Not our form of transport to Delhi (!) but a chance to bring you a typically decorated lorry from Kerala. Each lorry is named e.g. ‘Paradise’, I can’t see what the one shown is called but the decoration relates to the Hindu religion.
We retraced our steps through the rush-hour traffic – we had left the ship before 8.00am – with the ladies dressed in colourful saris and the school children smartly dressed in their uniforms and the now familiar hooting traffic. There were several gasps from those seated in the front seats of the coach as they witnessed several near misses – our bus contributing to the cacophony of noise and mahem!
We first stopped at a Marriott Courtyard Hotel for a lunch and my first taste of real Indian food from an enormous buffet. Although Indian food is spicy it is not necessarily chilli or pepper hot. I’m sure you know that such delicacies as chicken tikka masala and balti are purely English inventions and not to be found in India. So I tried and enjoyed a wider range of dishes as I could before leaving for the airport.
Security at the airport was the tightest I have ever experienced. We had to show passports and etickets to two armed guards at the entrance, again before we could proceed to Check-in and again to enter the security check area itself. Hand luggage and other items were of course X-Ray scanned and even having passed through the metal detector gate everyone was frisked in separate lines for men and women and our boarding passes double stamped and there was a check at the boarding gate again to ensure that all our hand luggage carried a stamped labels.
This tight security is as a result of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai in 2010(?) and other bombings in India carried out mainly by insurgents from Pakistan or the “P” country as it is called so feared and hated is it.
Once aboard our Jetways flight for Delhi via Hyderabad we were soon in the air for our one-and-a-quarter hour flight to the latter city. Although we stayed on-board in Hyderabad again all our hand baggage had to be identified and labelled to security staff checking to see if anyone disembarking had left anything nasty behind.
New passengers embarked and we taxied swiftly out to the runway but then held – traffic may be? Unfortunately not, a passenger had been taken ill on board and we had to return to the terminal. Once again the security team boarded and we had to re-identify all had baggage in case this had been a rouse on the part of the ill passenger. Luckily the person had no hold baggage and after a very slick security check and medical transfer we were soon back in the air.
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