We splurged and bought a flight for a change... It should have been a fairly straightforward day.
We got up at 6AM because we were super nervous about missing our 11:05AM flight (in other words, we "pulled a John Samm" (only some of you will get this, sorry)). We walked to the top of the hill here to take a tuk tuk to the bus station, and took our bus to the airport. Now, when we had talked to the front desk at our hotel yesterday about how to get to the airport, we understood that if we told the bus driver (who essentially drives a shuttle between Rishikesh and Dehradun) that we wanted to be dropped off at the airport on the way, the driver would pull into the airport drop off for us. This was not the case. This driver instead dropped us off at the sign that read "airport 1.4 km's turn right". At least we knew which direction to walk in, right? The arrow pointed towards a street on the right, so - with our heavy packs, we headed down this winding road.
Like most things in India, the road seemed a little unofficial/uninviting. However, we didn't question the overgrown road, the rusty signs, or even the family of monkeys that had taken up residence in the middle of the road leading to the airport. It was only once we reached the actual terminal that we started to realize that this airport may not be the RIGHT airport...
We got up at 6AM because we were super nervous about missing our 11:05AM flight (in other words, we "pulled a John Samm" (only some of you will get this, sorry)). We walked to the top of the hill here to take a tuk tuk to the bus station, and took our bus to the airport. Now, when we had talked to the front desk at our hotel yesterday about how to get to the airport, we understood that if we told the bus driver (who essentially drives a shuttle between Rishikesh and Dehradun) that we wanted to be dropped off at the airport on the way, the driver would pull into the airport drop off for us. This was not the case. This driver instead dropped us off at the sign that read "airport 1.4 km's turn right". At least we knew which direction to walk in, right? The arrow pointed towards a street on the right, so - with our heavy packs, we headed down this winding road.
In the distance, we could now see the new terminal, but we had to go back where we started from to get there.
Despite all of this extra unnecessary walking, we still made it to our boarding gate by 8:30AM - over 2 hours ahead of our departure time. Our flight was then delayed again and again until we finally took off for Dehli at 2:30pm but had missed our connecting flight to Aurangabad. We'll now be catching a flight out tomorrow.
At least the airline put us up in a decent hotel for the night. Air India owns the hotel that we're staying at (the Centaur Hotel), and according to the waiter who served us tonight (meal vouchers were included in the deal!), at the hotel restaurant, over 70% of the people who stay at this hotel were on missed/canceled Air India flights.
We originally avoided booking a flight with Kingfisher Airlines because I'd read that the company was going bankrupt and that many flights were canceled recently. It seems as though air travel in India may be just as unreliable as any other form of travel
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| Photo of Jenn waiting for our taxi. We got a prepaid taxi to take us to our hotel in Dehli, and they gave us #37. Numbers 1-36 and 38-45 were in the station and ready to go, but we had to wait for #37 to get back before we could go to the hotel. This particular situation struck me as typically Indian. :) |
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