Suffice to say that neither of us got much sleep overnight on the train - the noise, light and frequent disturbances from people pulling the curtain of your berth was driving us bonkers - even Chillout music could only go so far to drown out the madness. In the end I gave up at around 8:00 and unfolded the bed so that I could sit down instead. Claire followed half an hour later - and after I checked the GPS location on the phone we realised that we were well behind schedule by about 2.5 hours.
Never mind, we were not in any hurry as today was written off anyway. We had bought muesli-bread (yum!), jam, Guava juice (really nice stuff!!!) and cheese the other day so we sat down and had a nice breakfast. But because the train was so far behind we didn't have a chance to get out of the train at the stations to pick up coffee so we had to survive without it, which was hard given the lack of sleep ;-)
In the end we arrived at 13:15 about 2 hours behind schedule, which wasn't really too bad. We then tried to ring the hotel to ask them to pick us up but we couldn't get through. In the meantime we had plenty of rickshaw drivers and other pesky individuals hovering around us and we actually had to become quite rude to get them to p*** off. In the end a local tourism approved guy helped us out by calling the hotel, as he was a friend with one of them there, and had them arrange for a driver to come and pick us up - and then proceeded to point us to where to go to wait for the driver. He was very nice and we naturally had our paranoia-armour activated while dealing with him and trying to get rid of the others. In the end I gave him Rs.40,- for helping out and said thanks - and that "you never know who you can rely on here!" He was nice enough and even came out to check on us while we were waiting for the cab and fending off annoying individuals trying to sell us transport services not just to the hotel but also to bazaars, emporiums (my friend/wife/son/business partner etc. owns this exclusive place where they sell hand bags/shawls/figurines/jewellery etc ad nauseam - bla. bla. bla.), local tourism attraction etc...
In the end an old driver arrived and quoted us the secret code 121 that the hotel guy had given the tourist guy and us over the phone, we loaded up the car and were on our way. However, he was a pretty bad driver - unable to start the car while it was in gear and revving up the engine to move slowly through traffic - we got the distinct feeling the guy didn't even possess a driver's license. Sigh...
Never mind, we arrived in one piece at the hotel and checked in - the hotel is really quaint but quite nice and the rooms really spacious and quirky with domes and pillars in the room. We spent a few hours having showers and relaxing (Claire fast asleep, as usual) before we got up for a walk and went for something to eat.
We ended up in the Peacock Rooftoop Restaurant in the Pearl Hotel where we had a very nice meal - Vegetable Jalfrezi, a chicken curry cooked in Yogurt and Vegetable Pakora and rice to share. As Claire is currently taking the same anti-biotics that I was on because of an upset stomach I was the only one having beer and I ended up polishing off two Kingfisher 650ml bottles while there too.
When we got outside we haggled with three auto-rickshaw drivers but the first two (young) lads were too cocky in terms of haggling and walking off, as did we, so the old and more experienced guy picked us up, knowing full well that there was potential for repeat business. So we agreed to have him take us around to the main sites in the city tomorrow for 8 hours at Rs.400,-, which wasn't too bad.
Afterwards we sat down in the garden of our hotel where I had a third Kingfisher before I stumbled up to bed with Claire, watched an episode of the Big Bang Theory before going to sleep.
Never mind, we were not in any hurry as today was written off anyway. We had bought muesli-bread (yum!), jam, Guava juice (really nice stuff!!!) and cheese the other day so we sat down and had a nice breakfast. But because the train was so far behind we didn't have a chance to get out of the train at the stations to pick up coffee so we had to survive without it, which was hard given the lack of sleep ;-)
In the end we arrived at 13:15 about 2 hours behind schedule, which wasn't really too bad. We then tried to ring the hotel to ask them to pick us up but we couldn't get through. In the meantime we had plenty of rickshaw drivers and other pesky individuals hovering around us and we actually had to become quite rude to get them to p*** off. In the end a local tourism approved guy helped us out by calling the hotel, as he was a friend with one of them there, and had them arrange for a driver to come and pick us up - and then proceeded to point us to where to go to wait for the driver. He was very nice and we naturally had our paranoia-armour activated while dealing with him and trying to get rid of the others. In the end I gave him Rs.40,- for helping out and said thanks - and that "you never know who you can rely on here!" He was nice enough and even came out to check on us while we were waiting for the cab and fending off annoying individuals trying to sell us transport services not just to the hotel but also to bazaars, emporiums (my friend/wife/son/business partner etc. owns this exclusive place where they sell hand bags/shawls/figurines/jewellery etc ad nauseam - bla. bla. bla.), local tourism attraction etc...
In the end an old driver arrived and quoted us the secret code 121 that the hotel guy had given the tourist guy and us over the phone, we loaded up the car and were on our way. However, he was a pretty bad driver - unable to start the car while it was in gear and revving up the engine to move slowly through traffic - we got the distinct feeling the guy didn't even possess a driver's license. Sigh...
Never mind, we arrived in one piece at the hotel and checked in - the hotel is really quaint but quite nice and the rooms really spacious and quirky with domes and pillars in the room. We spent a few hours having showers and relaxing (Claire fast asleep, as usual) before we got up for a walk and went for something to eat.
We ended up in the Peacock Rooftoop Restaurant in the Pearl Hotel where we had a very nice meal - Vegetable Jalfrezi, a chicken curry cooked in Yogurt and Vegetable Pakora and rice to share. As Claire is currently taking the same anti-biotics that I was on because of an upset stomach I was the only one having beer and I ended up polishing off two Kingfisher 650ml bottles while there too.
When we got outside we haggled with three auto-rickshaw drivers but the first two (young) lads were too cocky in terms of haggling and walking off, as did we, so the old and more experienced guy picked us up, knowing full well that there was potential for repeat business. So we agreed to have him take us around to the main sites in the city tomorrow for 8 hours at Rs.400,-, which wasn't too bad.
Afterwards we sat down in the garden of our hotel where I had a third Kingfisher before I stumbled up to bed with Claire, watched an episode of the Big Bang Theory before going to sleep.
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