Ok, so as some of you are aware we didn't make it India the following day, or the day after that. In fact after a couple of days Craig was in a lot of pain with his back (yes following his epic stop on the zipline!), so we had to make a trip to Pokhara hospital. Surprisingly it wasn't actually that bad, well I mean it was in a sort of tower block, totally filthy and the equipment looked like it was from the Dark ages. We walked in and paid 1000 rupees, about £7 to see the doctor. We walked up a flight of stairs and straight into the doctors office, he prodded and poked and then sent Craig for an x-ray.
Whilst I was waiting for him outside, I noticed a whiteboard up by the reception desk. This board listed each bed number, who was in each bed, when they were admitted, what department and what was wrong with them. This is right in the front of the building where anyone that walked in off the street could see it, so much for patient confidentiality.
We then took the x-rays and went straight back upstairs, we were back out on the street again in 5 minutes having been told that he had a slipped disk, to rest for one month and not lift anything heavy.
Now obviously to rest for one month and not carry anything is impossible, so we decided to give it another 5 days and then think about moving on. In those 5 days we did very little, we had to go back and extend the visa again and just took lots of little walks around the park, where I saw some beautiful butterflies and got ambushed by a terrifying looking spider thing that hurled itself out of a tree at me (Amy, skip the first picture!).
While we were enjoying a long lunch in our favourite people watching spot, we had some entertainment from some street kids
Once the 5 days were up Craig was not feeling a whole lot better but was very keen to move on. So I agreed on the condition that he let me carry more stuff and he not argue when I try to help him. So with that in mind we booked the bus ticket to the border, but the night before we left we got a much better offer. The owner of the hotel had a taxi friend who had driven from the border that day and was looking for a fare back. So after a bit of negotiation we managed to get him down to a 1/4 of the price - £20 for a 6 hour taxi journey. This I decided would be much better for Craig as he could sit as he wished and stop whenever necessary.
So at 7am the following morning we hopped into our taxi with our epic amount of luggage. The drive was really pretty despite the scary amount of landslides....
6 quite precarious hours later we made it to the border. The taxi driver got us a close as he could go and then we had to walk. It was about 40 degrees, and i felt like an overworked, underpaid and underfed donkey. We had to walk through the arch on the Nepal side and get stamped out, into no mans land.
Then walk about 200 metres and through the arch into India, where you stop again and they check your visa and stamp you into India.
Once you reach the other side they are a few touts selling rides to Gorakphur, the next big town. So we paid £2.50 each and jumped into a shared jeep, this took about 3 hours and eventually deposited us in Gorakphur right outside the train station at 5pm.
By that point Craig was in quite a bit of pain, as even this over worked donkey cannot carry 3 bags weighing 70kgs +, so he had, had to carry one of the 30kg bags. We decided to check out the train station and see how likely it was to get train tickets out of there for that night, but with sleeper beds. Well that truly was wishful thinking, from the outside the station does not look to bad, a little manic but nothing we haven't dealt with before.
From the inside it is a totally different matter, when we walked in there must have been 200 families, totalling about 500 people living in the station. When i say living, I mean living, cooking, washing, sleeping, toileting, the whole shebang. So after navigating ourselves through them/ over them/ round them etc to a counter, we were told to join a queue consisting of 50 very aggressive Indian men.
Now there are certain times when it is important to know your limitations, and this was definitely one of them. In India people do not queue they just push and shove until they reach the front, so we reached the conclusion that either Craig would join the queue aggravate his injury and probably get into a scrap. Or i would join the queue and probably get both trampled and molested. After about 30 seconds of considering this we left.....
I had thought then that it would be possible to book a train ticket online, but first we just had to find somewhere to put the luggage, and possibly stay over if the train was not possible. We looked at a couple of hotels opposite the station and they are all pretty much the same level of grimness, so we picked one and paid £3 for one night. It took us about an hour to sort out a sim card and some 3G access. Just in case anyone is wondering Gorakphur is the £$%& of the world, I have never been anywhere so dirty, creepy, busy, noisy, hot and smelly. Once I finally got online I found that there were no tickets available for that night, or all of the following day. This took me about an hour, and after an hour of sitting in that room I couldn't take it anymore. The room was damp, it had no windows, mould up the walls, cockroaches everywhere, indescribable slime all over the bathroom. In the room either side of us there were 4 Indian men in each room, shouting, and the walls were so thin you could hear all of this as well as the incessant traffic outside the hotel. Staying just one night in that place was not happening, so we went out onto the street to look for a man that sorts things.
This is not an official thing, but there are men in every Indian town just sitting around, loitering you could say, that can find you anything from taxis to drugs to animals to you name it really. So true to form right outside our hotel was group of such men, we talked and told them that we wanted a taxi to Varanasi that night, but for a reasonable price. It took a couple of hours, but eventually they found someone that was willing to make the 6 hour drive for £35.
So about 9pm having been on the road since 7am that morning, we jumped into a taxi. Now this has to be one of the worst decisions we have made on our entire journey, lets just say that we were really tired and hot so our piss-taker radar was not really working for us.
About an hour and a half into the journey myself and Craig were near dozing off, the taxi driver realised this. He then grabbed the opportunity to pull over and go to sleep himself, now I would not have minded this if he had driven more than and hour and a half and if he had kept the window closed. But no, so suffice to say we both woke up being bitten to pieces by mozzies, boiling hot, on some dodgy rd. in the middle of nowhere with all the doors unlocked. Anyway I gave him half an hour and woke him up, so off we went again, at some point he stopped twice to go to the toilet and for Chai. The about 4 hours into the journey the same thing happened again, this time we were asleep and ended up stopping for god knows how long. At some point the locals started waking up and shining torches in the car windows, to be honest it was pretty scary. It was a complete nightmare from start to finish made even more annoying that because when we got him moving the 2nd time, we passed a sign saying we were 30kms from Varanasi, so close yet so far. We eventually pulled up to Varanasi train station at 4am, where he tried to drop us, despite me having told him we have a hotel booked several times during the journey and the address.
By this point we were very over tired, hot, hungry and impossibly itchy. So I marched over to a group of Tuk Tuk men and asked them to give the taxi driver directions to the hotel, this they very kindly did, and he just wandered off. So knowing when to admit defeat, we hauled all of our stuff out of the taxi and into the Tuk Tuk. It was at this point that our utterly useless taxi driver demanded 500 rupees extra as a night charge, it was one of those laugh or cry moments. So we laughed, a lot, perhaps a little hysterically I think. We jumped into our Tuk Tuk and by 5am we were sitting in an alleyway full of cow/ buffalo/ dog/ monkey/ human poo, on the step of the hotel waiting for them to open the doors.
The man that owned the hotel, Santos, was lovely and got us tucked up in our room very quickly.
After checking on the state of our ravaged legs and ankles....
We decided to check on the view from balcony before we hit the sack, this is what we saw
Welcome to Varanasi...............
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