Mangalore

The best train seats we could find to get us to Mangalore was a second class fan assisted carriage. Just before we were getting on the train, James noticed there was more than one station in Mangalore, so asked which station I had booked us tickets to. I had no idea, as I didn’t know there were multiple stations – of course, it turns out that I booked the station that was the furthest away from where we were staying.

At Gokarna train station, we tried to pay for an extra fare to extend our tickets, but we were told we could only buy the extension at the train station we wanted to extend it from (which, of course, we couldn’t do as we would still be on the train). At the start of the train journey, we initially considered risking it and staying on the train an extra stop, but it turned out that after five hours of sitting on wooden benches in a non-AC carriage, we just wanted to get off. We felt so dirty from all the dust blowing in from outside we just wanted to get off.

When we took the previous train from Agonda, there were also some French people travelling who told us not to sit in our reserved seats and that we could sit anywhere. At first, we were confused and thought, well, if we have guaranteed seats, let’s use them. But then when James was looking up the train carriages online, he noticed there are actually a lot more train carriages with unreserved seating.
We managed to get a whole cabin to ourselves, so could really stretch ourselves out on the wooden benches over the next five to six hours. By the end of the journey, we were totally ready to get off the train and hop straight into the shower. A small Tuk Tuk to our hotel and we managed to freshen up and then go for dinner.

We had no plans whatsoever for Mangalore; it was just a stop-off to help us get to Mahe. The following morning, we killed a few hours by going to the local shopping centre to buy a few toiletries – deodorant, hand sanitiser, a tinted sun cream for me, and some toothpaste. We hit the jackpot by getting everything in one shop.

It was quite an experience to get the deodorant; I was offered a whitening roll-on stick – the sales lady said it smelt nice and also makes your skin go white – definitely not what I wanted as I quite like having a tan! But we got to the actual roll-on deodorant eventually. Asking for the tinted SPF was a little more of a challenge, as she couldn’t understand why I would want it coloured. She said something though to her co-worker, and she quickly found me something – a Korean-branded tinted moisturiser.

These girls were in their element with all of our purchases, and of course tried to sell us even more things – I used my go-to excuse when people try to sell me stuff: “sorry, my husband will tell me off” (while James is standing right there – it usually works, or makes the seller speak to James and not me!)

The train to Mahe was a little pricey, coming in at just over £10 each. The only one available was an AC sleeper train. We didn’t really need the sleeper section as the train was less than two hours. But for this, we had a lower and upper bunk bed between us. As we didn’t need to sleep, we just sat on the lower bunk. We were given clean sheets, pillows, and blankets for the journey too – so James made up the bed for us.

Our bunks were facing another one, which we shared with one local gentleman from Kochi. It was quite nice talking to him, and he told us a few things we should do in Kochi, such as see a Kathakali.