Arrival in India – October 2004

Will we fly?…
We spent all night packing, trying to put bags into bags, make our luggage smaller, lighter. We had 14 bags and 2 bikes – 16 items and 265 lbs.; the allowed limit was 3 bags and 44 lbs. per person. Three times the weight. It promised to be expensive. We decided to arrive early and beg for sympathy.

We were the first ones in the airport, aside from employees sleeping with their feet up. We entered through separate entrances – one for men, one for women – then packed up our bags, tying four together to make “one” big bag and readying our bikes for the departure.

At 4 AM, the check-in counter was opened and when we tried to check in, they told us that our airplane tickets had been sold to someone else! I couldn’t believe it – we had paid in cash! We were told to wait 20 minutes for the manager, who never came. We waited several hours, and still no-show. The hunger pangs eating away at my stomach, my migraine, and my extreme fatigue kind of numbed me. I refused to believe that we wouldn’t be able to board the plane. The next flight was SIX DAYS later, and we were supposed to meet Vince in Delhi in four days! I looked at the women in black chadors and the bearded men wearing turbans, all speaking strange languages, and blinked back the sleep in my eyes.

Just before the flight was supposed to take off, a clerk informed us that they had two seats available. We were pushed through in a hurry and driven across the runway in a space-age bus to the already-closed airplane and seated in first class. A miracle.

The four-hour flight took us over the Iranian and Pakistani deserts, which were beautiful from up on high. A sort of lunar landscape made up of undulating dunes, jagged, steep peaks, some of them pink….

We arrived in Delhi amidst lightning and thunderclouds…the biggest storm Delhi had seen in a while….