8 to 9 Day Friday, January 8, 2016 Aurangabad

Namaste,

my dear friends.

The last two days were unfortunately not for laughing!

Although we had a great journey to Aurangabad as mentioned before by train, the first ride in an Indian train and to get the right feeling, we opted for the lower sleeper class. But I am pleasantly surprised, it is quite comfortable in India's trains. Except for the fact that we were almost 2 hours late, there is nothing wrong with such a train journey.

It got worse after arriving in Aurangabad around 11 PM, the plan to check in at the hotel near the train station and sleep did not work out.

An acquaintance that we met on the train could not help us either. The taxi driver who clung to us since the train station and repeatedly mentioned that the hotel we are looking for does not exist! After a while, even he was clueless after I had repeatedly shooed him away, but he was still going to be our savior. He took us in his taxi and drove us through crowded and empty streets of Aurangabad. The first destination was a hotel that according to Google Maps should be ours but had a different name. So we found it, woke up the receptionist and checked in. Oops! No! He couldn't find anything. So we checked his internet access. Okay, our hotel seems to be different. So back into the taxi and drove there. When we arrived, everything seemed fine, the hotel name was different but it seemed to be ours, so we went in and everyone looked at us cluelessly at 1 AM.

They don't have any reservation for us, half an hour of discussion, and checked the internet again, now it's around 1:30 AM. Um, at some point, an email caught my eye that said, your cancellation was canceled!!! Okay, and now? This hotel is fully booked.

Now our taxi driver came to our rescue, who promptly drove us to another hotel around 2:30 AM, where luckily there was still a room available. Take a stressed breath, it's around 4 AM... Goodnight.

After a short sleep, we were picked up at 11 AM by the taxi driver's brother for a trip to the Ellora Caves and the Mini Taj Mahal in Aurangabad.

Unfortunately, it turned out that these crowds of people and the traffic chaos in Aurangabad are not better, and we saw all the sights in the city on the first day. So, the next evening, we left the city towards Pune by a very comfortable sleeper bus...