Bus adventure

Yep, you heard it: bus.

But a nice bus, see?

So yeah some words of warning: those letters in your "confirmed" train ticket that you booked weeks in advance CAN mean that you are actually waitlisted, and therefore do not actually have a ticket. And if you chose an uncommon class, that is very bad because you are waitlisted for only that class, which may have only one car while other, also perfectly acceptable classes may have dozens of cars and space, but they won't tell you that.

Also, apparently 2AC Sleeper is one of those Uncommon Classes. Oops.

We found out it was waitlisted early on in the process but figured it was ok because we were ranked 2, 3, and 4, and they say that you only need to worry if your rank is something significantly above 30. But yeah, that's for the more common classes like 3AC Sleeper or 1AC (clearly!)

So, after a hectic afternoon of finding this out, being passed from person to unhelpful person at the Ernakulam train station, waiting in lines at each one, we finally got a "no, you can't take the train for the next few days" and that was that.

So we eventually found a travel agent and bus tickets... leaving in just one hour! Aah! (we didn't have our bags and we hadn't payed our hotel and we didn't have enough cash for both the bus tickets and the hotel and this hotel was at least a half hour drive away, and the bus was another half hour from there! Hence the Aah!)

We took the risk and bought the tickets, hopped in a very quickly-driven cab and eventually stopped at an ATM - but it didn't work! Oh no! Then the cabbie got lost! Double oh noes!

But then we found another ATM that worked and the hotel, got our stuff, paid, and got in the bus with 2 minutes to spare. Phew. - Also I think the cabbie might have called the bus and told them to wait for us, but I didn't realize that until we were on the bus already. So it was pretty stressful, but it was high-fives all around when we sat in our seats (and realized they were about 100 times nicer than the other commuter-style bus seats we'd been on before.)

It was probably the nicest bus I've been in, and due to the ticketing fiasco with trains, I've decided that these private bus companies are the way to travel in India. Leg-rests, leg room, comfy seats, pillows... It was nice.

...For the first 45 minutes. Then the clutch went out and we were stranded in the road for over 4 hours while a parade of different mechanics tried to fix it. No announcement or anything, just no movement of the bus and we all continued to watch the heavy-action Tamil movie playing on the screen in the bus and got more and more curious what was going on.

We eventually walked over to the "European Fried Chicken" down the street - the only option, we checked - and had some dinner. They were the first place this trip that took credit card. At all. Not even any of the hotels did, but this greasy fast-food joint did. Weird.

Then, something like 12 hours went by, and we made it back to Tambaram! (there was another mechanic at some point and apparently somebody came and sat in the seat next to me for half the trip, but I was asleep for almost all of that.)