The train ride, a sleeper train, from the West Bengal to Allahabad was supposed to be 16 hours. Instead it was 22 hours. I shared a 2A sleeper class with the Indian version of the 3 Stooges. Luckily my noise cancellation headphones and podcasts of CarTalk and Wait Wait made the evening bearable. It was the 9 hours of the next day that crawled by even slower than our train did. It seems all of India’s trains were extremely late that day. I missed my connection and had to spend a night in allahabad. Then I had to hire a car to drive me 7 hours to Bandhavgarh Park. All told $200 of extra cost. Oh well, at least I didn’t did spend the 22 hours on the sleeper train in a non-air conditioned car like the Ozzie backpacker I met–but he was young, so I’m sure he survived!
