India🇮🇳Buying a train ticket in just 1.5h and getting to the station in a lawn mower

Varanasi was an extremely intense start to what would prove to be an extremely intense country. It was time for the next destination: Agra. There is a direct train. No one could tell me where the buses went from and which route they took, so the train quickly became the only option. However, the train also had its challenges. Used to arriving at the station one minute before the train departs, tapping my OV-chip card at the gate, and boarding, I assumed it would be different here. The British left behind a complicated bureaucracy. If you want to travel anything other than the lowest class, you have to buy a ticket at least a day in advance (you can‘t buy it on the same day). If you want to travel in the lowest class, you can only buy a ticket on the same day (which is a challenge for trains that depart five minutes after midnight, but the systems don‘t allow otherwise).

To let my culture shock from Varanasi acclimatize a bit, I decided not to go for the lowest class right away, so I went to the station a day in advance to buy a ticket. There were only two people in front of me, so it shouldn‘t take long. Hmmmm, the retrieval, input, verification, and adjustment of all the data took about twenty minutes per person. They want to know so much about you that the CIA would be jealous. When it was finally my turn, the clerk had already exceeded her working hours by ten minutes, so she closed the system and said that a replacement would probably come in twenty minutes. After half an hour and another twenty minutes to process my data, I had my ticket.

The next day, I had to find a tuk-tuk again. I quickly found one, and he quoted a price that was close to the local price, unfortunately for a reason: the tuk-tuk had the power of a lawnmower. Every time we hit a speed bump, I had to get out and push the tuk-tuk over it. Thanks to good teamwork, we arrived at the station on time, which was good because this train left on the dot; furthermore, it had power outlets in every cabin and arrived only two hours late, which was well below the average, as I would later discover in my subsequent train journeys. For now, it was 2-1 for the Indian Railways versus the NS (Dutch Railways).

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