Matthew Feb 3, 09

Well we have successfully taken a train journey. Despite the fact that at least 3 different taxi's were arranged to take us to the station at Mughal Serai outside Varanasi when we finally hoisted our bags to shoulder in the company of a boy from the hotel and braved the sheer mayham of the second day of the sarasvati festival which featured crowds of teenage boys dancing in group in front of lights and speakers pushing out huge volumes of sound being pushed down the strrts by auto rickshaws anand some kind of scaffolding structure there was no taxi where it was expected and we were immediately set upon by touts offering to gety us to the station despite the bridge outages and only just in time for our train if we left now for only twice the usual taxi fee and this for an auto rickshaw - a big new one.Our boy left us to make more negotiations and eventyually returned and we ran throught the steets with a driver who had been there all the time and were deposited in a small dented subcompact and driven via some secret back route the wrong way along crumbling bridges - the bridge was out and arrived in half the time we had originally been quoted. Then to the platform and trying to understand the announcements. Eventually a young couple from the Czech repbulic sought our reassurance that we were on the right platfoem for their train to Bangalore but almost immediately they told us that the platform had been changed and with no further verification we scurried across the to an arriving train hrftrd on our weighty bags and were trying to find our sears when I reallized the train was in motion. Without those Czecks we would still be waiting. the rest of the trip was fairly uneventful. We met a number of nice people - some engineering students and a computer engineer from Bangalore named Snoji, a Christion, and we had an interesting discussion obout the Divine Unity and how it appears in the various true faiths.. The food and the sleeping were surprisingly good and we are now in Chennai - have just finished a short shopping spree undertaken by using local trains - 1 rupee per station . we plan to get to the airport the same way tomorrow. I need to call the airline having a message to do so from Linda and Eleanor who are now on their own path - may God Bless their journey. I had neant to mention in the previous post how happy we had all been after our darshan with the jadaguru of the North.

For Now - I still have some more notes for topics for posts and I do intend to make them up when I get home.

Matthew