Meeting Laura and Patrick

When we planned our trip last year we agreed to meet Laura and Patrick somewhere in southern India, the exact location to be decided. After more than a little debate Mysore got the nod and it turned out to be a good choice, but first we had to get there.

To reach Mysore, we had to dash up the Kerelan coast, then head inland, a journey which taught us three things:
Never catch a train on the first weekend of the summer holidays - it was like the Northern Line at rush-hour, just for five hours.

Secondly, Indian train travel while busy is head and shoulders above Indian bus travel, it's not the seating, people sit on each other in both, it's just a bus journey feels how I imagine it would be to sit on a trailer, being pulled by a tractor, through a very muddy field - fine for ten minutes, uncomfortable for any longer.

The final lesson is this, if you're male and you do find yourself stoically fighting your way through a carriage on one of these trains and the carriage only has hundreds of sari and burkah clad ladies, I can offer you the following insight; the reason they all look miffed is you're in the ladies only carriage (veils off etc.) and the very last thing Indian ladies want closely confined with them, is a large, sweating, pasty-coloured, foreigner of the male variety.

Although, as always with these things there was an upside. The ladies loved Mrs B, she got a seat, acquired a bindi (a sign of marriage), talked and grinned a lot and left her husband loitering by the loos, with the other male types you find at the ends of ladies only carriages. So four hours of comparing sweaty armpits for me and four of refined cross-cultural interaction for the wife.

Anyway we got to Mysore. Laura and Patrick had less luck, but more comfort, they couldn't get on the first two trains from Chennai (Madras) and as there are only two a day this meant we didn't meet until a day and a half after they landed. Needless to say, it was all more than worth it in the end. It will be a long time before I again find myself waiting on the platform of a central Indian train station to meet Patrick, who I hadn't seen in three months. It all felt like we were in totally the wrong place, very dislocating, but ultimately very good news. We were all just pleased to have managed the normally simple thing of meeting up.

A flurry of posts may now follow, our excuse is that train travel gives you time to think about what you can say. Apologies for getting carried away, it was always more for our pleasure than yours.....