A Journey Along The Track….

 

It has forever been a little dream of mine to go on a train ride. 🙂 I’d always pictured it to be somewhere… grand, but I certainly wasn’t upset experiencing my first, of hopefully many more train rides, along the lovely paddy fields between Colombo & Kurunegala.

It was on Monday the 21^st of September 2015, and I was tagging along with my lovely aunt, uncle and cousins to spend a weekend at their place in Kurunegala. Well, the credit of taking up the challenge to take me on my first train ride goes to them! *winks*

My dad dropped us off at the station and it ended up becoming quite a little experience by itself since we had to take the overhead bridge to actually get to the station!

I could see many vendors with plastic toys and other educational stuff trying to talk people into buying them. Moving my gaze away I saw a splendid view of the Fort, tall buildings under construction and quite a lot of trees scattered here and there- a lot for the city, I mean. 😉

And so we arrived at the station. My uncle rushed to get us tickets for the Night Express Intercity which was 180 LKR each (we travelled at noon, so I do wonder why it says night, though, LOL).

Now with our tickets in hand, we entered the platform area. I was stunned to see how old the entire station looked, but I was definitely impressed. There were lots of waiting areas and vendors selling everything, from food to a wide range of papers and magazines.

Looking around, it didn’t take us much time to find our platform. We then prepared ourselves to wait for our train- and finally, finally it arrived.

Getting on, I was lucky enough to get myself a window seat- the best kind, don’t you think? 😉 The train started moving and I found myself starting my journey, my first train ride (OH YAYYYY! I can now tick this off my Bucket list!!!).

The ride starts off slow but comforting- that’s the first word that comes to my mind when I think of describing that experience, the lulling feeling when travelling on a train is really nice and quite unusual to me. Ooh, and the medley of sounds created by the movement of the train? Spectacular!

Along the way, we passed the floating market, factories and little housing schemes and- prepare yourself for this- the ride will also take you through paddy fields and tunnels! YES!!!  Long, dark tunnels… we went through 2 of them! 😉

The huge expanses of land, water and different plantations that stretched for miles showed nature in its full form and beauty. The ride was so soothing that I got really annoyed when we stopped in some stations on the way.

One other thing that fascinated me was that many vendors came to our compartment, selling fruits, toys, books for kids, pastries, buns, snacks and even tea & coffee!  There also were many differently abled people who passed through all the compartments signing Sinhala songs and collecting whatever little money that was offered to them.

Two delightful hours later, we reached our destination- Kurunegala, which is also, incidentally, my home town. Yeah, so that was my first ever train ride, and I’m happy to say that all in all, it was one fantastic experience, right from the start to finish.

All thanks to my Aunt dearie, Uncle and Cousins; for making my first train ride a wonderful experience! ❤

P.S: I was kind of annoyed that no one bothered to check my ticket throughout the entire journey! I was even planning on taking a photo of whoever did. 😉

• Things you need to keep in mind when taking a ride on the train:

Always keep in mind to take one small bag along with you as there is no proper baggage storage area in the local trains. My bag was small enough that it was able to be stored on the top shelf in our compartment.

Thank you so much for reading and I hope you enjoyed my post!

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Much love;

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