Part Two: A change of scenery

On Saturday morning, we took a cab to Delhi airport. Turns out there are two airports – the domestic and international. I phone the airline to check which one we are leaving from, just in case. Clearly, it was the domestic one but you never know. The cab driver asks us to pay him about 5 kilometres before the airport, which we promptly reject. We smell some kind of a scam and are afraid that he will kick us out of the car in the middle of nowhere on the highway. Instead, he claims there is some "police problem" at the airport and he is not allowed to stop there for long. After reading all the horror stories in guidebooks and on the web, it's sometimes difficult to distinguish between scams and the truth. You become too suspicious that you think the locals are always over-analyzing everything that the locals say, trying to figure out "the catch". Sadly, sometimes there is no catch and you are just making yourself look like a paranoid idiot.

Indian airports operate a strange breed of security procedures, it's all very in-your-face but I doubt it's more effective. Firstly, you have to show your ticket and your passport before you are allowed into the building at all. Anyone who is not flying has to stay outside. So that kind of eliminates those emotional goodbyes, when you are about to leave your loved one, and you sit together and sip coffee until the "Last call for passengers to …" When you get to the departure lounge, you first go to a counter where you get your checked-in bags scanned. They attach a tag to your bags and stamp them as safe. Only then are you allowed to queue at the check-in desk. I don't see what stops you from adding dangerous items to your luggage in the meantime? I don't think they do a second luggage scan before the bags are put on the plane.

Once checked in, Ingrid and I went to hunt around for some food. There were about two food joints at the airport, both of them pretty unappealing if you ask me. We sit down on the floor with our overpriced snacks and engage in an activity that the Indians like to call "time-pass". Ingrid comments on the fact that the domestic airport is much cleaner than the international one. She's right. After all, the floor is clean enough for us to sit on. Don't get me wrong, this is India and our standards with regards to "clean enough" have definitely been lowered. Pretty soon, however, it becomes clear that our strategic position next to the toilets is not as strategic as we had thought, and the smell forces us to get up and go to the security clearance.

Again, Indian security procedures prove to be slightly different to what we are used to. Men and women queue separately, and instead of just walking through a metal-detector frame, everyone has to stretch their arms and legs for a thorough body search with a handheld metal detector. Ladies are always searched by female security staff, and the check is done behind a screen for extra privacy. Meanwhile, the guys who scan cabin baggage ask Ingrid to give them a guided tour of her rucksack. When she pulls out several bottles full of shampoo and other liquids, I realize that I had completely forgotten about the no-liquids regulations. "Damn!" In my head, I am already imagining saying goodbye to my shampoo, perfume, toothpaste, sunscreen and make up. It turns out India is not the EU, and they don't care as much. They ask Ingrid to put her name and passport details in some book and that's that. We're through. Two girls with too many bottles of shampoo are going to Goa!

The waiting area near our gate is crowded and boring. Two white guys in their teenage years blast in, complaining about the lack of organization at this airport. They look like they're about to have a heart attack. "Typical Germans," we both say, laughing and feeling very smug. They are flying to Mumbai, and it seems like they only just arrived from Europe. Ingrid and I are quite the opposite. At this point, we couldn't care less about any of the chaos around us. We are no newies to all this, and so we quietly sit on our bums, enjoying our holiday.  

We take our seats at the back of the plane. I knew I would be flying quite a lot this year and after the crash of the One-Two-Go plane in Phuket, I got a bit freaked out. I was researching flights for my Southeast Asia trip and I had actually saved One-Two-Go in my "Favourites" folder before the crash. Yes, there are airplane crashes all the time but this one just rang too close to home. However, not everybody on that plane died – so I wondered: Are some seats safer than others? It turns out the answer is yes. According to Popular Mechanics (http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/air_space/4219452.html), if you sit at the back of the plane, you are 40% more likely to survive a crash than the passengers sitting in the first few front rows. They analyzed data about commercial airplane crashes that had both survivors and fatalities and came up with this conclusion. Maybe it's just statistics, but it's good enough to make me sit at the back, even though you can't recline your seat. In front of us, there's a group of those new hip-Indians, obviously flying to Goa or Mumbai for a fun holiday. They're in their early 30s, wearing jeans and t-shirts and you couldn't tell if they live in New Delhi or New York. Especially the girls seem to be a lot more worldly than your typical timid saree-clad woman. I like it.

We are flying with one of the Indian domestic low-cost airlines, Air Deccan. We left around mid-day, so lunch is needed badly! Our flight to Goa cost just Rs. 3,700 (approx. £47) and there is no meal included, so we each buy a lunchbox which includes some sandwiches with a spicy Indian filling, samosas, muffins and stuff like that. It tasted pretty good, price pretty reasonable too. We have a stopover in Mumbai, and as the plane lands, we see lots of rooftop swimming pools. "All the posh people and Bollywood celebrities seem to be having a good time in Mumbai," I think to myself in my naivety. Months later, when I actually got to visit Mumbai, I learnt that the airport perimeter is lined with slums, and the blue squares are not rooftop swimming pools but those blue plastic sheets commonly used on roofs of huts in slums to prevent the water from coming in.

It's pretty cold on the plane so I we are doing our best not to freeze, covered under my beach sarong. After four hours of chatting, napping and reading the extremely "exciting" in-flight magazine, we finally arrive at Dabolim airport, near Vasco-da-Gama in Goa. We catch a pre-paid taxi to Panjim, the capital of Goa and ask the guy to drop us off in Fontainhas near St. Sebastian Chapel, where most of the budget hotels seem to be, according to the Lonely Planet. We travel through narrow, quiet roads and everything is so different to Delhi. It's the end of September and the monsoons are about to finish. Everything is incredibly green, lush and the vegetation seems really wild, with every inch of soil covered in plants. It all seems to be growing like mad, as if it couldn't grow enough. The shaded of green are not the normal shades of green that you would see on a lawn in Britain or in a wood in somewhere in Europe. It's bright green, the kind that you will only get in a really humid, fertile climate.