We made an amateurish mistake today. We tried to rush in India.

The day started rather well with us catching a nice air conditioned bus two hours down the road to Ahmedabad which is the capital of Gujurat. It’s not really noteworthy other than the fact it had more options of getting into Rajasthan so we decided to only stay one night. 

We arrived at about 12noon to dusty dry heat and after talking to our very helpful hotel owner we headed to the train station to see if we could try our luck getting tourist allocated tickets to our next destination as all the normal tickets were completely sold out. We had done a little planning and wanted to buy our next three stops’ tickets as the trains would be so much quicker than buses. We were full of optimism due to the hotel owner assuring us there would be seats. Mistake number one.

So we arrived at the train station and waited an hour in line to be told that our train tickets to the next place were not available. Okay not the end of the world. If we could get a bus we could come back and book our other tickets. 

The next 5 hours involved us trying to buy these stupid bus tickets. 
We made the mistake of telling the hotel owner what we were planning so of course we couldn’t possibly go down to the bus station ourselves so he sent his manager. So we ended up with second hand information on all bus times. Brilliant. But according to our man there was a private bus. Again we believed him. Mistake number 2. So we traipsed around town trying to find the travel agent that ran said bus. Turns out he was wrong. By this stage we we’re pretty over it. Argh the frustration! 

The day ended with us heading back to the bus station to purchase a ticket to a different destination kind of half way to our next stop. We didn’t even get to see any sights of Ahmedabad. But that wasn’t too big of a deal as there wasn’t too much to see. Actually Armenabad was a step up in Indian city shambles. There were key intersections that seemed to be a free for all and you seriously nearly died every time you tried to crosstie road. The council had put in bus lanes and the hilarious thing about these is that they had to hire security guards that manned ropes across the lane to make sure only buses used them. They also had traffic lights here but as often as not you were more likely to be going when it was red than when the lights was actually green. 

We fell exhausted into our bed looking forward to a good nights sleep before getting up at 5am to catch our bus. This is about the time the party started down the road. Even with all windows shut, aircon and fan on we still could hear the bass reverberating through the walls.

Ah India you can be very entertaining at times but today was not one of those days. S