Anatomy of a disastrous Indian vacation, part 3

So far:
We made to the foothills of the Himalays, by plane, no train, some autos and a whole lot of non-mobile things. Here’s part 1 and part 2

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The music of the hills was all around us.

It enveloped us, stuck a Rs 20 stamp and airmailed us to a dreamscape where the mighty Khang-chen-dzon-ga towered above jagged snowcapped peaks and Yetis were picknicking on the glaciers while playing antakshari. Or so we imagined. It was too foggy to see anything clearly and it was getting dark. We reached Darjeeling by 5 pm, after being stopped at every village to pay a “Chaandi toll”. The flora changed from evergreen to deciduous and the street dog breed changed from mongrel to Lhasa apso. Wonderful dogs they are. Quiet, unlike Pomeranians, and have an air (and general disposition) of a wise Himalayan sage.

On reaching our hotel, Viramma Villa, the very first question I asked the friendly maître d was “where is Khang-chen-dzon-ga?” and she pointed her finger in the direction of some fog, and said “There is Khang-chen-dzon-ga”. “Ah. Can I see it?”, I asked. She said – “Very unlikely in January”. Disappointed, we soothed ourselves by tucking in more momos than is considered healthy (for an adult alpha male Gorilla, i.e), slurped on Thukpa, briefly fought “The Blanket Territorial Wars of Viramma Villa, circa 2009”, and then slept.

The next day, our only day in Darjeeling was precious to us, and therefore had to be rationed carefully between the adventure lovers (me) and Tibetan market shopping lovers (the rest). To cut a long story short, and get back to the disaster-filled parts of this story, the day was lovely. We managed to see monasteries, and young monks play some mean soccer, red pandas, Himalayan black bears, the insides of several trinket shops, a little bit of Nepal and importantly, hogged large quantities of Tibetan, Nepali and Gorkhaland food. So there. Now let’s get back to the regular grind.

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The fun started when it was time to settle the hotel bill the next day. The maître d informed us with the tone of someone saying “Oh, by the way, the taxi ride down to Bagdogra is complimentary”, but instead of saying that, she said – “Oh, by the way, the tariff card had a small error. It was missing a zero. At the end”. Now, it was a lovely vacation so far, with Kingfisher planes and Indian volvos providing us a totally alternative experience, but to be charged (a lot) extra for the only boringly normal (read “enjoyable”) part of the vacation was a little hard to digest, like dry Jhalmuri with pungent mustard oil, like biting into a juicy looking kozhukattai expecting an explosion of sugary sweetness mixed with the crunchy coconut filling and finding instead that it is one of those atrocious non-sweet, tastes-like-mud, kaarakozhukkattais. We could go on with the metaphors, but I’m going to get back to the main thread now.

We haggled a bit, managed to convince the glib Pnjaabi gentleman who owned the place to give us a bit of a discount, and once he convinced us that the only reason he was reducing the tariff was his love for all things South Indian, we actually ended up feeling happy with ourselves for paying just a little bit less than the outrageously high tariff they demanded in the first place. Nobody does business like them I say.

We were on our way now, with the driver promising to take us to the Makaibari tea factory where we could sample and buy the freshest Darjeeling tea. We had earlier decided to not buy tea from the mall on his promise that direct factory maal was much better. And needless to say, we found the factory shuttered because it turned out to be Republic Day. Normally I would let forth a stream of choice curse words, but just one day in Darjeeling around the locals who rarely seem to get angry, always smile and play with Lhasa apsos, I did not feel like polluting the atmosphere with profanities. Instead, I made a mental note to remember to rickroll as many people as possible once I was back in the plains. We then bought our tea at a small shop downhill after steadfastly refusing to look at the expiry date on the packaging. Ignorance, for that moment, was beyond bliss.

Soon enough, we were back in familiary territory, the insides of an airport. With our experiences in the recent past, the first thing I did was to identify a seniorish SpiceJet rep and asked him the state of the weather in Bagdogra. He seemed confident and we soon checked in and were waiting for the departure announcement, which by now should be amply predictable, never came. I met a Bengali gentleman who, prior to retirement, worked in Air Traffic Control at this very place, Bagdogra, and he enlightened us all with this:

SpiceJet then formally announced that despite the fact that 6 other planes had landed, they did not manage to obtain clearance to land their plane, and therefore had to cancel. And just so they could completely obliterate any trace of silver lining in what was already a monstrously dark cloud, they told us that SpiceJet Corporate Policy prevents them from offering any kind of accommodation for the stranded passengers. Just so the passengers wouldn’t get skeptical, he played an audio clip that featured Darth Corporatus saying – “No accommodation. Is that clear. (Sounds of heavy breathing)”.

