We've had two lovely Guides on this tour, one showing us the North and the other showing us the South of India. However neither Guide was permitted to accompany us into the airport.
When we got to Cochin we were met by a local man who was supposed to facilitate our check in for the internal flight to Mumbai (Bombay) where we had to change terminals for our international flights back to Heathrow.
The internal flight from Cochin to Bombay was with Air India and the luggage allowance was just 15kgs as opposed to the luggage allowance on the International flight back to London with Virgin Airlines (23kgs).
Having been caught out on the journey to the South earlier in the tour (and charged quite a lot for excess baggage) we'd all reduced the weight of our suitcases by stuffing as much as possible into our hand luggage and wearing/carrying some of the heavier items.
Our helpful local man took all our passports and tickets and got the check in staff to put all hold luggage through in one batch. Needless to say, the combined weight was over the limit and there was a charge ... but give him his due, he chatted up the girl on the check in counter and she waived the fee (think she was aware of the rumblings of discontent from our Group who couldn't understand why they didn't just check us in individually so we could 'pay as we go'.
Our helpful local man then waved goodbye to us and we set off through the myriad of 'officials' and rubber stamp wallahs en route to the departure gate. We'd been keeping check of the number of rubber stamps collected on the way and had got to 5 per person by that stage. But it was all going too smoothly.
Before we reached the gate we were stopped in our tracks by an official who told us that there was a problem at the luggage desk. One of our cases had revealed suspicious contents and needed to be opened and examined. There were nine of us and all our hold luggage had been assigned to poor Ruth - the luggage tags were in her name so we were told we'd have to give Ruth our padlock keys and security codes and she would have to go to luggage security to sort the problem. Obviously we objected strongly to this and said 'one for all and all for one' and all that sort of thing but they were adamant only one person could deal with the problem.
We suggested to the official that they take the radical approach of checking the name tag on the 'offending' suitcase and then that person could go and open his/her case and deal with the problem. That got lots of the wonderful Indian head shakes (how do they do that)? but the idea took hold and was passed on to yet another official to deal with. After 20 minutes of inactivity we asked what was happening as we had one hour till boarding time ... then after another 10 minutes we were told the case had been identified as belonging to Neil. Neil had already worked out his might be 'the one' as he has been puffing away on electronic cigarettes throughout the tour and the 'plug in' sections could be mistaken for little bullets (although they'd got through customs checks/X-rays at every other airport).
Unfortunately as all baggage was in Ruth's name, the officials needed to have a Proxy form completed (and triple rubber stamped) to allow Neil to open his own suitcase and this took a further 30 minutes.
But all got sorted in the nick of time and we all caught our flight. Mumbai/Bombay airport is the pits .... changing terminals involved leaving one building and battling our way through hoardes of guys trying to grab our luggage to take it the 500 yards to the International flights building for a mere 40 US$. The noise and smells and hassle are hard to cope with at 1am when tired and hot but that's just the start of it.
We'd upgraded to Premium Economy with Virgin which meant we went straight to the counter to check in but after that we queued for nearly an hour to get to the Immigration desk then another 30 minutes to Security (collecting several more rubber stamps along the way).
Once through, the first thing we did was stop at a bar and have a stiff drink! Just 3 more rubber stamps and we were on board and Virgin took care of everything in their usual wonderful way. The flight took off on time at 3am (Indian time) and we landed at Heathrow 10½ hours later
We've had a fabulous time - Its a shame that Mumbai airport is such a shambles as its the last memory we have of the trip.
Positive things: I got to watch all 8 episodes of the ITV drama Broadchurch which I'd missed on the TV - brilliant series and so good to be able to watch 4 episodes on the outward journey and 4 on the way back - saves having to wait a week between each episode.
and ...... just look at these cute salt and pepper pots shaped like stylised planes.
They are stamped underneath 'pinched from Virgin Atlantic' so I obliged ... well actually I did ask the stewardess if I could take them home for Grand-daughter to play with and she said it wasn't really allowed, but yes go ahead and take them
and whilst thinking about meals/presentation I remembered that I'd photographed some of the desserts from the penultimate hotel restaurant. These are much smaller than they look in reality and declared delicious by all the 'dessert loving' members of our group who manfully struggled to do a fair comparison by sampling several each. Shame I don't have a 'sweet tooth'
but last night's hotel, whilst getting lots of brownie points for location and 'Green Policies/Conservation aspirations' just didn't make the grade on food presentation: Do you see what I mean?
This was part of their salad/veg display photographed from our table across the restaurant. Looks like a mouse head doesn't it?
We're in the process of transferring all the photos from our travel laptop (Christine) to my computer now and when I have the time I'll work through them and archive them in categories for future use so there may be more posts on this blog as I come across interesting/funny pictures. There really wasn't time whilst travelling to be very selective - we didn't get much free time, and when we did Internet access was either expensive or very slow so Blog posts had to be done in a hurry.
I've also promised to send photos to a couple of people from our tour, one of whom forgot his camera battery charger so ran out of steam halfway through, and another who didn't manage to capture all the butterflies and birds she wanted as her camera didn't have a decent zoom - mine isn't the best but nobody on our group had a 'professional' camera which I found surprising.
Here's a couple of photos taken by photographers at the Taj Mahal and Elephant ride station (Amber Fort, Jaipur) which have now been scanned at home. Think we had one of the prettier elephants!
Not our choice of pose but the photographer was insistent and this wasn't as odd as some he insisted on.
When we got to Cochin we were met by a local man who was supposed to facilitate our check in for the internal flight to Mumbai (Bombay) where we had to change terminals for our international flights back to Heathrow.
