Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Traveling the way I do..Aint for the faint hearted!

"Travelling" or "traveling"? What's the right way to spell the word? Nevermind... 'Cause there aint a right or wrong way to travel either!

This is gonna be the focal point of this post..

Had the most heart stopping experience last morning while boarding the train to Mumbai. Everything that could go wrong, went awry!

For starters, to catch the early morning 630 a.m. train, I woke up late. And then discovered that there was no hot water for my shower. Got delayed even more 'cause I'd to now wait for the water to heat up and by the time I got ready and headed for the station, it was already 620 a.m. Took me 5 minutes to get to the station but I landed on the wrong platform! My train was to depart from platform 6 and I was at platform 1! While I was dashing to my platform, the zipper of my bag gave way and all the contents started spilling out! If not for some friendly passerby I wouldn't have even noticed it. Had to retrace and pick up all my stuff from the trail and dump them in the bag and shut it. All this while precious sands of time slipped away...

Finally when I got to the designated platform, I was relieved to see the train still there and also that I didn't have to run further to find my wagon as it was parked right where the overbridge descended. After depositing my luggage on my berth, I was like "OK! This is it! Finally made it! Nothing can go wrong now!" but wait, episode 2 was even more gripping!

In my haste to the railway station, I missed making a pitstop at the ATM and so now I was pennyless! I had no idea where an ATM could be in this railway station! I ran the length and breadth of the platform and quite obviously there wasn't one! In the meantime, I bumped into an old pal who was also making the trip to Mumbai in the same train and who obviously was quite shocked to learn my current situation. We inquired at a vendor and learnt that there was one outside the station. So I made a dash for it and returned back just in the nick of time! By some stroke of luck, the departure was delayed by 5 minutes and the train started to move right when I got back from the ATM... Quite an eventful morning!

So like I said, there is no right or wrong way of traveling and the purists are definitely not gonna applaud my performance from yesterday but what the hell, I enjoyed every bit of it! This also gave me a chance to test the condition of my heart and it passed with flying colors! (Thanks to all those cardio workouts!)

The rest of the day was spent recuperating from the experience and in some rural landscape photography. Will put em up once I am back to my crib!

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