Travel Day

 Today was a VERY LONG travel day, so not much to report.  We were up and out of our hotel in Agra by 7:00 AM to catch an 8:15 train to Jhanci.  The train left on time and was supposed to take 2.75 hours to get to Jhanci, but about halfway there the train simply stopped on the tracks and we sat for more than 90 minutes going nowhere!  Thank goodness we were in the first class car so we had seats.  It was crowded though and got very hot and stuffy while we were stuck going nowhere.  By the time we got to Jhanci we had been traveling for 5 hours!  We then went to lunch, took a little stretch break and then drove 5 more hours to get to Khajuraho.  We drove into the hotel here at 7:30.  We did take an interesting break on the road as we drove through countryside and villages, where our guide showed us how a rural family irrigates their fields.  They have a well and a pulley system to get the water out of the well by turning a wheel that rotates a series of buckets.  The wheel is rotated by two cows yoked together.  It was really like a scene from the 17th century!  There were goats milling about as we watched the cows do their work.  The well was absolutely enormous - very wide and deep.  While very, very long and tiring the drive was entertaining and more than a little hair raising.  The roads are very poor, full of potholes and uneven at best and the bus rocks and bounces unbelievably.  I felt like my brains were scrambled by the time we got here.  And the driving on those country roads is an extreme sport!  Cows, goats, dogs, people, motorcycles, trucks, buses all vie for a very narrow road and pass one another with a hair's breadth of room.  I can't tell you how many near head on collisions we had in the course of the drive, nor how many times the bus drove onto the "shoulder" (there is no shoulder so the bus tips to the side as it slides off the paved part into the dirt along the side and then rights again when the driver gets us back up on the road.)  Those of us near the front of the bus had to stop watching out the window because we were having our hearts in our throats almost constantly!  We decided that whatever they are paying the driver, its not enough!  So we arrived to our hotel feeling pretty jangled and tired from the long drive.  Tomorrow we have a long day of touring with a flight to Varanasi thrown into the mix!

I've included a couple of pics of the train station and of the cows pumping the well!