Let It Fly

I get up about 09:00 and take two cans of Pepsi, a bag of dried cashews, two bottles of mineral water and a bag of banana chips from my mini bar.  I pack the disposable slippers I haven't worn in my bag and I'm off.

 

My throat is pretty good, my energy level is a damn sight better than yesterday, so I head down the road to my favorite Internet cafe and take a quick stroll down the beach.

 

This is the last I'll see of G. for a couple of weeks.  If my plans change enough, I may not come back.

 

I ask for a trishaw to the airport but it's too long a haul, some back-and-forth with the locals will get me a taxi for RS1000 -- about half what the price was to my swanky hotel.  I shuttle around a bit from point-to-point until they get the taxi they want to use and I head up along with an older man and his sister-in-law.  Elections are coming soon and there's a representative council for G. that they're both participating in.  Transportation is both expensive and rare in In., so they take a chance to hitch a ride up with whitey whenever they can. 

 

I've got no problem with that because it's not presumptuous.  And this guy had to jump through a few hoops to wrestle me a taxi in the first place.

 

I get to the airport with a couple hours to kill and am over-joyed to find a bookstore.  They have my favorite translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead here, a book that I still haven't read all the way through, but I opt instead for Bill Bryson's A Short History of Almost Everything.  I've read a couple of Bryson's works and this one looks interesting.  At 700 pages it's also hefty, and Buddah knows that there can be a lot of idle time between now and whenever.

 

I'm scheduled to fly from G. to Delhi, getting in in the evening.  My next flight is at 06:30 tomorrow morning.  I don't like the idea of having to get a room in Delhi, only to turn around and try to work the system to get to the airport early tomorrow, so my plan is to sleep at the airport.  This assumes, of course, that I can talk my way back into a terminal the day before a flight.

 

Security is weird.  You're not allowed to have liquids or gels in any quantity in hand baggage, which means I'm forced to check luggage.  What's more is you're required to have a tag for the one carry-on bag you're allowed (it's just one of those disposable jobs) and they're very persnickety if you don't have one.

 

I get through, get on my flight, and sleep the whole way.

 

Delhi is it's own little version of Hell that it always is and after exiting the terminal I walk right up to the best dressed guy I can see (this is a good trick to know who speaks the best English in a crowd) -- some traveller -- and ask him where my departure gate is.  He's all over it.

 

Of all the places you can go as a tourist, I consider the absolute most dangerous to be immediately around an airport.  The people there haven't been screened and many make a business to prey on the unsuspecting and confused.  Anywhere in the world, including the States, I travel my quickest immediately around airports.

 

So I make the quick sprint down to my terminal and hand my ticket to the guard at the terminal.  The trick here is to have a body language that acts very much like, "of course I'm supposed to be here, of course you are suppose to okay this ticket."  It's a very practiced act of handing a ticket to a guard as you look away.  Act disoriented by whatever a real person doing what you're doing would be disoriented by.

 

He pauses.  I keep acting distracted.  He lets me in.

 

Okay, good. 

 

I find my check-in gate, then find the quietest set of seats in the terminal.  Take out my tiny cable lock, lock my bags down, and start reading my book.

 

I know we've talked about this before, Special K, but it's worth repeating here.  One of the prime edicts I run my life by is "The Bear Story."  I don't feel like telling the flowery version, so I'll tell the basics here:

 

Two guys go camping up in a place that is known to have a killer bear.  They ignore warnings and go camp anyway.  As you would expect in a story like this, the killer bear appears outside the tent the first night and awakens the doomed campers.  One guy, very quietly, starts putting on his tennis shoes.

 

"What are you doing?" one guy asks

 

"What does it look like?  I'm putting on my shoes."

 

"Why bother?  You can't outrun a bear."

 

"I don't have to outrun a bear.  I only have to outrun you."

 

And that is a key to not only travel, but life.  You don't have to make your items impossible to steal, just make them harder than the guy sitting next to you.  In fact, you draw too much attention to yourself if you have some nuclear warhead surrounding your stuff.  A cheap-ass cable lock is plenty ("X, his stuff is so cheap, he even uses a cheap-ass lock).

 

There's a lot of ambient noise, shrill yellings between cleaning people, authorities, ticket personel, etc.  I pull out my iPod and shut the world away.  I consider an iPod a sociological cheat, by the way, but I'll use it in situations such as these.

 

I doze/read my way through the next six hours. 

 

I haven't eaten in 30 hours.

 

I'm not hungry,

b1