Next Stop: Unknown

Note: the following is satire, and not meant to offend anyone.  It was written after 34 hours of travel on no sleep. 

Jenn and I had the wonderful experience of setting in the New Delhi transit lounge for about 10 hours during our flight.  While this totally sucked, we had a unique opportunity to watch airport antics.  The show was even better because we got to make up the conversations going on between everyone since we couldn’t understand what they were saying.  So, where to start… the women’s bathroom has a woman who sits just inside the front door… She was wearing a greenish olive jumpsuit.  We’ll call her one of the worker ants.  what she does, we have no clue… half the time she appeared to be sleeping.  However, every hour or so, some man would come and knock on the women’s bathroom, out she would come, sign a triplicate form, and then go back in side.  Everything here is in triplicate… but not the triplicate you might expect… they actually carried around sheets of carbon copy paper… the old school kind, and manually put it between each form, fill out the paperwork, and then reclaim the carbon stuff for use the next time.  Anyway, the bathroom worker confuses us, as she doesn’t seem to do anything.  At least, she could refill the TP, as Jenn said it was almost always empty when she went in.

The men’s side had no such attendant, however there we are able to witness the Army Indian ant.  Standing inside the men’s bathroom would open up a window into the military side of operation.  Mainly, people in jumpsuits of camo, carrying around semi automatic weapons or handguns attached at their hips in holsters.  These men would use the restroom for normal means, then find the sinks to bathe themselves, faces, underarms, hands, before returning to their circuit.   

So far we have taken our Darwin instincts and drawn a comparison of sorts to the organization of Indian species, and the jobs they require.  one of my personal favorites was to become my handler.  He spoke very little English, but just enough to make contact with passengers.  This man’s job, it appeared was to become the handler for you.  The duties of a handler are not quite known… it seems as there are moral dilemmas given to this subtype of worker ant.  The handler is slightly more well dressed… nice pants, tucked in long sleeved shirt, fancy shoes, very presentable, which appear to give him some authority over lesser casts ants.  It also appears to give him an opportunity to get money from unsuspecting tourists.   This trick requires at least two brain cells, and a partner, so a level of trust is built within this handler organization.  Here’s how it works.  The handler identifies its target ‘’prey” and makes contact.  I think he selectively targets folks hopeful to find one more easily gamed.  He contacts you and asks what airline you are departing on, and where you are going.  He goes around doing this for several folks, feeling out the situation.  He then quickly triages the results… the order of which the trick will have to play out.  The handler then informs us that our bags are arriving into an unsecured area, and thus need to be moved to a secure warehouse, for holding until the next segment of the flight is ready.  At that point you would be able to get your luggage through customs, and then onto the next plane.    Since we are not cleared for security, we are not allowed to go claim our own baggage, therefore we must pay our handler to take care of this job for us, at a cost of 2500 rupees .  I see this game up front, but Jenn wanted our luggage, so we paid him… but in USD, not rupees…  as we had no rupees… turned out to be about 25 USD, which was all the cash we had between the two of us.  Ok, well, at least our luggage is taken care of… hopefully. 

This scam continued through the hours while we waited for our boarding passes.  We were flying executive class from Delhi to Kathmandu, which gives us the privilege of staying in the business class lounge area until our flight arrived.   Oh, so nice… leather comfy chairs, a place to relax, unwind, and not worry about our daypacks walking off.  This introduces us to the next Indian ant, the doorman ant.  Surprisingly, these ants are dressed in business casual clothes, and not big burley ants you’d see standing outside bars keeping the rift out.  No, these ants appear like they would pop when approached. None the less, they are effective about keeping us out of the business lounge… why?  because we don’t have a ticket. 

To gain entrance to the upper level of society, we have to have our ticket in hand.  Sounds easy enough, so off we go in search of finding our printed boarding ticket.  This brings us back to our handler, with whom we convey our requests for a ticket such that we can be seated in the business class lounge, instead of the prison like holding area we have been thus far.  He tells us the tickets need to come from the Indian Air desk, which opens at 4am.  (remember we arrived at the transit area around 10pm the previous day)  He tells us we are stuck in the cage until he can get those tickets printed for us.  It’s not 4am yet, so we go back into the cage to try to find some way to pass the time.  Shortly there after, our handler comes back and says he cannot find our luggage.  Great, just great… the scheme has gone up a notch.  Our handler hit the jackpot.  My guess is now that he realizes we are flying executive class, we must have good stuff in our luggage, something he wants.  Jenn of course being the smart one, asks for our money back, since he didn’t do his job of securing our luggage.  No problem, he hand us back six bucks.  I had given him 25.  After calling him on it, he gave me back the full 25.  So, at least now we have some cash to get a bite to eat or drink. 

