Arrived at 4am at Delhi Sarai Rohilla and, even though the ticket office was and they had a sign saying that tickets for all Delhi stations were available, they refused to let us buy one.
We took a rickshaw to Delhi at 5.30 and waited for tourist office to open at 8am. There were only us there to begin with but in a couple of hours there was wuite a big queue waiting for it to open.
Inside it was absolutely chaotic as the queueing cultures of so many different countries collided. Combined with the Indian ethic of doing exactly what you ask but nothing more, it was quite a frustrating process.
The guy at the desk told us that there were no tickets left for the one we wanted to get and so we would have to get one for tomorrow. We resigned ourselves to staying in Delhi another evening and were about to leave when we heard someone book a ticket to Varanasi today. We spoke to the lady at the tourist info desk in the same room and pushed back in the queue to the ticket issuer. He told us that if that was what we wanted, we should have asked for it and that it wasn't a very good train but if we wanted to change it we could do so for 150 rupees.
We went away to think about it for a second and decided that even with a 5 hour wait in the station, another 13 hour train journey and an arrival time at 2am in a new city, it was still preferable to another night in Delhi. We went back to the man but those tickets had also gone and so it cost us an extra 1000 rupees to get 3AC instead of sleeper.
To pass the time, we went back to our old hostel and used their internet but got kicked out just as we tried to book accomodation for Varanasi. Moved to other place but now the hostel we wanted was 'locked out'. Tried to get somewhere else called 'Yogi lodge' but when we called to ask if a 2am arrival time was ok, the man was very gruff. He told us that rickshaw drivers would try to take us to the fake 'Yogi Lodge' but that he could pick us up for 250 rupees. We didn't like the sound of this and waited to see if the one we wanted, 'Sagar guesthouse', would come up again. It did, and the very nice, softly-spoken man on the phone offered to pick us up for free if we called him before we got there.
The train was busy and when we got to our seats, there were already 4 adults, 2 kids and lots of luggage crammed in small space. It was quite a jostle to get settled but generally it was quieter - or at least the noises were less annoying - than sleeper class. It was also quite a bit cleaner and the toilet had soap, which was much needed since pressing the flush button poured water all over your hands.
I didn't get much sleep because our station wasn't the last stop and I was scared of ending up in a city we didn't want to be in with no way of getting a train back, but at least there wasn't mobile phone music blaring out. In fact, crying children made a pleasent change.
Once at the station, we called the hostel and waded our way through the hundreds of sleeping bodies taking up the whole of the station foyer to wait for our driver. Prakash arrived to rescue us from the increasing mob of rickshaw drivers and took us for a cup of tea before we drove to the hostel.
At the hostel we met Sunny and his father. They were hoping to give us a room on arrival but told us that they now didn;t have any spare space because a German guy had died at the hostel around the corner and the police had insisted they put the remaining tenants up. It was a suspected drug overdose and 2 people from the hostel were apparently being questioned regarding leaving him when they knew he'd had a bad reaction.
We were taken to new building that Sunny had bought just around the corner in order to 'rest'. It was under refurbishment and we slept on a table covered with a blanket. It was better than some of the hostels we've seen and did have a surprisingly clean toilet so it wasn't too bad at all.
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