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Continuing the ear-infection: sick on the Konkan express

As you can read in my previous post, Amelia got an ear infection in Belgium, got a fever on the plane to India and when we landed in Mumbai she was pretty sick.

However, we didn’t really realize how sick she was. Mumbai is very busy and intense, and we had a train reservation to go overnight to Goa, on the Mumbai-Goa Konkan express. So we decided to go. We thought she would get better faster in a relaxed hotel on the beach than in Mumbai.

The Mumbai-Goa Konkan express is one of the few trains you can book from abroad, which I had done, because seats in these trains tend to fill up weeks ahead of time. It’s a sleeper train, so you get a bed, in an open compartment (with 6 people). You can only book it 10 days in advance of the trip date, online, pay with credit card.

We went to Victoria station, which is really busy and hectic but pretty interesting, to take the train, at 10 pm in the evening.

Victoria Station:

Here the problems started. Remember we were still pretty jet-lagged. This didn’t help, we were carrying a sick baby, and our bags (that weren’t huge bit still heavy). On the return trip I learnt to use the porters that are available in every train station. If you’re traveling with children, that just makes life that much easier, even if they try to rip you off (it’s just a few 100 rupees, which is a few dollars). Lesson learnt: when traveling with kids, use the help that’s there (like porters). Watch what Indian families do.

Once the train got going, the first problem turned up. They didn’t reserve a compartment for us. It turned out we would have to wait 3 hours in the end to get them to find a bed for us. They had doublebooked. Arg. Our stresslevels were rising, and this being a few days after landing, our tolerance for Indian-ness wasn’t very high (in other words, culture shock hadn’t really worn off yet).

Meanwhile, Amelia was getting more sick and was crying all the time. Not a good time. The whole trip was pretty miserable, Amelia sick, we worried about her, trying to get some sleep.

When we arrived in Goa in the morning we took a taxi to the hotel, and then went straight to the hospital with Amelia. More about that in the next episode!

To give you an idea, here’s a picture of the return trip (Goa –> Mumbai, which we also did with the Konkan Express). Amelia hanging out with an Indian family. That trip was much nicer.