We then spent a day in Bagdogra. And guess what, the women spent that day shopping.

The next day, SpiceJet almost cancelled our flight again because of one lady who refused to let her hand baggage be screened and also refused to adhere to the liquid quantity limits imposed by airports. She threatened to call people whom she assured us, were in high places. Security was not amused. The rest of us were so amused that we could have cried.

3 hours later, we were back in Chennai.

The end.

ps: The audio clip features me attempting to play Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, Adagio sostenuto. Kindly excuse the many mistakes.

Anatomy of a disastrous Indian vacation, part 2

Here is part 1

In the previous episode: After an exciting, fun-filled flight cancellation experience at the airport, Ashok and gang found themselves at the Esplanade bus stand staring at what they were told would be a Volvo. Read on…to find out what it really turned out to be.

Background music plays.

(Break for Gopal palpodi and Ramraj dhoties ads)

The State-of-the-Jamshedpur Tata Bus was in front of us, a dark colossus in the Kolkata twilight. Well, not really twilight, more like halogenbulblight, but it was large, outwardly sleek and conspicuously lacking the lettering “Volvo”. On asking our tout if the Swedish had suddenly changed their phonetic alphabet to where TATA was now read and pronounced VOLVO, he admitted that this was not the real Volvo, but it was, he stated with a patriotic sparkle in his eyes, the Indian Bholbho.

That settled the matter. An Indian Volvo was good enough for us, and truth be told, the bus had an exterior design that suggested a transport that Messrs Zaphod and co would find suitable enough. So we coughed up the rather reasonable Rs 700 per ticket that was demanded and boldly stepped into the Indian Volvo, and that was when the adjective “Indian” transmogrified into “Afghani” because the inside of the bus looked like territory Messrs Laden and co would be rather familiar with – The Tora Bora. A dark, unlighted alley with occasional enclaves for seating passengers was before us, and we met the tired eyes of fellow Kingfisher passengers who had occupied all of the best seats.

We settled into our seats towards the back end of the bus, right above the wheel so that we would have the privilege of running shock absorber test cases for the next many hours. We tested the levers that leaned our seat back and were about to drift off into sleep when it hit us. It was the winter Arctic wind, and before hypothermia set in, I located the conductor and asked him what technological marvel was bringing us the experience of the Arctic at these warm latitudes.

“Sir. This is A/C bus sir.”

Lovely. That was excellent value for money, but a tad excessive, I thought. While the near-death experience of Hypothermia was exciting, edgy stuff, all we wanted to accomplish was to get to Siliguri while not being in a coma. Could he turn it down a bit, I asked.

“Sir. A/C off karne se joothe aur cigarette ka bodhboo ayega”

Ah. So it was either the devil or the deep blue sea, and I was inclined, like any other concentration camp inmate, to choose death by chilling over death by (ob)noxious odours. I came back to my seat and summoned those by-now-asleep brain cells that got me an engineering degree and put them to the task of devising a stop-gap solution to the arctic wind problem we had. They instructed me to round up all the window curtains and stuff them into the gaping hole that was the A/C vent. That seemed to increase the temperature around our seats by a few degrees, and keep us out of cryogenic stasis.

Just 12 more hours, we thought.

At midnight, I woke up to find the bus stalled, and several passengers missing. I got down and was relieved to find them smoking cigarettes and drinking tea from small mud pots. They were also discussing Obama’s economic stimulus plan. On enquiring the geographic coordinates of our current location, I was told that we were just a stone’s throw away. From Kolkata, that is. Alarmed at our pedestrian velocity, I located our conductor and asked him for a realistic estimation of our arrival time in Siliguri. He quoted a time that had mysteriously augmented itself by 2 hours.

“Road kharaab hai saar aur fog bhi hai”

Once the driver was done with his refueling (with Nicotine and Tea), we departed.

Just 12 more hours, we thought.

Several hours later, I woke up to find sunlight struggling with every photon in its body to get past a thick blanket of fog that I optimistically assumed was a result of being close to the Himalayan mountains. I was rudely corrected when a shop sign on the highway (“Pal Jerox”) notified me that we had just crossed the Ganga at Farakka.

