At intervals during the night a dog is making a fearful din under our window. Not the most restful of nights. Alarm at 6.00 a.m. Breakfast is a quick cup of tea and a banana along with our first anti-malarial tablet of this trip. We check out and come up against the same taxi bandit. We have luggage and there are no other cabs in sight so we settle on his idea of a fair price. The roads are clear and, at this time of day, traffic lights are considered ornamental. There is time to buy essential supplies such as bottled water and biscuits before the train is announced.
Our booking is for lower berths in Two-tier AC class, not our first choice but a recent change on Indian Railways automatically allocates these seats to old codgers. We find our names on the chart posted by the door, stow the luggage and take our seats. The coach is fairly battered but nothing out of the ordinary and we can see out of the windows so that is a plus. Our neighbours are an Indian couple with a grown up son. We exchange a few words with father but his accent is very heavy and conversation peters out. The first chai wallah produces a very acceptable cup, not too sweet. By now we have left the city behind and are travelling through quite lush countryside, mainly devoted to rice paddies. The TTE arrives and approves our tickets without even a glance at our passports. D is rather relieved as these tickets were booked after the withdrawal of Senior concession fares for non-Indians but before the booking website had been amended to reflect this. We settle down to enjoy our last half price rail trip. To be honest it always seemed rather odd that we got a subsidy - just as long as they don't start adding a foreigner surcharge.
The Faluknama Superfast Express rattles along at a good pace. Most passengers are going through to Secunderabad but we get off at Bhubaneswar, a mere 440 km, so do not have to gear up to sleep on this train. Until the last 20km or so we keep good time but then are reduced to a crawl, ultimately arriving around 30 minutes late. Our accommodation is at a hotel we have used before, the Grand Central, only a hundred yards from the station. This means we only have to spend a hundred yards telling numerous people that we do not need a taxi. We check in and crash out for a couple of hours.
After our siesta it is time to go shopping. We have had difficulty buying 'Orange Bites' in Kolkata but a small shop opposite the hotel had them last year and still does. These small boiled sweeties are an essential part of our Indian travel kit. Just down the street is an ATM with only two people queuing. A message on the screen tells us that only 2000 notes are available but so far we have been able to change these without too much of a problem. Essential tasks completed we retire to the bar at the Grand Central for a refreshment and a plate of onion pakodas, the first this year. Back in the room D tries to solve the problem with posting photos to the blog. He succeeds mainly in burning off a lot of data and decides to go out to get a top up, known here as a recharge. The Orange Bite man does these and Rs 251 buys a Gb of data plus, strangely, Rs1.07 of talk time. By the time D is back in the room the phone has received 4Gb of data. This happened last year but only for one free Gb.
It is past our supper time so food is sought. The dining room is deserted but a waiter soon arrives with menus. We have both been enjoying veg food so far and decide to stick with it. No naan available tonight, so we have rice, daal, chapattis and mushrooms jalfreizi. This is delicious. We need a recipe. The energy boost provides stimulation to solve the IT problem. D digs out his old tablet, which automatically downsizes photos before sending them. This does the trick. 4G phones are very clever but D's provides no obvious way to do this.
And now the problem is lack of signal Grr!
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