We’ve arrived safe and sound! All of our fears have been to to rest! We’d been told we’d either fall in love, or get the first plane back out again. We’ve completed out marathon journey from Heathrow to Jalgaon, and so far we haven’t booked a flight back. So we must be loving it!
The marathon journey included an eight hour flight to Mumbai arriving at 11pm (plenty of movies, as long as you like Bollywood), four hours hanging around at the rather plush airport, a bouncy rickshaw to the train station and another two hours waiting in its gym like rooms – along with hundreds of sleeping locals grabbing every square centimetre of space available on the hard tiled floor to sleep out the night before they also grabbed a carriage to somewhere on India’s magnificent rail network (that also happens to be the world’s largest employer with 1.6m staff). The seven hour sleeper train journey in pretty much a sardine tin of a carriage was surprisingly welcome (sleep!!) and we nodded off in seconds.
We arrived this afternoon in bustling beeping Jalgaon, and found a room in the excellent Hotel Plaza with the most amazingly friendly manager in the world. He drew us a map for our trip to Ajunta caves tomorrow, recommended a restaurant we’ve just stuffed ourselves in, and ordered a rickshaw to cart us around on local rates. As in 15p for a ten minute ride. The room is a double with private bath and TV, lovely and clean, and only 450 rupees (6 GBP) a night for our troubles! At the moment we’re only going to be spending half our budget which is fantastic.
While waiting at the airport we met a couple of photographers who’ve been flown out here to snap a wedding in Goa, the lovely Jon & Melina kept us entertain for a few hours and it was then we began to experience the local ‘curiosity factor’. A boy came and sat down right next to me, couldn’t fit a blade of grass between us, and simply listened to us talking, with an occasional (suspected TB) cough. Feeling slightly disconcerted, the only way around this was to try talking to him, and found out he was waiting for a dad who was a pilot, he is going to University for twelve years to be just like him, and he was sitting next to his uncle who impressed us with his knowledge of train timetables like a cabbie and ‘The Knowledge’. So friendly!
We’ve been stared at lots, and had many more lovely conversations with the inquisitive and friendly locals, especially funny when one turns up with a bunch of friends and only he can speak English so he translates backwards and forwards while the rest of the group nods and ahhhs at our responses; “The train ticket speaks the truth!” he exclaimed when he doubted our itinerary. Excellent.
In short, we had a great time in South America, but were slightly apprehensive about launching ourselves straight back into another endurance test. Especially as we’d seen all of our friends that we missed so much back home, and to be honest just wanted to stay and set up shop! But as suspected, now we’re here, we’ve got a funny feeling that this side of the world is going to be a lot more unexpectedly interesting than our travels so far. We’re in India, and we’re loving it!
PS We absolutely haven’t been to the Taj Mahal yet, but still it makes a nice picture. 
More From Mr & Mrs Travel Blog
- First 24hrs in Rio! Includes such delights as Copacabana Beach and Rio water…
- Mr & Mrs – A blog of our round the world trip travelling through South America and South East Asia » Gallery: Bustling Beijing and Hiking the Great Wall of China!
- Gallery: The Wonderful Floating Islands of Uros on Lake Titicaca, Puno!
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Wot! No pictures!!??
Woohoo glad you guys are ok. It was wicked to see you. Hope you got your I POD in time, the lady at the post office said it might take longer due to the strikes. We’ll keep a tabs on you now we’ver got this link.
Miss you both already.
Mr and Mrs ASHTON