Travel from Khajuraho

Our last morning in Khajuraho we decided we were tired of our peanut butter, nutella, banana breakfasts in our room and returned to Ganesh Restaurant for breakfast. When we don't get up too early, it's nice to sit at a table together eating breakfast, drinking chai, talking, and reading. Earlier we were doing that everyday, but then we got out of the habit as the pace of our sightseeing picked up. (Also places tend not to open for breakfast until 8am, which is often not early enough for us lately.) Over breakfast we enjoyed watching a baby goat through the window and talking about the feasibility of having one ourselves (a goat that is, not a baby--don't get too excited, Mom).

Josh wasn't feeling so hot, so he went back to the hotel to relax while Mary continued on to the little Archeology Museum alone. Lonely Planet said it would be 5 rupees admission, but when Mary got there, they told her it was the same ticket as the Western Group of temples (a 250 rupee ticket!), and it was only valid for the same day admission. No big deal if we'd known this up front, but really annoying since we didn't. Skipped the museum since it didn't sound like it was worth anywhere near $5 to see.

We went to a south Indian restaurant for lunch (yay dosa!) and then got on a bus for Satna, where we plan to catch the night train to Varanasi. We are currently on the wait list, but pretty high on it so we should be fine.

Later - we are at the train station and have confirmed seats. Something a little strange happened on the bus as we were coming into Satna. They tried to get all the tourists to get off somewhere unknown (not the bus station), and made us get all our baggage that had been on top of the bus up to that time. They said this was where we should get off to go to the train station, but we also heard someone say that we were only 10 km from the train station when the bus station is 3 km from the train station. So we thought maybe they were trying to get us to take an expensive tuk-tuk ride to the station. There are so many scams like that in this country, a tourist learns not to stray from her planned course of action or take an alternate destination for stuff like this. Or maybe it really was the right place and the 10 km we heard was for something else. At any rate, we and all the other tourists insisted on staying on until the bus station.

After the tuk-tuk ride to the train station we got our seat assignments, then we went outside and got some popular street food and bananas. I think dinner was 28 rupees outside plus 23 rupees for a soda in the station. We are in class AC3 tonight, which should have the same arrangement as Sleeper Class, plus AC (not that we'll need it), blankets, pillows, reading lights, and wealthier travelers. We're counting on the blankets!