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India Bus travel goes WRONG: we take a $170 Grab across Rajasthan and are shocked by what we see
Updated: Jun 16
Easily our worst experience in India, the Sindhi Camp Bus Stand will haunt us for many years to come. The most chaotic of situations led us to missing our bus, and having to substitute it with a very dilapidated Grab for a SEVEN HOUR drive from Jaipur to Udaipur in Rajasthan.
We left the Sindhi Camp Bus Stand with our shoes and luggage covered in muck, our heads banging from the noise and our moods thoroughly dampened from missing our bus. It was impossible to find, or to find anyone to help, and we were now faced with getting a Grab instead.
No chance of finding another bus online, and even if there was, there was no way in hell we were going back to that bus stand! This is our experience, which actually starts off with a super cool Sari Draping, before it all goes horribly wrong!
Thank you for stopping by, and a warm welcome to our India series here on Jenn & Leon Travel Blog. We had always wanted to visit this country, officially the 7th oldest in the world, and not only was the time finally upon us, but it came with our good friends and fellow Youtuber's Jackson and Marjo!
If you missed our earlier posts and would like to catch up, head over to our dedicated INDIA page or look out for the links in this blog.
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Jenn and Marjo's Sari Draping
From Jenn's perspective: One of the things I knew I wanted to experience while in India was a traditional saree draping. Having known only little about the cultural associations with the colour, styles etc I was looking forward to learning more.
While the experience that we chose left me with more questions than answers and not having the pleasure of choosing from different colours patterns and styles the little we did learn was enjoyable.
The time and care that is taken to dress and fasten the sari is incredible right down to the last fold! I’m not usually one to dress in bright colours or have an overly feminine style but the instant this material and method was draped upon me I felt this instant pulling back of my shoulders. My head held up a little higher. It felt like getting ready for your wedding day and many women dress this way daily!
I definitely would encourage you to add this to your itinerary and make some time to get dressed up, take some photos and possibly head out for a night on the town while in India!
For more info on this Sari Draping in Jaipur check out Trip Advisor.
A 3-star homestay that really feels like so much more! This beautiful hotel is in a great location and is themed on the six seasons in India.
Getting tickets with Red Bus
Booking tickets for trains and busses in India is available online for foreigners, and can be done while out of the country. There are several websites offering this, with the best being those provided by Red Bus and IRTC (Indian Railway Catering & Tourism Corporation).
As far as pros go, the ability to book online is about as far as it goes for us. Everything about out our experience with these companies was poor, from the useability of the website to the confirmation of where to go. Let's go through why that is, so hopefully your journey with them does not end up in disaster like ours!
To start, one of the things you must do as a foreigner with IRTC is to register yourself on their platform, which is very buggy to say the least. Uploading ID's was tricky and they seem to require quite a few details about you, enough to make us question why! Once signed up, finding the correct bus is pretty straight-forward, until you come to pay.
One thing to be sure of in India is that seeing a 'Mastercard' or 'Visa' logo does not always mean it will be accepted. We actually use Curve, an online card that has worked all over the world, yet here it did not. After much kerfuffle we managed to push the payment through, but it was not easy.
After completing this process you will be sent a confirmation email and tickets. All good then right? Well we thought so, feeling nice and organized, and dare we say even galvanized after our first train experience on the Vande Baharat Express went so well. But they do say not to count your chickens until they have hatched and it is an expression that works very well here. Little did we know, but the tickets would not be worth the energy it took to even send the email!
Sindhi Camp Bus Stand Jaipur: an absolute nightmare
With our bus scheduled to leave at 5am, we did not exactly have much margin for error when it came to finding the bus in the morning. The information on the ticket was simply 'Sindhi Camp Bus Stand'. After checking it out on Google it all seemed pretty legit, a large bus station which was just a short rickshaw ride from our homestay. Nonetheless we asked our hotel for more information, and they told us that this was the place to go.
Having already taken a bus from Agra to Jaipur, we were prepared for the pick-up point to be a tad unassuming; the last spot was literally a small hut which we never would have guessed but for a knowledgeable rickshaw driver. This time around we were going to a proper bus station (or so we thought). What actually greeted us was one of our lowest points in all of India. A place of chaos and dare we say it filth, this so-called transport hub is the last place anyone should be at 4.30am in the morning. It was awful. Honestly.
