Traveling through India: bus, train, plane

Alas, we must leave our beloved Udaipur. We are on our sleeper AC bus to Jaisalmer now. 5 pm to 530 am (which probably means 9 am.) Ale and I immediately fell asleep when we got on, and then I woke up around 730 to eat my two parothas which I had brought for dinner.

I just wanted to write about how reasonable it is to get to different cities here in India, if you don't mind sleeper buses/trains. So far we have tried most of the travel options. We have done 3 bus rides in the reclining seats, 3 bus rides in sleeper (little closed off beds with a window), 1 train ride in sleeper 3AC (3 bunk beds on top of each other in the AC compartment), and 2 legs of a flight. Best one? Flight obviously, but our flights were during the day and that kind of threw us off. we much prefer sleeping our way through travel and then not having to pay for a hotel. So I might have to vote for 3AC train. Trains are so much smoother because the buses obviously go on roads and the ride is dependent on the driver and the roads and whether they like to honk. Luckily this driver isn't a honker!

We will be taking sleeper class train from Jaisalmer to Jodhpur in a couple of days and I'm interested to see the difference between 3AC. They both have beds (3 bunks) but sleeper lacks air conditioning. Also, the sleeper tickets are like 1/4 the price. You can open the widows and get good views. Lonely planet recommends it if you want to get an Indian experience. Luckily that drive is only about 5 hours so we can test it out and see if we like it. Then we take a 23 hour (yes you read that right) train from Jodhpur to Haridwar. That might be painful, but we are doing 3AC at least. It's definitely hard to buy train tickets just a week before, but bus tickets are much more available (hence why we are on a bumpy bus now!) We would have preferred to split up our trip from Jaisalmer to Hardiwar in Jaipur (making each trip about 13 hours) but all the trains and buses were booked. What can you do.

I just met a girl in the sleeper next to us who is a doctor in Ireland. She already finished her 2 years of internal medicine and then usually they go do a fellowship. She didn't really love anything, so she decided to do psychiatry instead. Since psychiatry is not very competitive in Ireland, she said it gave her a lot more leeway in terms of starting date and so she finagled 6 months off to travel. She is doing an around-the-world ticket and went from Dublin to London to Delhi, then Calcutta to South Korea to Perth, Australia then to Ecuador and maybe some other places in South America and then back to Ireland. Looks like I have a future dream vacation (aka buying one of these tickets!)