 |
Tagne 2001 |
 |
Steve's DiaryDay 1 - Thursday 28th June 2001see also Dan's Diary for today The alarms went off at 5am. There were five of us scattered around my room in South Ealing, sleeping on the floor (or in my case, the bed) under enormous down sleeping bags. All the remaining space in my room was taken up with luggage: five expedition rucksacks, two enormous duffle bags and an assortment of daysacks, clothing, etc. With little time to spare we got up and packed the last few things into our bags and hurried outside into a cold grey London morning. Not for the last time, we discovered we had far more luggage than we could carry! With an average of just over two rucksacks each, we organised a complicated rota for carrying the kit bags (weighing around 40kg each!) and set off on the fifteen minute walk to the tube station. South Ealing is only twenty minutes from Heathrow by tube - just enough time to eat Dan's supply of left-over cheese sandwiches and swing from the bars a bit before pulling into the defiantly sixties station at Terminal 4 (after an enforced change of trains at Terminals 1, 2 and 3) and the relief of luggage trolleys! With no time to waste, I rushed to WHSmith to buy some cheap padlocks for the kitbags, while the others joined the queue snaking its way towards the check-in desks. It was time for some last minute adjustments: we repacked our hand luggage to look as small and light as possible, extracted our down jackets (or "coats", as we planned to explain them away to the check-in attendant; coats, cameras, etc being exempt from the normal baggage allowances). To cap it all, we were all wearing our heavy expedition boots. We reached the front of the queue and attempted to explain our prearranged baggage allowance increase to the French attendant. After several minutes of wrestling with the computer system, he called a manager over to explain that since we were over the standard baggage allowance (more than 50kg over, as it happened!) they'd have to charge us. At this point our last minute over-organisation proved useful, as we produced a print-out of an email from a travel-agent relation of Dan's, which proved that at 190kg, we were actually a mere 15kg over the free allowance; a quantity that these friendly representatives of British Airways graciously allowed us to take for free. Hurdle one was successfully passed; now all we had to worry about was getting past Indian customs without paying the 100% import duty that previous expeditions had warned us to expect. Armed with a letter from the Indian Mountaineering Foundation (IMF), we hoped for the best. Unleashed upon the departure lounge, we scouted round for somewhere to get breakfast. A suitable café manifested itself in the form of Prêt à Manger, where I broke open our petty cash and bought sandwiches all round, excepting myself: I took advantage of the last opportunity to eat sushi for several weeks! At last our gate was announced, and we made our way along several miles of carpeted corridor to our waiting plane. Espying it from afar, we were delighted to note an original BA tail design (none of this "ethnic" nonsense!). We joined the queue to have our passports examined (again!) and were soon walking down the "Economy class" jetway and onto the plane. This was my first journey on a 747 since a family holiday to Malaysia about fifteen years before, but it all seemed very familiar, even down to the intermittently working armrest controls and the cheesy in-flight entertainment. Alan had been booked onto a separate ticket (not being eligible for a student discount), so he got to sit about three days' march behind us. My patent-pending jetlag avoidance technique was as follows: don't go to sleep! It worked brilliantly, although it has to be said that those people who did go to sleep didn't get notably jetlagged either! With unconsciousness precluded as a means of whiling away the time, I got to watch the in-flight film, a tedious remake of an unknown sixties romance called "Sweet November". That, perfecting the art of cadging extra food from the stewardess, paying a social call on Alan and starting my expedition book saw me through eight hours of flight and brings us neatly to Delhi. Magically transported across five-and-a-half time zones, we arrived in Delhi in the middle of the night. A hot breeze greeted us as we stepped into the jetway, but the airport itself was air-conditioned, and even more sixties-inspired than Heathrow! To our surprise, about twenty wheelchairs with uniformed attendants waited at the entrance to the airport building proper; we could only assume that the first class catering was sufficiently generous to leave its beneficiaries incapable of independent motion. We met up at the foot of a noisy escalator and joined the queues for Immigration. Our special mountaineering visas attracted fewer admiring looks than we might have hoped (ie none), and we walked through to the baggage hall and scenes of chaos. Random suitcases burst through the wall on a decaying rubber belt, hurtled past a crowd of waiting passengers, skidded round several corners, and were intercepted by two burly airport staff, who deftly fielded them and added them to an ever-enlarging sea of luggage on the floor. The crowd milled around, torn between searching the floor for their belongings or waiting for them to appear on the belt. I implicitly delegated this tricky decision to the other four expedition members by crossing the hall to a branch of the State Bank of India, there to change $1000 into rupees. Returning ten minutes later with an inches-thick wad of notes, I discovered little had changed; around half our luggage had appeared, but the flow of possessions on the belt showed little sign of slowing. Eventually the last rucksack was hoisted onto our collection of trolleys and we strode to face our destiny... Customs. Customs proved to be an anticlimax. We handed over our disembarkation cards to an imposingly uniformed officer, but we weren't even questioned, let alone searched. Perhaps our mountain of bags gave us the appearance of rich westerners (which by local standards, I suppose we were!) We pushed our trolleys into the crowded Arrivals hall, and managed to walk about ten metres before a smartly dressed man approached us and asked us if we were the Imperial College expedition. This was Rahul, an employee of Eco Adventures, our agents. Deftly brushing aside the armies of taxi touts, we followed him out into the blazing heat of the Indian night, a traffic snarl to match any in London and a waiting air-conditioned minibus. Our first encounter with Indian driving proved something of a disappointment: not a single bump or scratch, and only sparing use of the horn. Delayed only by a brief encounter with road-hogging holy cattle, we arrived at the sumptuously engardened headquarters of the Indian Mountaineering Foundation, our accommodation for the next two nights. The night watchman showed us into our dormitory; the more astute among us immediately bagging the beds beneath ceiling fans. Our luggage was piled in the centre of the floor, and we filled our water bottles from the purifier (adding iodine!) and were introduced to Narinder Singh Chouhan, a friendly-looking man in his thirties who was to be our Liaison Officer. Despite it being only 18:30 according to our body clocks we were all tired and went straight to bed.
|
© Copyright Steve Jolly 2001. |
