Indian trains are nice. Every major station has a considerable amount of scammers. Of course to counter this, there are a lot of railway officials. Now as they have no uniforms, whereas some of the scammers have, you have no idea who to trust. This makes it all more exciting.
Instead of air conditioning, the 2nd class carriage had an impressive array of fans on the ceiling.
Trains have no restaurant car. This would be highly unnecessary and counter-productive ergarding employment. Every few minutes someone went through the carriage chanting "chaichaichai" or "coffeecoffeecoffee" or a name of some delicious-looking snack they were selling.
At every station the train was invaded by beggars who woke me up by tapping or scratching my hand and were patiently (stubbornly?) waiting for the white man to reward this unwanted alarm clock service by a handful of rupees.
Entering Punjab the amount of beggars was on decline. Punjab is a rich land, with a lot of agriculture and hard-working sikhs, who have been raised on stories of blood and martyrdom and who are still friendly towards everyone. The traditional sikh headwear, the turban, is a welcoming sight in the midst of the sea of entrepenours who want to cheat tourists. This might be a horrible misunderstanding and oversimplification, but the sikhs seem view foreigners as people and not as walking chests of gold. One reason might be that this group that consists of just a few million people is doing economically very well.
The Golden Temple, a holy place of the Sikhs was the reason we took the train. By we I mean me, Tuure from Finland and Ioana from Romania.
Tuure doing the tourist thing
Much more impressive in the night.
El Pene of Amritsar, commemorating the slaughter of around 2000 unarmed peaceful demontrators by british troops.
Tuure has more and better quality photos on his website.
Edit: 29 Aug - major rewrite because I was bored and this entry was too long.
