I am GOING

After a particularly precarious auto-rickshaw ride from Tilak Nagar Metro to Delhi Cantonment station, circumventing some sort of causeway through alleys and spaces crammed with people and animals, I thought I was ready for my first train journey in India. I was about to begin my overnight trip to Kathgodam Junction, a last stop on the rail network before the Himalaya foothills of Uttarakhand state.

Booking and boarding trains as a foreigner in India is a patience-testing experience that I view as a sort of primer for what you will have to endure by the time you actually hit the ground running in India. To book journeys independently, one must register and use the mediary online company, 'Cleartrip'. Since trains are very popular in India, many journeys are completely full by the date of departure and you will find yourself booking long before you've even entered the country.

When you register for an account on Cleartrip, it is straightforward initially. You supply an email, name, and some other basic information. But, they also need digital scans of your passport. Once they process this, they send a code which you then use in a secondary activation email. The problem is this whole exchange seems to go wrong several times for nearly everyone. If it's not the activation code being faulty, nobody responds to your email with passport scans, or you are misinterpreted by a live representative somewhere down the line, causing you to become frustrated and reset the registration several times. I think I had to make up extra email accounts by the time I had the process figured out. But then you are free to book journeys and print your eTicket. Hang on to that for dear life.

Now back to Delhi Cantonment.

A train appeared next to my given platform at roughly the time of my scheduled journey. Naturally, I assumed this must be the proper one, but I never printed my eTicket. No problem, I thought, I will just talk to one of the employees aboard and figure out which berth and compartment I am supposed to be in. After all, I had heard there is some sort of passenger list.

By the time I got the attention of one of the employees checking tickets, the train was already slowly moving out of the station. I explained the situation, and where I was going when he said "Jaipur. This train is going to Jaipur."

'Oh shit.'

There's a lot more to this story, but it illustrates the neverending adventure that is travelling through India, which to me, is my travel treasure.