28 days, 2000 miles, 8 trains, 3 rucsacks
Although we landed in Mumbai our trip really started when we landed at Chennai, after spending two nights in Mumbai just in case our luggage never arrived with us. The ‘short hop’ was a 100 minute flight, across a bit and down a bit, showing just how big India is.
Currently we’re in Mamallapuram, or Mahabalipuram as it used to be known, or Mahabs as it’s called for short, or, as I call it, Hampi-by-the-sea.
Here’s a short video:
Who’d have thought that we’d visit Dunkirk in India. Confused? I mean the new box office movie which was sensational!
We visited the nearby Sun City cinema and booked our tickets two hours early for a princely sum of Rs450, which is around £6, yes that’s right, for all of us. We got three tickets for less than the price of one in England. After buying our bargain bucket of popcorn and drinks (Rs190, about £2.50), we settled into our comfy seats and awaited the adverts and trailers. The screen lit up. Yeah, it’s starting!
Suddenly, the audience all stood up as the national anthem played, whilst a huge Indian flag fluttered on the screen. Slight awkward moment. Do we sit or stand? We decided to join in with everyone else. Perhaps this might catch on in UK? Or not!
Immediately afterwards, Dunkirk started and within seconds – there were no trailers – we were totally engrossed, especially me, who might have jumped a few times (not a great idea when holding popcorn!).
I was really enjoying the movie when abruptly (about half way through) the screen went black. Damn a powercut, Amy thought, but no, the lights came up and people went out for refreshments. We weren’t expecting that!
It was great to experience the cinema in Mumbai, which is of course the centre of Bollywood. We’ll do this again but Bollywood style.
The online check-in had already presented me with issues it shouldn’t have: it tried to force me to enter details of our German visa – we don’t need one – and I couldn’t get past that part of the process. Except, if you cancel the check-in process and start again it start’s from where you left off and forgets about the mistaken need for a German visa, until the next passenger and then you have to repeat the quit/start-again process.
I thought this would be the only visa problem, I was wrong.
At Heathrow check-in they thoroughly checked our visas for India, no problem, everything’s fine. We went through security with a bit of an issue, but after that it’s plain sailing we thought.
We had two hours in in Munich airport before our transfer to the Mumbai bound flight left, plenty of time as our baggage was handled automatically.
The Lufthansa announcer at the gate informed us we all needed our boarding passes stamped before we’d be allowed to travel. No problem, everything’s correct and in order, this will be easy.
“This is not a visa, this is only the application form.”
“It’s not, it’s what you get sent when the application is granted, that’s why it’s got the barcode and our attached passport photo. It’s a new visa style, for short term tourists, have you seen them before?”
“No, you must have a stamped visa in your passport, you cannot fly to Mumbai”.
Arrrrgggghhhhhhh.
We had to talk to another officer who suggested looking for emails on my phone, which wasn’t working, the airport WiFi was dead and although I knew I should be able to use data on my contract in the Euro it just wasn’t working. Turns out I hadn’t switched ‘data roaming’ on!
Eventually I got emails stating the visas had been granted.
And this was enough to get us through.
So, the key lesson is: if you’re travelling on a new style visa it’s probably likely airport staff in places won’t know about it so take every last little bit of information you have. An untrained, or rather unaware, member of transit airport staff almost stopped us getting to India, she had the final say and we in the end were lucky.
It’s 3am, in exactly 24 hours from now we’ll be starting the adventure and leaving for Heathrow.
Yes, it’s 3am, I’m awake and I’m awake on purpose.
There’s method in my madness
– hopefully I’ll be so tired by 8pm that I’ll sleep for six hours until we wake up ready to go
– India is 4.5 hours ahead of UK time right now, so it’s roughly wake-up-time there as I type, so hopefully I’m also adjusting my body clock to avoid too much jet lag.
It seemed like a winning idea at the weekend when I dreamt it up, now though…not so much.
We’re all so excited at going but at the same time it’s tinged with sadness that we’re leaving Emilia at home. This couldn’t have worked out any worse: we thought she’d be busily working this summer to fund her uni semester in USA – that fell through; we thought she might also be doing some summer trip with her uni/school friends – that never happpened; we thought she didn’t really like India backpacking last time – time’s made her realise she did. We all feel incredibly guilty at being so happy with our excitement but once planned there was no way we could factor getting Emilia to India, even for a couple of weeks. To make it even worse Love Island finished last night, she’s gutted 🙂
The weather in Mumbai looks pretty wet right now, unsurprising given it’s the monsoon but maybe I wasn’t expecting quite this image, of children playing (?) in the bow wave created by a bus.
Luckily we head two hours south east of Mumbai on day 2 so we’ll be away from the main monsoon rains quickly. On the plus side it’s meant I’ve looked for something to do indoors on Day 1 and as well as a bit of sightseeing we’ll probably head to the cinema to watch Dunkirk, at a total cost of £7 for all three of us, rather than the £37 I would have paid if we’d had time to watch it at home.
Every cloud and all that.
It took a few weeks to decide on the name – see why here – for the new blog but once decided I knew exactly how I wanted it to look, this page explains what I was trying to achieve.
As far as the holiday goes, so far:
– the route has been designed, to take in an appropriate amount of days for each of the 10 towns/cities we’ll be visiting.
– most hotels have been reserved, most of which will be paid for locally when we’re there.
– all trains have been booked, except a couple of small local ones we might take. Overnight trains have been maximised, saving us from wasting daylight time travelling and also saving money on hotels for several nights.
– the budget has been sorted – more on that later – and should come out at less than the price of two weeks self-catering in Menorca, and that’s including all the hotels and all the travel…and that fact it’s for a month.
Why not take a look at the site pages:
– about the blog
– the route
– why ‘masala dosa diaries’?
– what’s the design about?