Night 3 goes down as one of the worse nights EVER. The Nytol did not save me. And as I write this, we have passed the 72hr mark and the end point should be 2 hours away. It isn’t. It’s about 7 hours away. The train feels like it has given up the will to live. It is going to have to drag it’s sorry self across the finishing line. It has at least emptied out and is a lot quieter. Perhaps everyone else gave up on it. But I will see it through to the end. Assuming it has the energy to make it there!

Anyway, perhaps I’m just now in a grouchy this has been a ridiculously long trip without any decent sleep kinda mood. Last night was a shocker, impossible to sleep. Firstly, the locomotive was changed and it quite frequently judders so much so that my laptop almost feel off my lap. Secondly, my neighbours, as lovely as they were, didn’t seem that interested in anything other than occasional bouts of sleep interspersed with music, religious readings, talking loudly between themselves, then both joining a number of calls on speaker phone call, all the while with the berth light on full. I waived them off at Coimbatore by this point realising that we were now looking at a substantially late arrival. The place I’m staying who have been pinging me over the last few days asking me when I am arriving, have now gone strangely quiet when I said it was likely to be 04:00. A few reviews give me some nervousness about whether there will be a room or not but my head is now pounding so much that I can’t think about that possibility. Kanyakumari seems pretty limited on the hotel and eating options which is odd given its incredible location.

So basically this last part of the journey has dragged and as a result of the late running, I have missed out on the part I was really looking forward to seeing through a train window – Kerala. As a family we came here just a year and a half ago and I remember seeing a couple of trains and thinking what a great ride it would make. The return trip back from Trivandrum up to Mumbai takes a slightly different direction and in any event, it will be at night. So a bit miffed but really all I want to do is have a break from train food, have a shave, sleep decently (what with the arrival time it will be a short night), shower (instead of using Baby wipes to maintain some level of cleanliness…they’ve worked pretty well I feel), eat some more fruit and veg and most of all, get some exercise in. Oh and a cold beer would go down a treat.