Allahabad – Welcome to the Twilight Zone

I was taken by Hari (my loyal tuc tuc driver in Agra) to Agra Cantt station to take my train to Allahabad. According to the guide, a “quite” place before arriving to the heavy city of Varanasi. Learning how the train system in India works, I finally figured out that you have to check the platform number not by destination, but by train number and name. This information appears on the ticket, together with the seat/berth and carriage number.

I could do it until the first half by myself (until finding the platform) but finding my carriage was not that easy as the boards said one thing and the carriages another. So, after being by mistake in a third class carriage which stunk heavily to unclean toilets, I had to ask for the help of an Indian guy on the platform. He directed me to the right carriage. 

This time this train was not a classic one with seats; it was one with berths (hanging beds). I was given the one on the top at the left side.  Below me, there was a 40 year old Indian asking me nicely if I felt “free” and next to me there was a young Indian couple which for 30 minutes made of their upper berth a love nest (after turning off the lights of course). Welcome to India, I kept saying to myself.

Sleeping was not an easy task, as I had my two backpacks at the bottom of my bed and my berth was next to the door that connected to the toilet. So, you can imagine how busy it was. We cannot forget one little extra fact, turning on the aisle light for the passengers that were stepping out on each station in between. And let’s not forget the most important one: The names of the stops are not being announced, so you have to set an alarm to wake up around the arrival time indicated on your ticket. So, the ticket is your life on a train journey in India, so keep in by the hand!

After a night of light sleep and lots of Spotify songs going from my ears to my mind, I arrived at 5:00 a.m. in Allahabad. That night I had naively no reservations, as my Dutch traveller fellas who I met in Agra, told me the night before that they stayed at a hotel Prayag at 100 m from the station and that there was no need for a reservation as there was p-l-e-n-t-y of room. Well, arriving a bit destroyed at that time and negotiating with a rickshaw the tariff to the hotel (which certainly he did not know but pretended that he did), I ended up finding the hotel around 30 minutes later.  Mission accomplished? Well, not really. The guy indicated that because of a University exam on Sunday, they only had rooms available but for a higher rate (1400 rupees instead of 700).  If it was completely true or not. I don’t know but the guy didn’t seem open to negotiate or to do any effort so I went to another hotel next to this one but it was completely booked. With a strong urge to go to bed and sleep a bit, I decided to give it a try to this 1400 rupees room.

Going back to the first hotel I ended up in a crap-hole room (one of the worst I have ever been since my trip). I don’t consider myself a scrupulous guy and I can sleep pretty much everywhere but I think it was the tiredness, the way how I had to accept the room and the “hotel” itself that made me instantly reject it and see every single defect that it had.

Starting from the point that I had to climb up four floors in a maze of shared rooms, cross by a dirty kitchen placed somehow in between the aisles, walk across sleeping Indians on the floor and matrasses and end up in my so-called 1400 rupee room with A/C. It’s not that everything was against me that day, but I found no toilet paper in the WC. Anything else?

I didn’t care. I simply didn’t. What I cared at that moment was to lay in bed and fall asleep. So I did. I woke up around 11:30 and I took a shower and I decided to explore Allahabad a bit. I started walking towards a restaurant to grab a bit of nice Indian food and I was “following” my Lonely Planet (LP) Map and the streets were becoming dirtier and dirtier, I was getting inside a very crowded fruit and vegetable street market, cows started to appear and it felt somehow that I was not heading the correct way. I went to a store and there I asked a guy if I was walking the correct way. Welcome to the twilight zone I said to myself when he told me that I had been walking on the wrong direction. I had to go to the other way crossing the station first.

And that’s what I did and my stomach was getting hungrier and hungrier and I was walking around this main street where according to my LP it had the places where I could get some lunch or whatever. Well, some places did not exist or the other ones were not looking that “clean” and I still wanted to maintain a healthy gastrointestinal system.

Coming back and forth I found a nice vegetarian restaurant inside a hotel. So I went inside. Vikash, the owner, greeted me very amicably and made sure that I got a nice meal. He lent me internet from his telephone and he also arranged a taxi to take me to my next stops in Allahabad. 

It looks that in Allahabad, the train station works as a portal. To the city side (where my hotel was), everything was dark, dirty and unfriendly. To the Civil Lane side (north of the station), everything was the opposite. 

So my taxi arrived and I told Vikash that I would be arriving there for dinner. The taxi took my first to the confluence of the holy rivers Yamuna and Ganges. Here for 300 rupees you can have your own private little boat that will take you to the confluence called in Hindi de Sangam. This was a unique and nice experience. The guy took me to see how the dark greenish waters of the Yamuna mixed with the light greenish of the Ganges forming little whirlpools. Then he took me to a floating boot where a “holy” man was initiating a nice ritual in hindi and made me repeat several words in Hindi. Word by word I repeated while I held kneeld on the floor three coconuts with flowers on top. Then after a tip, you receive his blessing and then you are supposed to offer the coconuts and the flowers to the Ganges and that’s what I did.  I did it this time for my family.

The taxi waited for me nicely parked at the shore. When I came back I asked him to drop me at the Khusro Bagh. Park that is surrounded by high walls and that holds the tombs of the emperor Jahangir’s first wife,  second wife, sond and  daughter. This park is located on the dark side of the portal, next to my hotel, so the strangest things happened again to me here. People approaching me or trying to speak English to me at a distance, one local shaking hands and not letting go while asking for a tip and a very strange vibe there. As if the people in the park were not used to foreign tourists coming that often.

After this visit I went to my hotel and I made sure that I booked my next hotel for the next destination. So, I did. I raised the budget a little bit in order to have more choice, cleanliness and a little bit of comofort. I had everything ready for next day. After a nice last dinner at Vikash’s restaurant I headed the hotel to head to one of the strangest places in India, where it is said that bodies are openly cremated at the Ganges shore. This place is called Varanasi.