We did not film much at all, as our time here quickly descended into farce. Getting dropped off was the only part that went to plan as we got there around 40 minutes before the bus was due to depart. We thought it would be as simple as asking someone, a guard or a bus driver, but little did we know that our ticket would mean nothing here.
The first thing to say about this 'bus stand' is that it goes way beyond the parking lot that bears its name. Buses and coaches are actually everywhere on the road too, lining the underpass, accompanied by hundreds of rickshaws and taxis all tooting horns and nipping into any free space of road. The acoustics reverberate around this underpass, and honking is a staple custom of any vehicle operator in India. It does not stop. EVER.
We started by asking one 'guard' where to go, showing him our ticket. Go straight down there, leave the station, walk 100 metres and then to the left he says. So off we go, actually believing that this could be trusted. But it was wrong, along with the 4 other spots we were suggested to wait by people who looked like they had some semblance of understanding of the chaos all around us.
Walking around on these 'streets' with roller suitcases and flip flops is not something we would advise anyone who reads this to do. Most of the walkways are broken, full of trip hazards, dirt and trash. It must have rained because the ground was wet, sludgy and smelly. Many of the coaches were just left running, and along with the hundreds of cars and tuk-tuks the air was thick with exhaust fumes. This accompanied the stale smell of trash, urine and faeces that was also present and evident anytime you we even looked at a wall or corner of a building. Just trying to cross the road was playing with fire. It was hard to breathe or even concentrate as we frantically tried to locate this damn bus before 5am. It didn't happen.
We did try calling the 'helplines', indeed several of them, but no-one seemed to have any clue as to how to locate the bus. Apparently, the operator is supposed to send a text message to customers with the pick up point at least 12 hours before the journey is scheduled. However, as a foreigner, when we booked our tickets we did not have an Indian phone number, which happens to be the only way they can message. Not that they tell you this online before you book the tickets of course. Surely they can do better than this??
So without this number, the people on the phone washed their hands of it. We had as much back and forth with them on the phone as we did with the people who kept sending us traipsing around this station. We were on our own, and the longer we stood here within this disorganized mess, the worse it was going to get. By this point in our tale we had actually been walking around in circles for nearly 45 minutes, dragging ourselves and our luggage through the dirt, and the rain that was now starting to fall.
We (we were with Jackson & Marjo too) could barely hear ourselves through the honking, which just reverberated around the steel underpass like a percussion instrument going off deep inside your ear. We had very persistent beggars coming up to us, people staring, others trying to coax us into taxis and rickshaws. 5am, no bus, no coffee, surrounded by madness. All we could do is get back to the peace and safety of our homestay as soon as possible. We love to travel, and we can handle mishaps, but this was pushing us way past our limits.
Our $170 Grab experience
We were all so very relieved to get back to the homestay. It was still quiet, and we knew we had time to re-assess given our check out was not until 11am. We had a few possibilities on the table, from staying another night to booking another bus, or getting a Grab.
The Grab option seemed to be the most suitable given what we had just been through. None of us wanted to step foot near the Sindhi Camp station again, and so this was all we had. Fortunately we were splitting the bill! One of the bonuses about travelling as two couples!
We contemplated waiting but eventually decided to just order the taxi and get going. We knew we had a long drive ahead of us. Given we had already experienced a fair few packed cars and rikshaws owing to our luggage, Jenn was sure to order a 6-seater bucket-seat passenger van, so we could be as comfortable as possible. But again, as with much of India, this did not exactly work out either!
The car itself was not as described. At all. It was more like a 5-seat saloon, and was as rough on the outside as it was on the inside. Three in the back, tightly packed with some very uncomfortable seats, one in the front with some kind of fluid dripping from the glove box and a driver who spent most of the drive trying to keep himself awake by watching YouTube. Yes YouTube in his lap... and it was not even our channel! Just kidding, but seriously, given the state of India's highways and the incredibly dangerous driving habits of road users, we were not feeling too happy as we set off from the All Seasons.
