‘Quick, out of the way, let me get that shot’ or variations on that was all I would hear for five and a half hours after taking up my tiny seat on the Himalayan Queen.
We had spent the best part of the morning travelling through northern India to the town of Kalka. Here our broad gauge train terminated and we boarded the narrow gauge Himalayan Queen. The train would take us the final 90km through 103 tunnels and across 24 bridges deep into the foothills of the Himalayas at Shimla. A true feat of British Civil Engineering, it’s a shame we can’t seem to remember how to do this anymore or we may have actually had a FA Cup final at Wembley by now!
The earlier ride had been uneventful and I had managed to sleep most of the way. I did however manage to wake up in time to hoover up some leftover lunch courtesy of a group of kindly middle-aged tourists from the Monmouth Valley. Upon boarding the Himalayan Queen however things took a downturn.
Just before the train was to pull out of the station and with two seats a piece Mark and I were feeling pretty smug. This was going to be a great journey, our illusions were quickly shattered with the first shrill nasal tones of a middle aged American woman, I was to later learn, named Nancy. This woman and her entourage consisting of her long suffering husband, whose testicles I’m sure were kept in a jar and locked in a safe to which only she had the key, and four other woman including their Indian tour guide stormed into the carriage. Waving their tickets around along with their enormous digital cameras, with zoom lenses I’m sure only perverts and photographers for the National Geographic need, they unleashed an campaign of ‘shock and awe’ commandeering the remaining 10 seats in the cabin. Mark and I had lost our spare seats, possibly our sanity and in common with remainder of the cabin any hope of a peaceful journey into the Himalayas.
From the moment the train pulled out of the station and until our arrival at Shimla five and a half hours later, the talk was of ‘shots’. I must have heard the phrases ‘Quickly move, I need this shot!’ and ‘Oh my God, what a wonderful shot!’ more than fifty times along with the word ‘shot’ at least a hundred. Initially I was unsure if these people were deriving some sort of high from the pressing of a camera button. It never stopped! They seemed permanently on edge until the camera shutter flickered, I can only assume, providing them a brief moment of Nirvana. The effect however appeared short lived and they were quickly a hive of activity once more.
This went on for the entire journey, interspersed with brief periods of rest from all but the one they called ‘Nancy’. She never stopped. At one point she scalded a bloke sitting next to window who had the audacity to read a book. ‘Look at him, look at him, he’s not even using the window’ she cried ‘I could be shooting out of there’ her anguish apparent. At one point the withdrawal from not having taken a ‘shot’ for almost five minutes overcame her and she lunged for the train door attempting to shoot out of there. All through this her husband, Bruce, sat gazing into space seemingly detached from reality, as she demanded a new lens or memory card. I wanted some of what he was taking.
We finally pulled into Shimla station at 5:30 where she was still shooting. I quickly gathered my belongings and jumped down from the train. Taking in my first breath of the fresh mountain air, and finally away from that insufferable woman, I remember how I had imagined the journey to be memorable, and in a way I suppose it was.
