India Journal - Welcome to India
Day 1. April 3rd.
Welcome to India! It was a smooth and fast process at the airport. Then it was time to walk to the next terminal to catch my second flight.
After the long walk (20 minutes only, but under the Delhi Burning Noon Sun it felt like forever) I realized how good it was the decision of bringing my four wheels travel baggage, instead of my backpack. Usually when I walk too long with my backpack I end up with a massive back pain which clears out after many days.
I made it to the Terminal 2, which as per the police officer at the entry door of Terminal 1 was supposed to be the right terminal for my flight. When I arrived to the T2 it was already 2 hours before my flight. The officer on the T2 explained to me that I was mistakenly advised to go there because my flight was actually departing from the T1D, the terminal where I was before, which meant I still had to walk all the way back to T1 (another 20 min walk), so I was a little bit challenged with the time. The guard in T2 suggested I could take the free shuttle from T2 to T1, so I thought if it was 20 minutes walking at my slow pace, it could be less than 10 min with the shuttle. For my surprise, I was wrong!
Probably, because of the way the streets work, the bus did a huge 30 minutes ride across the airport nearby city, which made me arrive even later to the check in. All good. This is India. First thing to bring is patience. Here you don’t ask for patience, you will loose your mind if you find yourself asking for patience, you bring it with you so you don’t even realize you need it.
I had a great flight from Delhi to Dehradun. I was able to sleep since the moment I locked my seat belt, I didn’t even realized when we took off and woke up only a couple of minutes before landing.
“Welcome to Luana”. That’s the message that my driver was holding at the door of the airport. I was worried he was not going to be there, but he was. Everything worked good, it always does!
During the ride to Rishikesh I was thinking on how nice it would be to see an elephant as it happened the very first time I traveled to Rishikesh many years ago, so I started singing silently Om Gam Ganapati Namaha. Mind is powerful! Suddenly the driver said: “Elephant, look!”. Indeed! There was an elephant on the side of the road. Welcome to India!