WHEN I completed my last rail jaunt across India, I must confess that I felt that I hadn’t quite got my fill. Something seemed to be missing. It could’ve been that I didn’t take that many trains (6) or the fact that none of the trips were particularly challenging – it was all relatively relaxed and comfortable. The rest of the year sped by pretty quickly and included fabulous family trips to Turkey and a few days in Lisbon but the idea of sneaking in another rail adventure, before a return to gainful employment, grew and grew. I settled on an early new year departure with the specific aim of completing India’s longest single rail journey – the Vivek Express from Dibrugarh in the far North Eastern state of Assam, all the way down through the country to Kanyakumari – a mere 4,154km in 74 hours! That’s more like it!!
This took some planning, especially as this train only runs 3 days a week, it was relatively late to book tickets with confirmed seats/berths and the fact that I wanted to minimise spending on the most expensive part of the trip – the flights – through using mileage awards.
Availability on redemption tickets was limited to business class both ways – oh, how awful I hear you cry! – but I grabbed an outbound direct flight with British Airways (in their very respectable and comfortable Club World Suite) and a return with the reincarnated Alitalia (now called ITA) via Rome in one of their new Airbus 330-900 NEO planes which should be just fine – all for about £700 incl. taxes, which was a fair bit cheaper than return economy flights at the moment.
I landed in Delhi in the early hours of Wednesday 3rd January and, after navigating a whole new and complicated process to get a local SIM, waited a few hours for a flight to Guwahati, the capital of Assam. Ideally, I would’ve got the train here but at 30+ hours, that would’ve taken my trip a little bit over the 2 weeks which I thought was just about acceptable from a home-life perspective.
The flight to Guwahati gave some lovely glimpses of Himalayan peaks in the distance and we landed just as the sun was setting over the broad expanse of the Brahmaputra river. This is a piece of India that is tucked away up in the corner, basically between Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Myanmar and China. It is a fascinating region with wildlife reserves, which include healthy populations of tigers and rhinos, together with the tea estates, means it is an area that I feel I am not doing any degree of justice to – but one that will therefore be worthy of a much longer, and not solo, revisit at some point.
The Vivek Express starts in Dibrugarh and comes back through Guwahati however as this part is during the night, I decided to start in Guwahati in order to enjoy this scenic part of the journey during daylight hours. This has meant a full day’s stay in Guwahati which on first impressions – seems to be a city with very challenging traffic and road problems. A 9km journey today took an hour although as my sister remarked – it can almost take that amount of time to travel the same distance in London. She’s not wrong, but at least it’s a bit quieter!
The day here was fine. I managed to sleep well after the 23.5 hour door to door journey (starting with a train from Epsom to Wimbledon, tube to Earls Court and then on to LHR T5) and walked along the sandy banks of the Brahmaputra (sounds a little more romantic than it really was) before taking a small boat to Peacock Island to visit the Umananda temple. Apparently it is the smallest inhabited river island in the world. The temple was busy with many devotees but a temple guardian took me to skip the very long line and view the sanctorum. That was very kind but I felt rather awkward as I was merely peering at proceedings as a non-Hindu rather than as a worshipper. All the same, the people in the queue seemed understanding with this arrangement and I made a suitable donation to the temple.
From there I took an electric auto-rickshaw to the temple complex of Kamakhya, high in the hills above the city. The saffron robes of devotees against the backdrop of the setting sun on the temple roof captured one part of the compelling and infectious essence of India. The whole complex, complete with some rather unhealthy looking goats and scavenging monkeys, oozed a calm religious intensity that was ruined somewhat by a 1 hour Uber ride back to the hotel. A complimentary beer from the hotel went some way to restoring things. I was glad it was free as Rs400 (approx £4) for a Kingfisher really grates – nearly twice the price of the last pint I had with a friend in the local Wetherspoons (OK, that’s not your average price of a pint place).
For dinner, I pretty much had the same as I had on my night of arrival – a local speciality Naga Thali with smoked pork. Oddly, I first came across naga chilies in a local “Indian” restaurant run by Bangladeshis in Epsom. At the time, I’d asked for a spicy pickle and they brought some naga chili pickle which absolutely rocked. According to wikipedia, it is in fact one of the hottest chilies around – so that explains a few things today.
Tomorrow it is time for my first rail trip – just under 12 hours to cover 557km. A mere hop. And I can’t wait to get back on board Indian Railways.
