Shimla, India>, Nov 23, 2009
The trip in between the two cities took two full days and was quite interesting. Jaismailer was so hot and dusty (no rain for two years) that it was impossible not to be covered in dust continually. Since we had opted for the (cheaper) non air conditioned car dust blew into everything continually. Even showering two times a day couldn’t get rid of the dust. Therefore, the first day’s journey, in the desert area near Jaismailer, could best be described as “dirty”. After driving 500 kilometers we were no longer in the dusty desert area and we arrived in Mandawa, a small town, where we were spending the night. Our hotel stay there was a bit surreal. Our room was nice, but the hotel was under construction probably due to the fact that it is “off season” - there were few guests. In the morning we had breakfast at a table literally in the middle of construction. All the other tables were pushed aside into a higgledy piggledy mess of tables and chairs, and the workers continued to paint and sand a few feet away while we ate breakfast. Dinner in the evening that we arrived was surreal in a different way. We arrived at dinner to discover that, despite the fact we were the only guests in the dining room, the owners had invited outside entertainers. So we ate dinner while puppeteers and musicians performed a few feet away (the puppeteer had an entire stage set up with lighting). At one point the puppeteer asked for a female volunteer from the audience. No avoiding that one! At the end of each “performance” the performers stood around until we gave them a tip. We susupect they were all friends or family of the hotel owner.
The next day we drove to Delhi. This too was a chalenge due to flooding caused by the monoons. Many roads were closed, so our driver took us through narrow back alleys and side roads, all the while honking loudly to clear the narrow roads of cows, herds of sheep, and other slow moving obstructions. He stopped every few miles to ask locals about the flooding. Sometimes we had to turn around and retrace our route in order to try a different road. However, we finally made it to Delhi to catch the overnight train.
We travelled by overnight train from Dehli to Kalka where we switched to the narrow guage train (toy train they call it here) for the rest of the journey to Shimla. The train left Dehli around 11:40PM and arrived in Kalka at 5:15AM so needless to say we were both tired. Our beds were in a four person sleeper booth which we ended up having all to ourselves when the mother and daughter we were supposed to share with found empty beds near the rest of their family. We visited with the family for a while before they left our sleeper booth. They were very nice and offered us Indian snacks.
The toy train was was fun. There are several different toy trains which make their way to Shimla but we opted for a luxury train left over from the British era. The journey included breakfast against a backdrop of some spectacular scenery and passed through some 103 tunnels as it chugged its way up into the mountains, although we each saw only about half the scenery and tunnels as we kept drifting off to sleep. We arrived in Shimla about 11:00 a.m. and headed for the hotel .