KEY POINTS:
The guards at the entrance to the Delhi railway station won't let our bus into the carpark. Maybe our bus of Kiwis looks a bit dodgy. Whatever the reason there is nothing for it but to unload the bus on the main road.
We head for the station in a slightly ragged crocodile of travellers with bags bumping over the potholes, dodging the tuk-tuks that hurtle past.
Inexplicably to me (but no doubt perfectly reasonably as far as the stationmaster was concerned) there are no red-turbaned porters to be seen. So, our party has to trundle down the platform past several hundred interested spectators.
Suddenly our local agent comes to a halt beside a uniformed official who is pointing across the tracks. After much arm-waving GG sets off purposefully across the rails. We follow, bags bumping across the sleepers, and ploughing through the ballast.
I pray an express, or anything at all really, is not coming down the tracks. After passing in front of a stationary diesel that seems to be about two-storeys tall, we reach the next platform, where a group of porters are sitting on a pile of sacks. They too watch us as we stagger past.
And now, we are on the train, en route to Agra on the Mangla Express. (If I don't get everyone off it in the five minutes we are in Agra station, we could stay on the train for three days and eventually reach almost the southern tip of the country. There are 17 of us, 17 bags, five minutes.....I'll need a fortifying cup of railway chai to prepare. And maybe a hot fried banana, which someone has just tried to convince me to buy.
In the meantime, India is passing by - ploughed fields under a misty autumn morning sky, brickworks chimneys rising like minarets among the sugarcane, water buffalo wallowing in a pond, a distant glimpse of a white dome among a cluster of palm trees.
It's mesmerising - if we do miss our stop the timelessness of rural India would be enough compensation for a three-day train ride. But how many fried bananas would I need to last the distance?
