Saturday 28. February

It took a while to get used to the bunk, the train was lurching and the bunk was across the driving direction. But I did fall asleep. The train arrived at Hyderabad before daylight, probably around 6 o'clock. We got off the train with all our luggage, Christopher found Sofias glasses under her bed. He had a visitor in the night, by the way, in the middle of the night a man fell into our coupé while we were sleeping. But Christopher obviously got rid of him. We were taken to the Ramada hotel, a first class hotel with a clean bathroom and a nice toilet. We got a quick shower before breakfast. The breakfast was nice, I had rolls with jam and pineapple juice.

We changed some dollars after breakfast and got a kilo of rupees back. Well, maybe not, but it was a rather thick pile. 11535 rupees in 50 and 100 notes. We divided them among us at room 406 afterwards. The stomach is a bit out of order, but not bad. A day in Narsapur with Benjamin and Magdalenas cooking and plenty of water helped. A happy girl with her doll

After breakfast we went to Benjamin's house, a very nice place they had inherited from Magdalenas parents. We brought some toys and sweets from our suitcases and went to visit an orphanage that Benjamin is running. We videotaped the kids when we gave them toys to have something to show the children back home.

In the computer room After the orphanage visit I stayed at Benjamin's house to have a look at his computer with Ravi, his computer man, while the others went shopping. There was some problems with jumpers, so the PC couldn't find the disks and CD-player properly. So I put the jumpers in right places, reconnected everything and startet the computer. After fdisk'ing and formatting the disk and reinstalling Windows 95, everything worked fine. I'm really getting tired now, an hour of sleep wouldn't be too bad. I hope I'll manage to stay awake. Ravi and I took an autorickshaw back to the hotel, where he left me. The charge was about 30 rupees, I think, for a 10-15 minutes ride. I tried to call the others when I got back in the room, but I only found Tove answering at random, so I'd rather read for a while.

I slept till the others returned at 17:30 or something, and they had been shopping a lot of things. Christopher had been with Sofia to look at some jewelry, and Lars Erik had bought some beautiful pearls to Tone, so now she was very happy.

We left the hotel at 19:00. As usual, we filled up the cars to the limit and set off to the railwaystation. Benjamin was driving today. The traffic in Hyderabad is much calmer than at the countryside, maybe because it's more dense. We had to walk quiet a distance along the platform, and with all our luggage, we had some excercise.

The coupe was as yesterday, more or less, but the curtains was a bit nicer. We're sitting together with Jaap now, discussing the price of saffron. Sofia has bought some boxes of it; 0,5 grams for 40 Rupees, or a bit more than a dollar. That's about 2000$ pr. kg! And we're eating crackers and drinking mineral water which we got from the hotel's minibar.

Rolf Daniel and Jaap is discussing praise in India compared to the western world, and whether the praise is mechanical or from the heart. We also observe that the mindset is very different. If you dare to pray for anyone in the street in the west, people would think you're weird, but if you do it in India, there's suddenly a whole queue of people wanting prayer.

And the strange thing about Indian trains is that all the seats are reserved for a guy named Nosmo King. Peculiar.