I located our conductor again and informed him of this relativistic discrepancy. We seemed to be moving through time, but not through space. At least, not fast enough through space. He issued a frowned-upon programming directive, a GOTO statement that took me back through this post to the line where he had told me – “Road kharab hai saar aur fog bhi hai”. His current estimate for the arrival time was “X – C” where X = The unknown arrival time and C = current time.

Defeated, I notified the women in our gang of the latest developments, and they went through a complicated strategy session that most Indian women must go through while traveling through India – “Restroom planning”. Our society has a comprehensive all-round strategy exquisitely designed to keep women at home – a national obsession with giving birth 9 months after marriage, women-unfriendly workplaces, eve teasing on the roads and an atrocious public restroom system.

We had our breakfast at a dhaba in Dalkhola, crispy fried parathas with aloo gobi gravy. Delicious stuff, amply helped by temperatures between 10 and 15 degrees C. Anything tastes good in cold weather as long as it’s hot.

As is usually the case, time slowed down to a crawl as the bus trundled through the narrow corridor that separates Bengal from its mountainous northern part, and by 3 pm, 19 hours after we had left Kolkata, we walked out of the bus, like convicts being released after a life-term, and got into a Chevy Tavera that was to take us up to Darjeeling.

Rest in part 3.

ps: The background score is my adaptation/re-recording of Clint Mansell/Kronos Quartet’s “Lux Aeterna”, originally the soundtrack for the movie “Requiem for a Dream”. All layers were played on Garageband instruments using a regular Yamaha keyboard and a MIDI interface. I wanted to add some sort of a Natabhairavi layer on top of the G minor scale, but was too lazy to do it. Any of you musicians want to play around/remix this with other things, I’ve uploaded it to Jamglue

Anatomy of a disastrous Indian vacation, part 1

I just came back from a vacation. Make that a typically Indian, ridiculously, disastrously, catastrophically, wtfically craptacular vacation. A vacation brokered and broken by Kingfisher and Spicejet. In the words of Maddox, if foggy Himalayan hill-stations and fresh mountain air were the twin towers of enjoyable vacations, Kingfisher and Spicejet would be the two planes that crash into them.

Stop.

No wait. Make that, in the words of the legendary Goundamani, “Staaap”.

I just realized that angry ranting always leaves a bad aftertaste, much like payasam that has “caught the bottom” of the cooking vessel. So I am going to describe my vacation in the cheeriest possible way.

It began, like most vacations do, with a Wikitravel search for laid-back, formerly colonial, Himalayan hang-outs and that was when I chanced upon Darjeeling. Finding out that it is now a hotspot for Gorkhaland agitations and has generally become tourist unfriendly over the last decade or so,  I chose it with no further hesitation. I like places that other tourists don’t frequent because I would not want to get in the way of the average tourist tossing his empty Lays Tomato Chilli bag and Mirinda PET bottle into the verdant woods. It would have been rude to be a spoil sport and not participate in this great Indian tourist pastime.

Once the destination was selected, I had to find find some means of transportation to get there, and it seemed like “air” would be a good choice to traverse the 1741 km (1082 miles if your persuasion is distinctly un-metric and 5.64219187 × 10^-11 parsecs if your sense of scale is astronomical). Kingfisher promised me that I would fly the “good times”, and that sounded so positive. After all, who would not want to fly the “good times”. The Government of India did seem to insist that Rs. 8000 (out of Rs 11,000) are required as taxes to maintain the excellent, world-class spaceports of Chennai and Kolkata and  the Galactic Headquarters at Bagdogra. I paid up with no hesitation and with full trust in our good government to make those taxes pay for a smooth airport experience.

We reached Kolkata with no incident, and soon enough it was time to board our “good times” flight to Bagdogra, the nearest airport from Darjeeling. As the printed departure time came, had some coffee, made small talk, and went on its way, I started to worry a bit. I walked over to a Kingfisher representative and asked her if we were going to fly the good times to Bagdogra.

She said – “Umm..Er”

I immediately scaled down my expectations – “I don’t necessarily have to fly the ‘good’ times. Just flying the ‘sort-of-ok’ times would be ok as well”

She said – “Er..Umm..Sir, we are yet to announce the departure”

I reassured her that the lack of a departure announcement over the PA system had made that point rather clear, but was there any intention of making said announcement at some point in the near future?

She reassured me that Kingfisher always “intends” to make departure announcements, but those intentions are often tempered by factors such as fog in Bagdogra.

“Aah. I understand perfectly ma’am. Crashing the aircraft because of low visibility would definitely not qualify as flying the “good times”.

