Onwards to Kerala


We slept a second night in an air conditionless room in the Ashoka and then headed for the airport at about 6:45 a.m. Since it's quite cold in Delhi, the AC shouldn't have been a problem, but our room was very stuffy and we couldn't open the windows since on the fourth floor mosquitoes may still have been a problem. The ride to the airport took less than 15 minutes, so we had almost 2.5 hours to wait for our delayed 9 a.m. flight.

Flying domestically is an interesting experience. The fares are about comparable to air travel in the U.S. (for equivalent distances). In India this means that only the middle class and above can afford to fly. The domestic terminal at Delhi's Indira Gandhi International airport was quite empty at 7 a.m. It was still pretty empty at 9 a.m. when we boarded. In between we waited for about a half hour while an Indian Airlines employee perplexed over our reservation. Once he "approved" the reservation (made for us by a travel agent in Trivandrum), he sent us to a second window to get the tickets. Then we waited in a line to check baggage that might have been only 10 people long, but took another half an hour.

Going through security there was no line at all and about 8 security employees to accommodate us. We didn't have to take laptops out of their bags, which was nice. Each piece of carry-on luggage got a security clearance tag. Upon boarding, another employee checked to see that each piece we were carrying had a tag. This was a minor problem since Luc had pulled the tags off of at least two bags. I saved the tags and explained to the checker what had happened and he let us on. But before boarding, we got a truly awful doughnut from a seemingly decent "cafe" in the terminal. Marion and I got our Nescafés, mine with a cockroach in it. The server looked baffled as he took it back and served me up another. The paper cups had been stacked on one another, and upside down to boot, so I think he was confused as to how the cockroach entered the coffee.

During our wait in the terminal, Luc made his contribution to cleaning up some of the dirt in New Delhi (see pictures).

The flight itself was uneventful. Indian Airlines serves some pretty decent food. We got breakfast on the first leg, an hour-and-a-half flight to Mumbai. We could not leave the plane, which was headed on to Trivandrum, but this was not a problem since Luc was asleep at this point anyway. We got lunch on the second leg, and landed in Trivandrum an hour or so later than scheduled.

Trivandrum's airport is quite small. Our bags were the first to arrive on the baggage carousel, and a couple guys loaded them onto carts for us and pushed them a mere 30 or meters out to the curb where the driver arranged by the travel agency waited for us.

Posted: Mon - December 19, 2005 at 01:10 AM          

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