With most of us still feeling fragile from our gastro issues, barring Jenn, we were all nodding on and off for most of the journey. It seemed like the best way to get through it, and we were all devoid of energy given the lack of food we had eaten in the past week. Sadly for Jenn, she is not easily able to sleep in vehicles, and so she had to endure the reckless driving of our Grab more than any one of us. She was sat just behind him, watching him drift off or look down at his phone. It was very unnerving, even if he did breeze through herds of cows like he had been doing it his whole life.
We had been warned about dodgy drivers, so we were naturally paranoid (when we weren't sleeping). Not just Jenn, but we all felt it. The guy seemed off. But given we had no other way to get to Udaipur, we had to suck it up. Despite the lack of comfort and safety considerations from the driver, we did see an upside though in that at the very least we could get a closer look at the Indian countryside and smaller towns. We love this kind of thing and it is a good way to see what otherwise we would most likely never would. And we were shocked by what we saw.
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Shocked by India's rural countryside
We have often heard India referred to as a rich country with poor people. Indeed the stats do not lie, in fact, in the case of India they are quite extraordinary. Consider that in 2023 India overtook China as the most populated country on Earth. India now houses over 1.4 billion people, and with it, has become the world's 4th largest economy (worth over $4 trillion). So how has it come to pass that it ranks a shocking 139th in the world for GDP per capita? How has a country with over 5,000 years of history, the 7th oldest in terms of formed government, and with wealth beyond the dreams of many, failed its people so badly?
We are seasoned travelers and we have visited many countries with the 'developing' title to their name. We certainly aren't ones to judge poverty of one place over the other, but honestly what we saw in India shocked us to the core. It literally felt like we were walking around in a post-war world. In the near 8 hours it took to get to Udaipur, we can barely remember seeing a building that was not abandoned or in the process of crumbling to the ground.
The air was a constant orange haze, and with no sidewalks to speak of swirls of dust and dirt were all that stood between roads, highways, houses and stalls. Where there had been rain, it all became a muddy mess and on top of that there was more garbage on the streets than anywhere we had ever seen. And some (with no exaggeration). It was like there were mini-landfills on street corners, coupled with random piles of rubble, and oddly bricks, all over the place. Mounds of orange bricks often accompanied derelict or crumbling places, but these piles showed their age, as if they had been placed long ago. Homelessness seemed rampant and the scene just seemed all so apocalyptic.
This seemed like a landscape lacking in hope, devoid of any kind of prosperity. There are many reasons for this, easily found with a couple of google searches. Corruption, lack of education, lack of local governance, over-population, political turmoil. The list goes on. Even colonialism can be put in there. All of it has contributed to the current status-quo. We just could not help think just how bad it is though. It almost felt like a hundred years behind what we see in Europe or the Americas.
It might all sound a little harsh but we saw it all and felt it all with an extremely heavy heart and almost anger. How on earth has it got to this? 14 of the top 20 most polluted cities in the world are in India. 39 in the top 50. This is a shambles, a failure of governance, a failure of people and leaders who should be doing far more for the citizens they are supposed to protect and serve.
Basic roads, infrastructure and facilities are the job of government and India is failing. 7 hours of driving and not a single public restroom, or indeed even a proper service station. Just in general there seems like so little is being done here. We barely noticed construction of any sort, and it all just looks so bleak.
With all the fanfare of holding the G20, and with some of the highest poll ratings of any sitting PM, India's Narendra Modi does seem to be making progress. We can only hope so, because what we saw from a country with such size and power should be an outrage. We hope India will get to grips with things soon. The people deserve no less from their leaders.
Watch it all unfold on YouTube
See a more personal version of our experience over on YouTube! We show you more of the car and the journey, along with a sneak peak of our final destination, Dreamyard Udaipur.
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Coming up: Dreamyard Hostel, our first EVER hostel experience in the City of Lakes, Udaipur
We have always been apprehensive when it comes to hostels. More so a Leon thing than a Jenn thing, and as such, we had never tried one. So many travelers do though and they are far more affordable, and come with much more than just a cheap price. Another great advantage is the social one, and here at the Dreamyard Hostel we found that for sure.
We had such a wonderful time here, albeit we did book a private room with our own bathroom! For a first ever hostel stay it was great, we met some good people, had some fun game nights and awesome conversations. It was quirky and cool, and we really enjoyed it. We had a few of our best nights here! Welcome to Dreamyard Hostel Udaipur; all you need to know with our full review.
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