Overnight Trains: India vs. China

We took an overnight sleeper journey from Udaipur back to Delhi at the end of our Rajasthan tour.  Max was a little nervous since he'd never been on an overnight sleeper journey before, but I felt pretty prepared after taking trips in the hard sleeper class in China, which are always mildly unpleasant but manageable.  I was pleasantly surprised by the differennces between the two countries' trains.

We were in a class called '2AC' which stands for air conditioned 2-tier sleepr.  When I was making the reesrvation, it was confusing because the classes do not really match up with Chinese train classes, so I was not exactly sure what we were getting.  In a chinese train, hard leeper means 3 tiers of bunks in an alcove off the hallway, with no door or curtain and a public bathroom.  Soft sleepr is 2-tier with an actual room and a door, with ventilation. This is nice because so many men in China smoke on the train that hard sleeper can be smelly and disgusting.  Here, the 2-tier was actually still 6 bunks per cube, since the Indian trains are wider, enabling the addition of a third set of bunks across the aisle. But, it was still possible to sit up on the top bunks, thanks to having only 2 stacked instead of 3. In addition, each bunk received 2 sheets instead of 1 like in China, and a clean pillow case whcih I saw placed on the pillow.  In China all the beding is already laid out on the bed, but the pillowcases are always rather suspect and I have learned to bring my own. Also, the cubicle had curtains which could be drawn across the entrance, so while it wasn't quite as good as a door, it did cut down on the hallway light and noise during the night. 

The cleanliness of the train was MUCH better than in China, which surprised me, since the streets are actually much dirtier in the cities than I have seen so far in China.  In China, the train bathroom quickly moves from not clean to absolutely disgusting, with excrement scattered everywhere, bits of paper, water, etc.  And the smell is awful. The indian train bathroom on the other hand, while still a squattie, was pristine the whole journey.  I don't understand - do Indians have better aim? And the actual train istelf just felt cleaner, and there was no nasty wafts of cigarette smoke, even though we didn't have a real door. So nice...Overall, it was a pleasant travel experience, which was good since we're doing it again in a day to go to Amritsar!