few and far between that to actually get some of them you have to tell your mum to start queueing before you have even left the womb... it is however very hit and miss because some trains fill up randomly and with no rhyme nor reason why there was a sudden boom in tickets...

so we checked about 37 different routes to Goa through the most roundabout ways possible all of them either impossible (ending up spending 3 days waiting in a rice paddy in the middle of nowhere) or *Tada* wait-listed behind 200 other people - One pretty major part of the problem is that there is a quota on the amount of foreigners on a train. It's obvious though if you think about it - too many white people in one place - we might break out into an impromptu game of golf...

So in the face of hoping that 200 people spontaneously decide not to go on that new years holiday trip I just did what any sensible person would have done - I walked out, drove home, logged on, had a cup of tea and booked me an overnight coach ticket on the world wide web...


** Apparently a lot of you can't leave messages - if you click the title of the post it takes you through to the posts individual page where you should be able to leave a comment