Our public transport nightmares

This post is not to scare you in to thinking you can never take public transport when travelling. This is to show what can happen if you aren’t prepared enough and don’t plan ahead… or if you’re just really unlucky.

Thankfully we can now look back and laugh uncontrollably at the situations we found ourselves in whilst travelling.

It is really important that when you go travelling, you book trains in plenty of time as tickets tend to sell out fast and if you are in a big group especially, if you book late the likelihood of you all getting a seat is slim. Due to us adding a destination to our schedule (Pushkar) it meant we had to rearrange getting to Johdpur from Jaipur and this meant getting a taxi, rather than a bus. This journey is set to take around 5 hours and 40 minutes in a taxi. As you can imagine this isn’t the most enjoyable experience in the 40 degree heat. However, we blasted a bit of Gloria Gaynor ‘I will survive’ and this particular journey wasn’t too bad. But, you must be aware of the language barrier and the fact that sometimes people get lost. We added another 2 hours on to this journey due to our driver getting slightly lost and also not speaking a word of English. If you get chance to book earlier than we did, seriously consider all of your options, whether its getting a train, bus or even a flight – depending on your budget.

Another situation we landed ourselves in was getting to Agra. Of course, seeing the Taj Mahal was on all of our bucket lists of things to do whilst we were in India, and it was something we weren’t going to miss. When in Johdpur we originally planned to get the sleeper train from there to Agra as it is quite a significant distance and the sleeper train meant we would sleep as normal and by the time we woke up we would have arrived. Our plan definitely didn’t go as expected. When we were at Hostel La Vie, the workers there helped us to find the train station and told us the information we needed to know. Unfortunately, when we got to the train station they told us there weren’t enough tickets for all of us. When we asked our hostel about our options he explained that we could buy some tickets and apply for spare tickets for the rest of the girls in the group in case any became available. However, there was no guarantee that there would be, meaning we would be split up. This seemed like to much of a risk and resulted in us having to take a 10-hour taxi journey after we were told that the only bus that wasn’t full wasn’t air conditioned – we weren’t brave enough to spend 10 hours in that sort of heat.

This particular taxi journey was without a doubt the worst I have experienced. I don’t know if the driver hadn’t slept the night before… but he certainly wanted to sleep whilst we were on the road. We spent our hellish 10 hours trying to keep him awake, constantly on edge, checking if his eyes were actually on the road or if he was falling asleep at the wheel again.

We learnt from our mistakes and made sure that we wouldn’t be doing any ridiculously long taxi journeys again. Instead we opted for a sleeper bus to get us from Rishikesh to Jodhpur. Needless to say, it wasn’t all plain sailing. We were told by the hostel (Bunk Stay) that they would book us a taxi to the bus station which should only take around 15-20 minutes. We waited…and waited but it seemed the taxi wasn’t arriving any time soon. After turning up at least 30 minutes late we finally set off to the bus station, still with time to spare before our sleeper bus arrived.

The slight issue was that our journey seemed to be taking a lot longer than 15-20 minutes leading us to believe the driver had taken a wrong turn or that he was taking us to the wrong station. Another issue – he didn’t speak a word of English. After trying to ask and even use Google translate on our phones, communication was still impossible, and we finally arrived half an hour late for our bus at the side of a road, and to really top things off, it was in the middle of a storm. We had parked up on the side of a quiet road with only a shop insight. A parade of different men kept making their way to our car, handing different phones to the driver, with one of the men trying his best to communicate with us in some way to explain what exactly was happening. As you might imagine emotions were running high - Megan and Ellie were crying, Martha was ringing the bus company and Charlotte was laughing hilariously whilst I was sat in complete confusion. Embarrassingly for us, it turned out we were actually parked right in front of the bus ‘station’ which in reality was a little bus stop and the bus was in fact late. After our crying, shouting down the phone and general chaos we were causing, don’t worry we tipped our driver and apologised profusely for our emotional breakdowns.

When we got on the bus our expected 11-hour journey was extended to 15 which wasn’t so great when Megan had to keep going to the toilet every half hour. It resulted in her having to keep getting the driver to stop whilst she made her way into little café’s and shops asking for the toilet at all hours of the night in the pitch black.

The moral of these stories is to always be prepared! Research and plan-ahead of time all of your transport options and the best way to get to each of your destinations. If you are getting taxi's don't expect for them to come on time. Of course, sometimes you can’t avoid getting yourselves in to these less than ideal situations, but the good news is you can eventually look back and laugh.