The chaos reigns during a long travel

Well, not long, but the longest air journey of my life. Though I have travelled in train for 48 hours in one go, air travel had never been so long.

This time the total journey for me was almost 36 hours or probably more. I was at Bangalore airport at 11 PM for a flight scheduled at 4 AM. Emirates provided a good choice of entertainment and I did avail it to the fullest during Dubai-Sao Paulo leg of the journey. The flight duration was more than 15 hours and a tire body fell deep into sleep the moment it was airborne. The problem of middle seats is that you never feel comfortable; you cannot spread your legs and are always conscious that any movement of yours would disturb both your neighbors. You also feel guilty if you have to make a visit to the rest room as it would mean an unwarranted exercise for the person on aisle seat.

A journey as long as 15 hours is quite difficult to be completed while sitting in one seat and squirming there only uncomfortably. So all I did during that time was to watch movies, eat whatever they had in offing for a vegetarian and to go off to sleep as soon as possible.

With some palatable food in offer, I hooked on to the movies available and surprised myself with my stamina of watching movies non-stop. ‘Luck by chance’ was the first to go followed by ‘Lamhe’ and ‘Aloo Chat’. Enough of Hindi movies – now let me watch some English one and I switched to ‘Duplicity’ and ‘The Proposal’ – the movies of two of the actresses I like.  Now don’t ask me anything about any movie, not even the stories – I got all messed up and cannot differentiate between any of those, except that I made a note of buying the audio CD of Lamhe the moment I am back in India.

Finally the journey came to a halt after the flight landed in Sao Paulo. Rushing to pick our baggage and then to the TAM airlines counter for checking in again, we started experiencing chaos. I always thought that the counters of Deccan airlines in India are a house of chaos but this one seemed to be a castle of chaos.

For a flight at 9:50 Pm, we were still in queue for security check at 9:30 when all of a sudden security check stopped for whatever reason and no one seemed to be bothered about the situation. The officials had something else to discuss probably or may be shifts were to change or maybe there was some emergency – all these guesses we made did not seem to be falling in place as no one was moving from his/her seat, the calm and casual look of officers defied any presumption of emergency, they jabbering and joking attitude ruled out any serious discussion and then finally for no apparent reason, they decided to work.

We had to fly domestic but were made to go to the emigration counter – God knows why! The linguistic barrier ensured that we cannot ask any question and just follow whatever we could understand. And lo! it was 9 45 by the time our security check was over and we were running to the embarking point lest we are left behind and forced to spend the night in Sao Paulo. But the moment we got into the plane – surprise! we were among the first one to enter. Cool, now the time to relax and watch some other movie – don’t know what as I fell asleep the moment movie started. Woke up after 45 minutes and found that the flight was all set to take off, if everyone is in. Finally it started crawling towards the runway and we could be in Rio in another one hour – but hold….. For some reason beyond our comprehension, we were informed that the flight would not take off and would be taxied back to the bay. The flights were to be changed, by which I could only guess of some technical snag in the flight.

Another flight and another period of wait and another round of sleep. Woke up after some time expecting to be on my way but the bird was yet to move from its nest. Go back to sleep buddy! Finally it took off and I was once again sleeping mid-air and then woke up by landing jerk.

Running out of patience, out of energy and out of any hope, walked into Rio airport and walked towards the conveyer belt. Picked up the luggage and realized that I was only 4.5 hours late. Thanks God finally I had reached at least. But..but..but..why to hurry. There is a cab to be caught and getting a pre-paid cab ticket does not guarantee availability of a cab. Another round of wait before the cab is made available.

Finally I was left with energy enough to drag myself to my hotel room and take bath before hitting the bed.  Thanks God the journey got over.

~ by Prashant Singh on November 9, 2009.