Jan 07

Landing In India

After 28 hours of travel, I landed safely in India. Then the lessons in patience began…
We touched down about 30 minutes behind schedule (no big deal). We sat on the Tarmack waiting for a gate to clear another half hour (that’s when the concern began). Immigration was a quick breeze and the airport seemed more modern than I remembered (so I made the mistake of optimism). It was nice to see the baggage claim area now had television monitors indicating that my flight’s luggage would arrive on carrousel 7. It was familiarly Indian when the luggage began coming out on carrousel 5 (the monitor never changed).
After almost an hour at carrousel 5, I knew I was in trouble. When my backpack finally arrived, I knew there was no time to wait in the queue for customs. I started waiving my obsurdly unofficial copy of my travel itinerary as I began walking toward the front of the line. Just when I thought the official at the front was going to send me back, he waived me through (no questions, no inspection, no taking of my declaration form).
My magic itinerary form also got me to the front of the line for the transfer to the domestic airport. Unfortunately, that line led to a tiny elevator (that held 2-3 people) with no stair option. It was here where I met Safah, another traveler on the same connecting flight. Now there were two of us waiving and pleading our way onto the elevator so we could wait for the bus. Except for being an excrutiatingly slow exercise in starting and stopping the only noteworthy aspect about that bus ride was the realization that Sufah and I were both going to the same Yoga Teacher Training Program in Goa.
We were not surprised to learn our flight had left without us. We were surprised to learn that our tickets were NOT transferable to a later flight. What hurt more than forking over another $100 bucks was the fact that the next flight was not for seven hours.
Safah was smart and decided to connect with a friend in Mumbai. Even if I had friends in Mumbai, I don’t know that I would have called them at 6:00AM, so I camped out at the airport.
Have you tried camping out at an airport lately? The first problem was that I could not check-in my luggage until after 10AM. With my luggage in tow, I could not get through security to where the interesting things like telephones and internet were. So I marked the 35-hour traveling milestone reading and sipping chai in the pergatory world of pre-security.

Roughly 6 hours later, we finally arrived at Whispering Lakes retreat center in Goa.
I did managed to stay awake for a couple of well deserved beers and sunset on the beach. Let’s just say today is going much better than yesterday. It’s supposed to, it’s my birthday!