There are two ways of flying to India: 1) paying about £700 each for a direct flight and getting there in a day, or 2) paying £349 each for a “self-transfer” flight involving Mickey Mouse budget airlines and taking two days with buckets of stress. People who know me will also know which option I chose. So we got to Stansted by train quickly and easily and then tried to find the check-in desk. I booked through Fightnetwork and the airline from Stansted must have been mentioned among the reams of bumph wanting us to pay extra for things we didn’t need. I assumed we were going by Air India but a pleasant man told us Air India don’t fly from Stansted. Try Emirates. The Emirates desk couldn’t find any record of us. Major panic and suspicion of scam. The very helpful people at the Emirates desk finally tracked down our journey and informed us that we were flying by FlyOne (Moldova’s very own budget airline) to the Moldovan capital Cisinau and then, after a wait of 10 hours, by another FlyOne plane to Dubai where we were supposed to self-transfer to an Air India plane to Amritsar within 2 hours. We thought it might be a good idea to get a hotel at Cisinau airport, but there isn’t one! So we sat for 10 hours on those silly plastic seats that are designed to stop you from getting comfortable by making you slide off after 3 minutes. I was worried that 2 hours would not be enough at Dubai and we would miss the connection to Amritsar. The Air India desk told us that we were at Terminal 1 and would have to get a shuttle bus to Terminal 2. The buses run every 40 minutes and we had just missed one. I was certain that we had missed the plane (check-ins stop one hour before take-off), but got to the desk just ONE MINUTE before it closed. The flight was uneventful and when we got to Amritsar, none of the taxi drivers had a card reader. A very helpful driver had the bright idea of driving us to a filling station, getting us to pay the fare of 750 rupees to the station which then put 750 rupees of petrol into his taxi. He got us to the Ramada hotel by 2 am by short cuts along desolate little side streets where we got to our room and collapsed into bed before sleeping for 12 hours. I’ve been trying for 78 years to do the sensible thing rather than saving money by doing the daft option but I suppose its too late to change now.
The pics show the mountains of eastern Turkey from the plane, the Black Sea, and Jennifer at Dubai airpoty
