Planning Agra tour..what a mess...
on Le Reveil du Soleil (India), 25/Mar/2009 05:32, 34 days ago
It is just unbelievable how hard and complicated can be to just plan and organise a trip to Agra.. It took us two adventurous days. But it is fun,too, we get to learn new things everyday.. Everyday is an adventour. So here we go:First, we wanted to go by train so we went to the Railway Reservation Building to book and buy tickets. On the entrance, a man shouted at us probably in order to point us that we have a separate line (we were 3 women).. So yes, there are special counters for women and probably around 20 or more for men. So you can picture the place... lot of men staring at you and just a few women sitting on the special counter for ladies.. Well this is nothing.. We than had to fill in a form with our name, age (????), sex, address, phone.. and only after we booked the ticket and payed for it. However, the cashier told us that for the return ticket we are only on the waiting list but there is no problem.. Finally, after 1 hour and half we managed to sort it out. And we went also to the main train station just to familiarize ourselves with it so that we know where to get our train on Saturday. But there surprise..an employee pointed out that our ticket is not valid because we need confirmation for our return ticket. So than he send us to a foreigner travel information office . We got there but it was impossible to get confirmation or get another train. We decided to book bus tickets instead and therefore we had to go again yesterday to cancel the train tickets. To cancel our train tickets we had to fill in another form again with name, age... and again wait on the ladies counter..lucky there were no women at all so we didn't spend much time... and totally ignore the men staring at us... We managed to cancel the tickets but we had to pay a cancellation fine around 320 rupees.. What a mess..Eventually, everything is set and I am looking forward for this Saturday's trip to Agra.To soon,Cristina