In the cage, you are stuck with what you entered with… there is no bank, atm, or anything of the sort to help you out here.  Outside of the cage is an entire villa of food, shopping, money machines, real chairs to sit in…  the only thing required to get there is a ticket and a passage through a security checkpoint.  This ticket we speak of has yet to be introduced to the story. 

Now we introduce our next Indian ant, the ticket runner.  I’m not exactly sure how this aunt operates.  It appears his goal is to get tickets from some unknown place, which happens to be a place we can’t go due to security restrictions, return those tickets with luggage tags, deliver ticket and tag to one person, then repeat for every customer who needd a ticket.  Also note, this person works in contact with the handler species.  When a ticket is issued, a triplicate form is filled out (remember the copy paper), containing the names of the passengers, and their exact luggage ID numbers. There is an exchange of information from passenger to the ticket runner ant, and then another exchange between ticket running and handler.  Both go off into some ‘secure’ area to find the luggage and bring it out.  Somehow in this mess, it gets cleared for customs…  it appears this happens by rolling the luggage down the hallway, dodging all the normally ticketed folks, to a small door labeled “customs”.   A conversation happens there, likely with a higher form of Indian ant species, a general of sorts, and the the boxes come back with an ok, and then disappear again.  Yes, disappear… hopefully to be put on the actual flight.  About this time, our handler comes up and asks us to follow him.  After waiting for 8 hours, it appears our tickets are soon to be printed.  He puts us in place in line, and says, “wait here”, and then leaves.  We wait…. for well over an hour, as we watch this ballet of ridiculousness occur over and over. We soon realize that our handler just put us in line because his shift was over and he had to jet (probably home with all our belongings that mysteriously were not found).  So, after standing for several hours, we went back into the cage and found a somewhat comfortable seat to continue waiting.

This place had a view of the whole area, and provided some entertaining moments.  Just like the bathroom attendant Indian Ant, there is a similar species called the floor Indian Ant.  The sole function of this woman is to continuously walk around the building with a dust mop, and keep the floors clean.  She does not stop to talk, she does not make eye contact.  She is for all intensive purposes, a roomba automated vacuum.  She has an upper sibling of sorts, maybe an ant who graduated from floor duster to machine washer.  At this level of the species, we get to add a new variable… electricity. 

Electro-Indian Ant, let’s rename him “Power Ant” must feel special, as he get to operate a floor rotating disk cleaning vacuum system, and, has a subspecies that operates along with him, who carries a mop to clean up leftover fluids from the machine.  I think floor Indian Ant and Mop Indian Ant, must be sibling species, Power Ant is their uncle or something.  All three of these cleaning units wear the same costume, so it’s fair to say they are of equal rank in the Indian Ant society.  None the less, Power Indian ant sets up his machine, pulls out miles of electrical cable, and plugs it into the wall.  As he flips the start switch on the machine, the room comes alive with bursts of sparks, fire, smoke, crazy noises, flashes, zing, zangs, and finally pops.  Leaving behind a trail of smoke to a cable which seems to have shorted, and eventually bust a circuit breaker.  Interesting, as now we see yet another species of Indian Ant, the decision maker ant.  Not one, but 3 decision makers come to observe the situation.  After explaining what happened, a report was filed (in old school triplicate) and new orders were passed around.  Our mop floor Ant has a new job of cleaning up the marks on the floor where the short was.  The Power Ant had to get his unit fixed, there must be an “electrician Indian ant” behind the scenes to take care of that for him.  In the meantime however, the Mop Ant would manually clean up where the Power Aunt was working, but currently disabled.

Back at the hander and ticket runner station we’ve run into a problem.  The power ant is back on track and cleaning the floor in between customs, and the super secret security area where bags are stored.  As the handler runs his bags from the customs area to the handler area, the Power aunt gets his machine in the middle.  The handler ant runs his cart into the power ant, and stops, giving him a look of pure evil.  The machine is still running, but not making forward progress, and the handler ant continues to stare down the power aunt.  Evidently, the handler ant feels he is of a higher class and the Power ant should back off.  The Power aunt cannot back off, if he does, he leaves a pool of water everywhere.  Its suddenly a standstill.  Neither Indian Ant will relinquish position, the handler Indian ant growls at the Power Indian Ant, who just looks on, taking it all in.  For several minutes this goes on, until the ticket runner ant comes over to see what is going on.  He tells the handler ant to go around the power washer ant.  This upsets the handler, as he expected to dominate the “lesser” power washing ant. 