So I went back with the satisfaction of knowing that Kingfisher did not consider a crashed landing in Bagdogra to qualify as a “good time”. But soon enough, as the departure time on our boarding cards had generally left the outer boundaries of the Oort cometary cloud, several passengers seemed concerned about this gross deviation from printed reality. And that was when Kingfisher airlines, being the excellent customer-centric organization they are, decided to compensate us with an afternoon tour into a parallel universe. Let me explain that with a diagram.

It was a dizzy ride so far, but clearly some of the passengers seemed to sour at this point. Perhaps the relativistic effects of cavorting through  parallel, and highly improbable, I might add, universes had something to do with it. They were starting to get agitated, and soon enough, Kingfisher had to tell us that the joyride was over and that they were depositing us back into the real world, back where Flight 4549 from Kolkata to Bagdogra stood cancelled, and passengers were back on the tarmac with vacation plans that would not go for $0.01 on ebay for the paper they were printed on.

I had enjoyed my ride through the parallel universe, and was disappointed that it had to end. But not for long. Some of the Bengali gentlemen on the tarmac were determined to keep spirits (not of the Kingfisher type though) high and decided to put on a skit for all of us. They called it “The Fundamental Right to Fly (and keeping it open)” and it went thus:

Angry Bengali Gentlemen: You cannot cancel the flight like this.

Kingfisher rep: But sir. Fog..

Angry Bengali Gentlemen: You are violating my right as a passenger.

(Repeat ad infinitum)

Wonderful stuff, although it did become a tad repetitive after a while. But they quickly invented a new script. This one was called “I am the Bagdogra Weather expert, not the Met dept” and it went this way:

Angry Bengali Weather Expert: This is bullsheet. Tottal Bullsheet. There is no fog in Bagdogra. I just called my friend there. The skies are totally clear. You people are totally lying.

Kingfisher rep: But sir. We have not got clearance to take off.

Angry Bengali Weather Expert: What clearance. What fog? You people are taking us for a ride or what?

Oh well. I wish they were indeed taking us for a ride, but the plane was stubbornly switched off and wasn’t going anywhere. But nevertheless, other folks got into the skit mood, and we had the pleasure of watching several other ad-hoc masterpieces that were enacted on the tarmac of the Kolkata airport that day. The best of them were:

• “I have called the TV Media, and they will be here any moment. We are going to embarrass Kingfisher in the media”
• “The Kolkata Tarmac Sit-Down Dharna”
• “Ratan Tata was first, Vijay Mallya will follow him (out of Bengal, i.e.)”

It was lovely vintage Kolkata stuff. I might not have been “flying” the good times, but I was sure “having” the good times. I thanked Kingfisher heartily for their excellent alternative, albeit non-flying, entertainment options, unlike the dull and dreary Indian Airlines and Jet Airways, which oh-so-boringly announce flight cancellations well ahead of time and deprive passengers of an opportunity to experience parallel universes.

KF also graciously offered us two choices once the tarmac skit festival was over.

1. Take the next day’s flight – An excellent option, but just to be sure, I asked them the probability of the flight taking off the next day, and the rep cheekily informed me that since the collective energy (decibel volume) of the Bengalis demanding to know this answer was so high that it made the actual calculation of the next day’s flight’s position very inaccurate because of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty principle.

2. Cancel the flight and make alternative arrangements to Darjeeling – An ever better option, but of course, with one catch. KF temporarily arranged to reprint a custom new edition of the Oxford dictionary with a radically altered defintion of the word “Cancel”. Apparently, “Cancel” was now recursively redefined as “Handing over a piece of paper with instructions on how to cancel from yatra.com”. Heady stuff it was.

So option 2 it was, and we made some enquiries on alternative modes of transport from Kolkata to Darjeeling, and since train reservations had become full by the end of the Pliestocene, our options were limited to “Bus” and um..”Bus”. So we went down to the main bus stand in Esplanade and were immediately mobbed by touts. It turns out the the tout to bus ratio in Kolkata approaches infinity on days of flight cancellations. We settled on a particularly sprightly young L’arrangeur de bus who assured that it was a cushioned, breezy 12 hour overnight ride from Kolkata to Siliguri, from where Darjeeling was just a stone’s throw away (provided of course that stone = 3 hours and throw = taxi). We were also promised by our hyperactive tout that our bus was a state-of-the-art Volvo.

It turned out to be a State-of-the-Jamshedpur Tata and the journey took 19 hours.

The rest, in part 2.