My First Travelogue (Day 1)

Day 1 (September 26)-> The first part of our journey to Leh was the train from Mumbai to Chandigarh. Paschim express had a depart time of 11 Am from Andheri station. We all huddled up on the platform quite before the train was to arrive. Standing where our coach was scheduled to halt, we realized that Chandigarh was on slip route. Slkip route means not all coaches of the train go to Chandigarh but only a few.This meant that our coach will actually be last in the train, but before we could realize this our train came. It had only 2 minutes halt at Andheri and with the entire luggage(13 bags for 8 of us, quite reasonable I had thought ;-)) we had a really tough time making it to our seats. A clear indication of how rest of the journey is going to be ;-)
In India people love their travel and since we were a large group, our seats were scattered in various compartments. So the next task was to make some insternal adjustments with other passangers so that we all could be together in one compartment. More that 50% passengers in Paschim express were senior citizens. If it was a coincidence, I dint understand. However that made our task tougher as the oldies were not very flexible for the shuffling we were trying to impose on them. Anyway our destination Chandigarh was not due in next 28 hours so we had plenty of time shifting others, making room for ourselves, playing cards and laughing at the drop of a hat. To be frank we were making so much noise that almost all others knew where we were going and some were even watching the movie guessing game we were playing.