Two more curiosities… off to the side, we have a roped off section for the tea maker ant.  This Ant has a chair to sit on, and a little box that he can open up to inspect occasionally.  The front of the machine has a few buttons.  When a button is pressed, tea comes out the front.  It is a Indian’s entire job to man this machine, and make tea for people…. which people, I cannot tell, but obviously some get tea, and some do not.  The Tea machines seems to self operate… press button, put cup under exit, wait.  In 30 seconds, fresh tea is available.  Why they need a full time person to do this is beyond me.  Maybe it is against the law for a person to make their own tea?  Or, is it degrading to an upper class Indian to have to make his own tea?  Who knows, but having that job surely must suck.

The 2nd curiosity is the Track girl.  This is likely the strangest of all I encountered in this colony of Indians.  There is a well dressed young woman, possibly chosen to be the most attractive by her peers, (just a guess here).  Anyway, this woman’s job is to carry a piece of paper around in a circle.  She seems to follow the same circuit, sometimes clockwise, sometimes counter clockwise. Maybe being mute was the genetic feature that predisposed her for this job, as she never said a word to anyone.  She would just walk around, looking like she was supposed to be there.  I don’t know if her presence helped or hindered progress.  There must be some connection our Darwinian conclusions are missing here… as she serves no visible purpose to this ecosystem.

Time goes by,and we get our tickets.  Whooohooo, our ticket handler ant came through for us….  We now have boarding passes for our flight.  The flight leaves at 8:25am, and we are given the boarding passes at 8:00.  Wow, we can finally go enjoy the business class lounge. Oh wait… now we don’t have time, as we have to spend 30 minutes going through security to get to our gate on time for our departure.  Note to self: always get printed boarding passes in hand for foreign traveling… the electronic stuff just doesn’t work in 3rd world countries.  There wasn’t a computer to be found anywhere.  Oh, back to our luggage, before I forget.. yes, we have none, and the agent tells us to file a report when we get to Kathmandu.  Wonderful… pass the buck downstream to someone who has even less knowledge of what is going on… At last however, we are out of this hell pit, and onto our last leg of this 36 hour sleepless journey to Nepal.

Our flight from Seattle to Chicago was uneventful, however the Seattle ticket office only gave us boarding passes for the first leg of our flight… and only checked our bags to New Delhi.  Upon arriving at Chicago, we deplaned, and walked/shuttled several miles to the international departure, only to find that our plane was just about to leave.  The woman didn’t want to give us boarding tickets… but only because we didn’t have India visas.  (we had confirmed we didn’t need a visa to pass on through to Nepal, but she had to reconfirm).  Then, the lady was upset because our bags were only checked to Delhi, and not to Kathmandu.  So, after some frustrations, she spit out tickets for us, and we rushed onto the plane.  An empty plane… a huge 777 with over 60 rows, and I think there may have been 40 people on the plane.  We arrived at Frankfurt 7.5 hours later, and had to deplane again while they made us wait two hours for a layover/cleaning/reboarding process.  Finally, on to India!  Jenn and I still did not have boarding passes for our India to Nepal leg of the trip, and we also had no idea where our luggage was going to end up.  On arriving in India, we were escorted to a transit lounge and told to wait.  And wait, and wait, and finally, some guy came up and asked us for our boarding passes.  We told him the story, and he borrowed our passports and luggage tickets for a while and came back and said we had to pay him 2500 rupees to go get our luggage and put it into the warehouse.  Evidently, we can’t leave the transit area, and thus we cannot go get our luggage.  (This seemed a bit odd to me… and, I didn’t have any rupees anyway).  Long story short, we gave the guy USD, and he disappeared… and here we are, still waiting for our flight from India to Kathmandu.  Sadly, it’s a 10 hour wait. I just hope the guy delivers on the luggage deal, and we actually get to Kathmandu without having lost anything. 

Notes to travelers: Avoid long layovers at the New Delhi airport… this small box of a transit area is miserable… loud loud loud airport announcements continuously, freezing cold temperatures, hard uncomfortable seats, and people coming through all night.  No chance to sleep here…