August 31, 2010
The most important lesson of the day: When traveling in Asia, do not, I repeat do not, transit through India. We arrive in New Delhi and it’s as if we immediately enter a Kafka novel. We get off the plane and an official with our names on his official looking clipboard escorts us and one other gentleman to the transit lounge. This means a long long walk through empty corridors with pristine carpets but no discernible purposes. When we finally reach the transit lounge, we discover it is guarded by a man in fatigues with a gun. It’s full of chairs and only one counter packed with people doing apparently nothing.
Our escort tells us to sit and wait until we’re issued new boarding passes. We assume this will only take a few minutes so continue to stand. Our escort walks over and asks us again to sit. We don’t. He asks us again. We don’t. He’s quite insistent and we can’t make out why it's such a big deal. Then the other gentleman who was escorted from the plane with us comes over. He tells us that we’ll probably wait at least three hours for our boarding pass so we ought to get comfortable. He then takes us under his wing. His name is Narayan, and he’s a Nepali returning from the states where he dropped his oldest son off for his freshman year at Yale. He’s done this transfer before and knows that it’s a bureaucratic nightmare. So we settle in. He offers his trekking advice—avoid meat and milk. And we sit and chat.
After three hours of waiting, and just as Anita and I decide to lie down and try to get some sleep, we are given a boarding pass and then abruptly ordered to leave the holding room. We head upstairs and Narayan kindly offers to buy us dinner since we have no Indian rupee. He bargains with the counter boys for four plates of noodles and curry and Lisa buys a round of beer, and after a nap on the floor in our cozy, fuzzy socks (courtesy of Lisa), we are finally on our last plane to Kathmandu.
Photos: Our feet in the cozy socks Lisa brought for us all (these prove invaluable over the trip).
The Azhi Melwa at the Delhi airport in socks almost 30 hours into the trip.
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