Matheran itself is a place where many locals go for the day. It's in the hills, and vehicles aren't allowed there. There's lots of walking, horses and monkeys, however.
We left the hotel at 8am (about the same time we would normally leave for work), along with some packed up pastries from the hotel breakfast bar) to get a taxi to the station. There was then a degree of bartering with the taxi driver to get a fair price. We ended up paying 100 rupees, notably less than the 200 that he'd originally asked for, but also somewhat more than the 50 that my colleague thought was fair. (Note - approx. 70 rupees to the pound).
Getting to the station we queued to get the mainline tickets. First class seemed the only sensible way to go (frankly, I'm prepared to rough it but you'd have to be beyond cheap as a westerner to decide to save your money and travel second class). We got the tickets to Nerul and then tried to find the platform. We were directed to the right train and took our seats.
First class travel on Indian trains is not as good as first class on UK trains. First class travel on Indian trains is not as good as second class travel on UK trains. It's hard to compare Indian trains with anything on the UK network. The seats are hard and uncomfortable, there are lots of hanging hand grips (presumably for busy periods, which Saturday morning at 8:30 wasn't), there are fans attached (mostly) to the ceiling, and there are signs all over one end warning you of the danger of being electrocuted by what's behind the panels. Also (which is something of a boon to the photographer), the doors don't close.
Most trains don't just have first and second class carriages. There are also women only carriages (which feels a bit odd), and also carriages for 'handicapped and cancer patients'. Whether the latter, in particular, is a sign of compassion to ensure that the sick aren't pestered, or is in fact just a way of keeping them away from the healthy majority is an interesting question. My colleague pointed out that one of the tenets of reincarnation is that you get in your next life what you deserve from this (with the corollary that if you are sick in this life then you brought it upon yourself in your previous one). This is not a philosophy that necessarily encourages huge amounts of compassion. As Glenn Hoddle is only too aware, it's also not a philosophy that a public figure in the UK could espouse.
We started talking to a guy on the train who said that Nerul was about an hour away. At that point little alarm bells started going off in my head as I was sure the guidebook had suggested it was 2 hours away. It was then that I began to appreciate that one vowel in a place name can be really quite important. We were on the wrong train (strictly, we were on the right train for our tickets, but had the wrong tickets). Fortunately, my guidebook had a train route map in the back so I was able to work out that we were still heading in roughly the right direction, but that we should change to a cross line shortly.
We got off and now needed to get tickets to the right place. Fighting our way to the ticket hall we saw a sign that said that there was no queue for first class tickets. Expecting that this meant that there was a separate queue my colleague left me in the queue to go and look for the right one. After a while he returned to say that it looked as though what it meant was that you didn't need to queue for first class tickets - you just went straight to the front of the queue to get them. This felt odd, and I decided to let him do that part. He succeeded, but I don't think he was very popular with everybody else in the queue.
It is, perhaps, true to say that you never see the best of a city from the train. Mumbai is no exception to this rule, with the train going through slums and other very poor areas. One thing that is a bit different to western railways is that the lines themselves are no barrier to people. People cross the lines, walk along them and even work on them with an apparent reckless disregard for the huge metal things that thunder along the lines.
What all this is good for, of course, is candid photography, both in the stations and along the route. The downside, of course, when the train is moving is that you don't often have enough time to react from seeing what will make a good picture to actually be able to take the damn thing. I managed to get a few nice ones, though. (Click on the title for pics from the day.)
Another change of trains brought us to Neral a bit before 12. The small trains up to Matheran were booked up until 3pm, so we took a shared taxi (60 rupees each). This was an experience that was really quite scary - lots of tight hairpin bends, taken at reasonable high speed in a fairly decrepit van while overtaking anything that we approached, regardless of what was coming in the opposite direction. Given the steepness, you could see why the train takes a couple of hours to get up to Matheran, in long slow loops. The car does the trip a lot faster. It was a matter of minutes before we arrived at the entrance to Matheran.
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