Then there was my Indian airline check in experience. I had checked in online, so theoretically, the only thing I had to do was to stop at the web check in baggage drop counter. But the computer was down at that counter, so I went through the normal line. After 20 minutes, I worked myself to the front of the line, then some Indian guy with a big family and a dozen bags tried to use the web checkin line and when he found out it was out of service, he just moved laterally in front of me. If you have never been to India, you probably don’t know that they are the most rude people in the world when it comes to queuing up. If they feel entitled (most of them), they will just shamelessly walk past everyone to the front of the line since they are obviously more important that anyone else. This ain’t my first Rodeo, so I now how to handle situations like that. I told the guy not to even THINK about cutting in front of me. He said “but I have checked in on the web already”. I said “so have I, get to the back of the line like everyone else”.
Then there was the gate. My boarding pass said Gate 18. I went there and there was a sign saying it had been changed to Gate 20. So I went to Gate 20 and there was a sign saying that it had been change to Gate 21. So I went to Gate 21, and the person there said, “Oh, you’re flight is at Gate 18” (because that is what it said on the boarding pass). After some discussion about infinite loops (or how to keep an Indian busy), it was decided that Gate 20 was going to be the place.
Then there was the Plane. When I got to my assigned row, I saw the tray table down. On close inspection, I saw that it had no latch at all. I pointed it out to the flight attendant and he said to just sit there and they would fix it. I thought “Right”! In a few minutes a guy from the flight deck came out (all this while the aisled are packed with people trying to figure out which seats they were supposed to be in (buses don’t have seat numbers, Indians think a plane is just a flying bus. They call them Airbus don’t they?) The guy from the flight crew must have been the flight engineer, he had two gold bars on his shoulder boards. He looked over the missing latch, disappeared for a few minutes and came back with a roll of masking tape. Well I thought to myself “self, that ain’t gonna work” because one of the important qualities of masking tape is that it DOESN’T STICK VERY WELL TO ANYTHING. So I said to the guy, that isn’t going to stick, you should be using something like duct tape. He says “Duct tape”? And I said, “yeah, you now, the stuff you use to hold the engines on the wings”. I don’t think he understood because they allowed me to stay on the plane. In the US, a sky marshal would have asked me to leave the aircraft at that point. Well, surprise, surprise, the tray table fell down before the flight engineer even made it back to the cockpit. I just held it up with my knee during takeoff and affected a more permanent fix inflight myself (see photos below).
My arrival in India went smoother than I anticipated. I had arranged for the newly instituted Visa On Arrival by filling out a 50 page online questionnaire to insure that my father wasn’t Pakistani, my mother wasn’t Pakistani, my paternal grandparents weren’t Pakistani, my maternal grandparents weren’t Pakistani, That I didn’t own any goats of Pakistani origin, etc.. It turns out that I was the only one at the Visa On Arrival window. A lonely Immigration officer really perked up when I arrived. I think I was the only one he had seen all day. Either nobody else could prove their Pakistani free lineage, or they simply just gave up on the web form. Later when I had to show my passport again at customs, the officer said “Oooo, you have a Visa On Arrival”! I don’t think they have seen too many of them yet. Even the guy at my hotel in Jaipur said “Oooo, you have a Visa On Arrival”! And they said it with the awe of something like “Oooo, you have the new AppleWatch”!
It was freakishly hot in Jaipur today (106). Also a Sunday so virtually everything was closed. I did manage to get a SIM card for my iPhone which is no easy task in India. You have to provide a copy of your passport’s picture page, a copy of the passport visa page ( “Oooo, you have a Visa On Arrival”!), A copy of something that proves your home address (used my driver’s license), A copy of something that proves where you are staying in India (I used a business card from the hotel) and 2, yes that’s right, 2 color passport size photos. Then, after all this stuff, it takes 24 hours to get the SIM activated. I remembered that there plenty of hoops from my last Indian adventure, so I checked online to see if everything was the same and had all of my ducks in a row when I finally found a phone shop that was open. I told the guy I needed a SIM and he started to tell me everything I was going to need, probably figuring that he was going to get rid of me pretty quick. I started slapping all the stuff out on the counter, he looked at it and just gave a shrug and got a SIM out for me. It turns out that he had some SIMs that were pre-activated, so I had it working in much less time than I thought. At least something went well.
Tomorrow morning, I take a train to Sawai Madhopur and should be out hunting Tigers to film by afternoon.
The “flight engineer’s solution to a missing tray table lock:
I sacrificed one of the airline’s headphones for a better fix:
I mentioned that it was HOT in Jaipur today. Here is a solution that one of the street dogs came up with:
No kidding. He was just casually standing there enjoying the relief.
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