Agra to Gorakhpur

Sooo, the next few days were pretty knackering! In order to get up to Nepal, we had to spend a few days travelling. We woke up at 5 in Agra to catch a 6 hour train up to Lucknow. We hadn't travelled Second Seater class up until this moment. Hmmm to describe SS... think of British trains, diminish their standards by about 50x and you are still nowhere near. It is the pits, but yno, for around 2 quid what can you expect. After sleeping the majority of the way, we arrived in Lucknow, at around 12 and with 3 hours to kill before out next train we decided to walk about, find some food and catch up on some reading. Upon looking at the selection of food at one of the train stalls, we were approached by two 7 year old beggars, who instead of asking for few coppers demanded that we bought them a pepsi. Obviously after being pestered for the previous 2 weeks by beggars, we knew how to deal with them, giving them a firm 'no' and ignoring them. These girls were persistent little buggers however, pestering us for about 5 minutes. After a few minutes a tourist police officer walked over to ask if we needed any help or information and upon seeing the two street kids irritating us, took more severe actions than just a firm 'NO'.. Instead this policeman decided to wallop the older girl around the face! That got them running and although it did seem somewhat excessive to us both, we did find it also mildly amusing, to be honest after being annoyed on numerous occasions by beggars, some form of extreme action was a little relieving!

After grabbing some food and reading for a few hours we finally hopped on the train, in luxurious 3AC! By luxurious we mean that they had glass windows, comfier beds, curtains, air con, and most of all peace and quiet! A drammatic contrast to sleeper class! The train journey seemed to rush by, reaching Gorakhpur at around 9pm. Gorakhpur is nothing more than a small town that many people use as a night stop on their journey up to Sunauli. We found our hotel, grabbed some room service and collapsed, worn out from an entire day on trains.