The Goan Files : Part 2 : the Journey

Thank you for sticking around and bearing with me and my irregular posting habits. Let us now embark on the second part of the journey where i shall tell you about the trip from Chennai to Goa....

Starting off from Chennai Central, we were on the Brindavan Express to Bangalore which was scheduled to reach Bangalore Station around 1:30 p.m. Everyone was present and seated and the journey begun. Bored from watching out the windows and looking at the same old crap we all took to doing something else viz. listening to music, taking lotsa pics and playing UNO....Ahhhh...here is where our UNO proness journey begins...A journey within a journey....All in all i think we played UNO so much that if someone slapped us while we were sleeping at night we would have shouted UNO before saying What the hell..!!



So well, we played UNO, we ate bajji, drank lotsa Pepsi and coke and drove away an "Ajak" before Praneet announced that we were less than half an hour away from Bangalore. the first part of our journey was coming to an end as the train entered into the Bangalore City station. Our next train was from Yeshvantpur station which was a little distance from the City station. This is where i shall show you the honesty of Bangalore's auto and tour bus drivers. the common question put to them outside the City station was this

Question : How far is Yesvantpur station from here?

Answer 1 :: About 6 kms

Answer 2 :: About 15 kms

Answer 3 :: About 11 kms

Answer 4 :: About 12 kms

Answer 5 :: About 9 kms

Not knowing whom to believe and unwilling to take the risk of missing the next train which was slotted to leave at 3:15 p.m. we talked to a tour bus owner who settled on a price of 800 for about 12-15 kms which seemed appropriate to us. Starting from Bangalore City station we witnessed an eternal comedy, a universal law.

Law :: A tour vehicle operator's first stop will be the petrol bunk.

So after filling up on his gas tank at our expense he proceeded to take us to Yesvantpur station. Oh, i almost forgot about the bus. Ok, let your imagination run riot.

Holes everywhere
All seats broken
Cockroaches crawling all around
And an unworldly stink

thinking of the good times ahead (Kingfisher style) we bore all the shit silently and kept looking at the horrible streets of Bangalore. To our surprise, the driver proclaimed that we had reached and it was hardly 15 minutes since we had started ( including the tank filling session). After getting our luggage down, we had a long fight with the driver regarding his exorbitant prices and then finally managed to get the price down to 750 ( who knew that our bargaining skills will get better with time).

So well, after whiling away some time and walking a lot to reach the platform from which we had to catch the Vasco express ( Yesvantpur - Vasco Da Gama), we finally reached the train and went up to look at the seating list only to find that all our seats were separate but that there was a gang og hot girls ( all aged 23-24) moving with us to Vasco. Ah, the sight. Every one of us wanted a seat next to them ( typical guy mentality) and after lot of snap taking and sight-aditchifying the train finally begun.

Reaching Tumkur at around 6 we had our first break when all of us got down to stretch our legs and get some fresh air, whihc only resulted in Ela and me catching cold and Avinash catching a fever. None of us needed an iPod or a walkman as the girls next to us were in full flow playing antakshari.

Beautiful girls, beautiful voices, beautiful view....Ahh the life....And while we are at this how could i forget to mention Kichma's mokkai. Our MGR Krishnamurthy was playing UNO cards when one of the girls had to pass him and she said "Excuse me". Our Kichma instantaneously strikes back with a "Yes, Come in". none of the boys or the girl knew what to do for about 5 seconds, after which she passed and all of us were rolling on the floor with laughter.

Apart from this and a few more incidents like the Mortal Kombat remake staged by Praneet and me playing Scorpion and Rayden respectively showing off our fatalities, our cool boy Ashwath put kadalai to some girls and when the foreigner lady told us to switch off the light, we still didn't switch it off for another 2 hours, how we got food at Hubli station at 12:30 in the night, how me and Praneet shared a seat and couldnt sleep the whole night while Anand slept like a baby in all kinds of poses, how we finally got pissed and woke Ashwath up and told him that we had reached and when he got down Praneet grabbed his seat and i grabbed the other one and finally went to sleep.

When i woke up, the morning was cold, the air nippy with cold and obscure with fog before we finally entered Vasco station.

Enough for now....Part 3 will come up soon and i shall continue from there...

Hang on guys,
Ciao