The internal flight from Cochin to Bombay was with Air India and the luggage allowance was just 15kgs as opposed to the luggage allowance on the International flight back to London with Virgin Airlines (23kgs).
Having been caught out on the journey to the South earlier in the tour (and charged quite a lot for excess baggage) we'd all reduced the weight of our suitcases by stuffing as much as possible into our hand luggage and wearing/carrying some of the heavier items.
Our helpful local man took all our passports and tickets and got the check in staff to put all hold luggage through in one batch. Needless to say, the combined weight was over the limit and there was a charge ... but give him his due, he chatted up the girl on the check in counter and she waived the fee (think she was aware of the rumblings of discontent from our Group who couldn't understand why they didn't just check us in individually so we could 'pay as we go'.
Our helpful local man then waved goodbye to us and we set off through the myriad of 'officials' and rubber stamp wallahs en route to the departure gate. We'd been keeping check of the number of rubber stamps collected on the way and had got to 5 per person by that stage. But it was all going too smoothly.
Before we reached the gate we were stopped in our tracks by an official who told us that there was a problem at the luggage desk. One of our cases had revealed suspicious contents and needed to be opened and examined. There were nine of us and all our hold luggage had been assigned to poor Ruth - the luggage tags were in her name so we were told we'd have to give Ruth our padlock keys and security codes and she would have to go to luggage security to sort the problem. Obviously we objected strongly to this and said 'one for all and all for one' and all that sort of thing but they were adamant only one person could deal with the problem.
We suggested to the official that they take the radical approach of checking the name tag on the 'offending' suitcase and then that person could go and open his/her case and deal with the problem. That got lots of the wonderful Indian head shakes (how do they do that)? but the idea took hold and was passed on to yet another official to deal with. After 20 minutes of inactivity we asked what was happening as we had one hour till boarding time ... then after another 10 minutes we were told the case had been identified as belonging to Neil. Neil had already worked out his might be 'the one' as he has been puffing away on electronic cigarettes throughout the tour and the 'plug in' sections could be mistaken for little bullets (although they'd got through customs checks/X-rays at every other airport).
Unfortunately as all baggage was in Ruth's name, the officials needed to have a Proxy form completed (and triple rubber stamped) to allow Neil to open his own suitcase and this took a further 30 minutes.
But all got sorted in the nick of time and we all caught our flight. Mumbai/Bombay airport is the pits .... changing terminals involved leaving one building and battling our way through hoardes of guys trying to grab our luggage to take it the 500 yards to the International flights building for a mere 40 US$. The noise and smells and hassle are hard to cope with at 1am when tired and hot but that's just the start of it.
We'd upgraded to Premium Economy with Virgin which meant we went straight to the counter to check in but after that we queued for nearly an hour to get to the Immigration desk then another 30 minutes to Security (collecting several more rubber stamps along the way).
Once through, the first thing we did was stop at a bar and have a stiff drink! Just 3 more rubber stamps and we were on board and Virgin took care of everything in their usual wonderful way. The flight took off on time at 3am (Indian time) and we landed at Heathrow 10½ hours later
We've had a fabulous time - Its a shame that Mumbai airport is such a shambles as its the last memory we have of the trip.
Positive things: I got to watch all 8 episodes of the ITV drama Broadchurch which I'd missed on the TV - brilliant series and so good to be able to watch 4 episodes on the outward journey and 4 on the way back - saves having to wait a week between each episode.
and ...... just look at these cute salt and pepper pots shaped like stylised planes.
They are stamped underneath 'pinched from Virgin Atlantic' so I obliged ... well actually I did ask the stewardess if I could take them home for Grand-daughter to play with and she said it wasn't really allowed, but yes go ahead and take them
and whilst thinking about meals/presentation I remembered that I'd photographed some of the desserts from the penultimate hotel restaurant. These are much smaller than they look in reality and declared delicious by all the 'dessert loving' members of our group who manfully struggled to do a fair comparison by sampling several each. Shame I don't have a 'sweet tooth'
but last night's hotel, whilst getting lots of brownie points for location and 'Green Policies/Conservation aspirations' just didn't make the grade on food presentation: Do you see what I mean?
This was part of their salad/veg display photographed from our table across the restaurant. Looks like a mouse head doesn't it?
We're in the process of transferring all the photos from our travel laptop (Christine) to my computer now and when I have the time I'll work through them and archive them in categories for future use so there may be more posts on this blog as I come across interesting/funny pictures. There really wasn't time whilst travelling to be very selective - we didn't get much free time, and when we did Internet access was either expensive or very slow so Blog posts had to be done in a hurry.
I've also promised to send photos to a couple of people from our tour, one of whom forgot his camera battery charger so ran out of steam halfway through, and another who didn't manage to capture all the butterflies and birds she wanted as her camera didn't have a decent zoom - mine isn't the best but nobody on our group had a 'professional' camera which I found surprising.
Here's a couple of photos taken by photographers at the Taj Mahal and Elephant ride station (Amber Fort, Jaipur) which have now been scanned at home. Think we had one of the prettier elephants!
Not our choice of pose but the photographer was insistent and this wasn't as odd as some he insisted on.
Love the elli haven't ridden on one since I was a child at some zoo or other. I rather like the pose at the Taj Mahal. Your experiences at the Mumbai airport would have driven me nuts.
ReplyDeleteThanks Jo
ReplyDeleteWe've got 'more normal' sitting poses in front of the Taj Mahal but only individually. Thought it easier to pose a double one.
The elli was gorgeous ... i want one LOL