Travels, 3

A terrible journey, but not in the way I expected.

We caught an earlyish train which had a very intermittent journey to Heathrow, with several long pauses at red signals. But we still managed to arrive before check-in opened.

So we had a quarter of an hour’s pause before the next tsunami hit

We had been told at the on-line check-in that we would need to go to a check-in desk at the airport, not just the bag drop. Se we did. They wanted to see our e-visas. Now you might have thought that you can’t actually see an e-visa, as I did; but apparently the Indian government disagrees, and something on paper is necessary. As it happened, Rosemary, on a tourist visa, had been sent a long document announcing her visa, and had printed it out; but I was on a conference visa, and they hadn’t bothered to send me such a document. The most recent I had was the final application form, with a space for a photograph (which I had duly glued on). But this wouldn’t do. Foreseeing trouble, I had printed a copy of the email notifying that my visa application had been successful and the visa had been granted. This had all the information on it, but it was just in an email, so I hadn’t had the forethought to print it.

So the lady at the desk sent me up to the oversize baggage desk, which (among several other functions) prints out documents. So I went there. They gave me the email address and told me to email them the document. This involved finding a wi-fi network which would let me in, then hoping that dual security in St Andrews wouldn’t kick in, locating the email, printing it to a file, and emailing it to the girl at whose desk I was doing all this. But ten minutes later the email had not arrived, so I had to log in again and re-send it. Fortunately the second one got through and I got the printed document, which the airline desk found acceptable.

But by then I was so stressed that I left my laptop on the desk, and didn’t realise until back at the check-in help desk. So we had to check and then hurry back to the oversize baggage desk. Fortunately, she had looked after it for me, and handed it back.

And so to security. There we had the next shock, when our boarding passes refused to scan. The ink in the printer at the check-in was so low that it hadn’t printed properly. Fortunately, the girl letting people through into the security check could point us to the nearest check-in desk, where the offending passes could be re-printed. Second time it worked.

In security, I was allowed through (and didn’t even set off the alarm bells), but Rosemary was told she would have to take her shoes off; completely impossible for her with no chair to sit on. So I had to grovel on the floor and take them off, and reverse the moanoeuvre on the other side.

After that, things went pretty much as normal. Because of Rosemary’s stick. we were put in thhe first boarding group. The plane was a Boeing 787, whose severely restricted passenger legroom (together with the fact that a fair proportion of the space under the seat in front was taken up with a fixed metal box, and the overhead lockers above us were specially designed dummies which could not be opened) made the flight ten and a half hours of torture for me. The food was not great: dinner was chicken, so overcooked that it fell off the fork in pieces and made a terrible mess, and the scrambled eggs for breakfast had (I think) been pre-cooked and then microwaved, so stuck to the bottom of the heatproof dish.

At some point during the night I realised that I was sitting on the free headphones. So I dug them out, but quickly found there was nothing worth listening to. So I went back to the flight maps for the rest of the night. (I did manage a short nap at one point.)

Fortunately, when we landed in Chennai, things looked up, mainly becayse the people were human and helpful. We were right at the back and hence last off, but when we got to immigration, an official (who probably had other jobs to do) helped us fill in the form and then showedd us where to go. When we got through security and customs, I tutned on the laptop. I found the only open wi-fi and connected, and was immediately confronted with a login page requiring a username and password, and another official assured me that the airport had no free wi-fi.

So I booked a taxi to take us to a nearby hotel, but then the magic kicked in, as I shall relate.