Arrived! Hyderabad, India

Now for the conclusion of the wayward princess's journey to India...

Last time on Wayward Princess we left Brooke in the middle of a 14-hour layover in Dubai, UAE. Did she make it to India? Did her luggage?

The short version: Yes and Yes.

The details...

What I have concluded is that every single headache, hassle or frustration can be directly attributed to the ineptitude of the JFK ground crew of Emirates Air. India - the "developing nation" - didn't nearly lose my luggage. That was the ground crew at JFK. Dubai (how many of you had really ever even heard of Dubai before?) managed to get me a visa, through immigration, through customs and to a hotel all in about 90 minutes. It took the JFK ground crew about 3 1/2 hours to do far less.


But enough whining, following my last entry I went back to my room to sleep for a couple more hours before heading to the airport for my 3 am flight.

Now, I mentioned the JFK ground crew being my main affliction in this journey (and yeah, I'd also said I wasn't going to whine anymore, but this is the last thing, I swear.) What with me being many thousands of miles away from this nefarious ground crew you are probably thinking "what else could they possibly do to you?"

The evil arm of the JFK ground crew is long indeed.

When they started boarding for my flight to Chennai I presented myself with my passport and visa and boarding pass. Missing, however, was the TICKET! At JFK they neglected to furnish me with the new ticket for my new series of flights!!! They had given me a ticket for Dubai --> Hyderabad but the passage I was to take was Dubai ---> Chennai ---> Hyderabad.

Clearly it worked out, but it was a somewhat stressful moment for me (at 3am after having already traveled for 42 hours or something and with about 14 hours of travel ahead of me yet.)

But anyway, the rest of the journey went pretty smoothly. Chennai was actually very easy to deal with and the predominant impression I have from my time there is one of utter and total boredom. I was so tired of travelling and sitting by that point and I had a headache so I couldn't read or write or do a puzzle or anything and there wasn't really anywhere to go or anything to look at because it was tiny and even though it was a brand new country and continent to me, there really is only so many times you can look at the one food vendor or look at the five advertisements. What I ended up doing was sitting, staring at the board with flight departure information, for about 5 or 6 hours (collecting my bags, customs and getting to the domestic terminal took a total of about 45 minutes.) The person who was sitting next to me on my original (cancelled) flight from JFK was there also so that provided a degree of diversion but it was very very very much like watching paint dry. Our big excitement was the times when the flight status of some plane or other changed or everything moved up the board a spot (there were only about 3 flights/hour in the whole terminal.)

But I'm here in India now and its lovely and I will tell stories of all that soon!